Part of a series of posts on which John is embarked, surveying a bind into which ‘modern Western’ humankind have fallen.
It’s interesting to note that one of John’s chief targets is the idea of teleology: the notion that there’s a pre-determined goal, to which human development is pushing, whether consciously or not.
By contrast, Tom Campbell’s ideas rely on a very different idea of evolution and its - alleged - teleology. Precisely the picture of a blind evolutionary process which John describes in this post.
The two axioms on which Tom’s Big TOE is based are: ‘Consciousness exists’, and ‘Evolution happens’. But Tom’s idea of evolution corresponds closely with John’s, as laid out in this post: that there is NO teleological element in the functioning of evolution; that it is, in essence, an entirely random pressure, which simply goes where the opportunities happen to lie, in the process producing the most astonishing, creative works of complexity, from the very simplest elements available to it.
For an image of precisely this process producing endless works of creative art, simply watch a video of a fractal process unfolding visually onscreen: endless, never repeating exactly, apparently bottomless in its inventiveness, and yet… completely without goal-driven purpose; simply doing what it can, because that’s what is built into the basic logic of the reality we inhabit:
