Posthuman Blues

Supernatural: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of Mankind (by Graham Hancock)

To have established the role of hallucinations as the inspiration for cave art is one thing [. . .] But to understand what hallucinations really are, and what part they play in the overall spectrum of human experience and behaviour, is another thing altogether, and neither Lewis-Williams nor any other scientist can yet claim to possess such knowledge, or to be anywhere near acquiring it. Gifted and experienced shamans the world over really do know more – much more – than they do. So if we were smart we would listen to what the shamans have to say about the true character and complexity of reality insteadof basking mindlessly in the overweening one-dimensional arrogance of the Western technological mindset.

Hancock goes on to ask what, to my mind, is one of the Big Questions of the human experience:

What is the significance of the astonishing similarities between the entities known as "aliens", ET's" or "greys" in modern popular culture, the entities known as "fairies", "elves" and "goblins" in the Middle Ages, and the entities that shamans in surviving tribal cultures know as "ghosts", "gods" and "spirits"? Why are such figures also depicted in prehistoric art as far afield as Africa, Europe, the Americas and Australia?

I wonder if the machinations of an interdimensional intelligence are more likely than ET contact; the closer we look, the weirder the universe gets . . .

Is there another world in the mirror, Case physicist asks

Krauss concludes the book with a discussion of something even more exotic than the possibility of six or seven extra microscopically small extra dimensions. This involves the recent theoretical discovery that some or all of these dimensions could in fact be infinitely large and still remain hidden, a discovery that was made in part by one of Krauss' former doctoral students.

I'm drawn to the possibility that we inhabit one of potentially infinite "nested" cosmologies inhabited by all manner of entities, some of which can project themselves into our own for reasons that remain obscure.

This out-take from Rudy Rucker's forthcoming SF novel "Mathematicians In Love" addresses similar suspicions:

"Your jellyfish's cable generates one after another of your parallel universes," added Tanya. "And the series of universes is what we call a hyperverse. It's like successive drafts of a novel."

"She doesn't generate universes," objected Mulvane. "She indexes regions of space. The so-called parallel universes are simply different zones of one very, very, very large shared space. Occam's Razor. There's no need to multiply the realities, no need for mysto steam. One mammoth reality has room for all the monkeys on all the typewriters."