The mode we think with today, will be inaccessible, a mysterious jar, of umami flavour, something to have, on crispy crackers, at sunset to remember... And compare where we went, to where we subjectively thought we might.
We can’t have a means to conserve what we don’t really understand very well. And yet we have a sense of what consciousness is, and that it will not be easy to conserve. For each individual, alone, and as a member of society, this process is transforming. You get a sense of this change not only from the stories of past but from their rhythm, their attention to particular details we find unusual today.
In a similar vein, our future will not know how to make sense of how we go about our reasoning today. How our internal perspective on the world affects the decisions we take, what we consider important, what is close to us in a personal way. Despite so much of our lives being shared, across digital channels: subjective experience is missing, complex, and really hard to make sense of.
Take Homer’s Odyssey: this ancient world is clear. A world of large feasts to celebrate surviving life-threatening risks. A world of committed ideals, and naughty deities, tricksters or worse. A journey of self-discovery and growth, achieving wisdom through challenges and love. But we can’t see, in the least, how this world ever existed subjectively, whether in the subject or the author.
I guess we have, a moment to treasure what we have uniquely…