Leviathans, layered existence and noospheric bombs
Modern man looks at the world around him completely differently than the man of antiquity did. In the howling of the wind in the forest, modern man sees simply a flow of air, but ancient man saw in it a manifestation of the forest spirit. In thunder and lightning, modern man sees only electrical discharges in the atmosphere, but ancient man saw in a thunderstorm the wrath of the gods or the echoes of their fierce battle. Modern man looks at the world as a soulless mechanism and views it solely from the point of view of reason, like a scientist. For the man of antiquity, the world was alive – he looked at the surrounding reality like a poet, seeing animate beings in every phenomenon.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called two such opposing views of the world Apollonian and Dionysian. The thinker named the rational principle in honor of the ancient Greek god of rational thinking and order, Apollo, and the poetic principle in honor of the god of wine and dance, Dionysus. In this post, I want to take the middle path and look at the Universe simultaneously from both of these points of view – with the sharp blade of logical analysis, cut the essences into their component parts and then see the whole variety of phenomena as an ocean inhabited by countless living beings.
Space of facts and interpretations
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his famous book Tractatus Logical-Philosophical, argued that the world consists of facts. From my point of view, everything is a little more complicated, and it makes sense to talk about two different aspects of the world – objective and subjective:
The objective world is a space of facts
The subjective world is a representation of the space of facts through the prism of interpretation
You can metaphorically imagine the objective world as a huge white sheet with a bunch of black dots, on which each dot represents a separate fact. In this case, the subjective world will be a figure formed by connecting points to each other using lines. There are countless ways to connect the dots—each interpretation connects the facts in its own way. A liberal and a communist, a priest and an atheist view the same space of facts through the prism of different interpretations and connect the dots into completely different figures.
The same space of facts can be viewed through the prism of different interpretations. For example, the history of the Soviet Union looks completely different from the point of view of the liberal narrative and from the point of view of the communist one. Where some see something bad, others see something good: for a monarchist, the overthrow of the tsar is a disaster, but for a democrat it is a step in the right direction.
The universe as a whole contains an infinite number of both facts and interpretations. In the theory of relativity, Einstein imagined the world as a single geometric space with three spatial and one time dimensions. We can imagine the world as a single space of facts and interpretations – a kind of product of all facts and all possible interpretations.
Layers of existence
During the heyday of biological sciences, people tended to view the Universe as a huge living organism. During the years of rapid development of mechanical engineering, the world seemed to people to be a mechanism of incredible size. In our computer era, many people see the world as a great computing process or program, where information plays the main role. These are different views on the same phenomena, different interpretations of the same facts. In addition, we can consider phenomena at different levels or, one might say, at different layers of existence. To understand what I'm talking about, let's look at a small example.
Usually we perceive a person as a holistic image. However, if we begin to logically analyze this image, it will immediately evaporate. After all, a person is a cumulative image of the processes of interaction of his organs. Each organ is a cumulative image of the processes of interaction between different biological tissues. Each tissue is a cumulative image of the interaction processes of biological cells. Each cell is a cumulative image of the processes of interaction between chemical molecules. Each molecule is a cumulative image of the processes of interaction between atoms. Each atom is a cumulative image of the processes of interaction of elementary particles.
Thus, we can consider a person on different layers of existence – on the psychological layer as a person, on the anatomical layer as an organism, on the biological layer as a community of cells, on even lower layers as a chemical process or a cloud of elementary particles. We will use different words and identify different entities to describe what happens in each layer. At one level we will talk about protons and electrons, at another about hydrogen and oxygen, at the third about water and sugars, at the fourth about the nucleus and membrane, at the fifth about muscles and nerves, at the sixth about valves and neurons, at the seventh about the heart and the brain, on the eighth about joy and sadness and the like.
Just as we consider a person as a collection of his parts, we can also consider him as part of something larger – a family, a subculture, a people, a state, a biological species. This way we can look at the world on the higher layers of existence in relation to humans. At the same time, it is impossible to say for sure that these layers are clearly hierarchical. In one layer a person can be a representative of the people, in another a native speaker, in a third a citizen of the state, and in a fourth a specialist in a certain profession.
At different layers of existence, we identify different entities and monitor their birth, development, extinction and death. In one layer the characters are cells, in another people, in the third languages, in the fourth states, in the fifth religions, and so on. We look at a person and see how he is born, grows, ages and dies. We can say the same about everything else – everything has its own spring, its own summer, its own autumn and winter. In this case, if we claim that man is a living being, then what prevents us from saying the same about language or the state? If we claim that we are alive, then why can’t we say the same about the Russian language, the Russian people or the Russian Empire? Based on what criteria can we deny them this right? Isn’t Russia suffering, isn’t it alive?
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his treatise Leviathan, presented the state as a huge living being consisting of millions of individual people. This creature, like every individual person, has its own interests, just like a person, it can be healthy or sick, can fight with others like itself and can die. Just as a biological cell has a membrane, so the state has a border, just as a person’s macrophages and lymphocytes fight viruses, so the state’s police and intelligence services fight criminals and spies, just as a person can search for the meaning of his own life, so the state searches for its historical path.
There is no criterion by which one can say that some entities are alive and others are not. If we recognize a person as alive, then we are obliged to recognize the state as alive. And either we look at everything in the world in an Apollonian way – as a mechanism consisting of component parts, or we look at everything in the world in a Dionysian way – as an integral living being. Then the whole world appears to us not as a dead machine, but as an ocean teeming with life.
Noospheric viruses
Russian philosopher Vladimir Vernadsky and French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin devoted part of their works to considering one of the layers of existence – the noosphere, the sphere of reason. If viruses and bacteria live in the biosphere, then ideas live in the noosphere. And just as the fundamental particle of biological evolution is the gene, so the fundamental particle of noospheric evolution is meme.
Big ideas, like Christianity or socialism, are made up of many small memes. Over time, ideas change and evolve, adapting to a changing environment. Those memes that promote the survival of ideas spread. For example, the meme “abortion is bad” is present in all major religions, as it has a positive effect on the spread of these ideas. I described in detail the meme evolution of religions in the article “How the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep founded Christianity, and why it became the ideal meme.”
Just as the biosphere has biological viruses that cause diseases and harm the body, so the noosphere has its own viruses – ideas that infect carriers and cause them harm. Biological viruses use vulnerabilities in cells to infect, while noospheric viruses exploit vulnerabilities in people’s minds, their cognitive distortions.
An example of such noospheric viruses can be the ideas of various religious or totalitarian sects – for example, in the Russian Empire was popular a sect of eunuchs – men and women who cut off their reproductive organs because of the literal interpretation of one line from the Gospel of Matthew:
…there are eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven
From a biological point of view, this idea directly prevents its own spread – it is transmitted from father to son with great difficulty. However, the sect of eunuchs existed for many decades despite numerous attempts by the state to destroy it. The Skoptsy did not spend money on raising children, had a lot of time for work and professional development, bequeathed their money to other members of the sect – that is why they were rich and had money to spread their own propaganda among dense and extremely pious peasants.
Leviathan states constantly wage war among themselves, trying to weaken and absorb each other. Initially, the war of the leviathans was fought mainly only on land, after which the leviathans began to fight with ships at sea. In the 19th century, the battle of leviathans sank under the water; in the 20th century, it soared into the air. In the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip, leviathans fight even in underground holes and catacombs.
The Leviathans invented an astonishing number of ways to destroy their neighbors, and some of them were so terrible that the Leviathans agreed not to use them: for example, states banned themselves and each other from the use of biological weapons. But unlike biological weapons, there is no control over the use of noospheric weapons. States regularly construct harmful ideas, noospheric viruses that hack the enemy’s cognitive defenses and destroy him from the inside.
In his magical-realistic novel “The Art of Light Touches,” the great Russian writer Viktor Pelevin talks in detail about the use of noospheric weapons against each other by the world's leading superpowers. For example, he describes the result of using the Russian noospheric Tsar Bomb against the United States:
… modern America is a totalitarian scoop of the seventy-ninth year with LGBT in the place of the Komsomol, corporate management in the place of the CPSU, sexual repression in the place of sexual repression and the dawn of socialism in the place of the dawn of socialism…
The purpose of using noospheric weapons is to undermine the foundations of the stability of another state, to force part of the population to hate their own country and act against its interests. Leviathan states constantly use these weapons against each other, and with the help of censorship, control over the media and the Internet, they build their own noospheric defense.
However, noospheric weapons have the same problem as biological ones – they are weapons of indiscriminate destruction, which can turn against the user himself. Noospheric viruses, like biological viruses, do not know who they infect – a Russian or an American. For example, the narrative often used by the United States lately about decolonization and minority rights greatly undermines the power of America itself.
The use of noospheric weapons through social networks and the media makes them weapons of mass destruction. So maybe, for the sake of greater stability in the world, states should agree to limit its use in the same way as they agreed to limit chemical, biological and atomic weapons?
