One Must Imagine Sisyphus Important

[00:00:00]Good morning, John. Great video this week. It reminds me of a thing that I've been working on, which is a Hanks Channel video starting from the title The Most Important Thing That Ever Happened, which is, you know, that's fun. It's a ridiculous kind of content where you ask a question that of course cannot have an answer and you try to actually answer it. And you find out things. Like this question immediately asked two different questions. One was just like answers to the question, like the Big Bang, obviously the most important thing that ever happened. But then if you discard that, then like the formation of life or multicellularity.

[00:00:33]But then the other question that the question is asking is important how?

[00:00:37]Important to whom? To outline why this matters, one answer I got a lot on social media and from Cali Moore, one of the hosts of PBS Eons when I asked this question, was the Chicxulub asteroid impact, which like, yeah, but that implies that this is important directly for us, for me and for Cali and for you and everybody else. Not for example for the dinosaurs. I mean it was important for them, but not for their future except for the birds. I apologize, birds. I do find myself being very glad it happened cuz I quite like existing, but that does put me in the strange position of like rooting for a mass extinction. Like just being pro mass extinction is not a thing that I generally find myself feeling. So for me, I agree that's very important. But in the question itself all in its own, I don't actually think important for us is a given. We're just one thing that happened out of the many that could have happened. Where do you draw the line?

[00:01:32]Like what actually is important? And you could do that a bunch of different ways, but one fun answer to that question is important for the existence of importance. Because for a long time after the Big Bang, probably billions of years, there was nothing in the universe around to care and thus there was nothing that ever felt like one thing was more important than another. There was nothing to suffer starvation or rejoice in success. There was just stuff, stuffing. But then, care happened. You know, experience happened, suffering happened, pain, joy, all of the things started to happen, and it's unclear when exactly it happened. Of course, we know more, not a ton, but more when it happened on Earth, but there's a lot of universe out there, so who knows. But then there's also the question of why and how did evolution select for sensation? Like that's a mystery. We don't know how. And not because it's not a good solution to the problem. You could imagine other solutions to the problem. And more important than that, it isn't clear where it comes from. Like how evolution found it to get to it.

[00:02:34]From where does experiencing actually arise? But you know, putting aside the hard question of consciousness, in my experience, experience exists. Is it an illusion? I don't know. Can experience itself be an illusion, like a rainbow, just glints of dead light bouncing off dead raindrops, all of it made of normal physical stuff, except the illusion that emerges isn't a band of light, it's a trillion little eyes all seeing light or sound or pain or desire. The observer is the illusion, but the moment the illusion observes, does it not then become real? I did not actually leave aside the hard problem of consciousness. I I just dove right back at it. My point is, I think importance is important. I think the universe without sensation, very cool, but not this cool. The thing about the story of Sisyphus that makes me most amazed is not that it is a story that we share and can use, like ants releasing pheromones to build a better, more capable colony.

[00:03:32]That's very cool. I don't want to say that that's not cool. It's extremely cool. It's like top 10 coolest things.

[00:03:37]But what I think is most amazing is that it does that not by just like being, but by making me feel something. It's very cool that the pheromone of the story doesn't just make me do things, it makes me do things by making me feel things, by being sensed. I don't just think about the story of Sisyphus, I feel about the story of Sisyphus. I perhaps feel about it before I think about it.

[00:04:04]The joy of Sisyphus might just be in the doing, but another potential joy would be knowing that we still think and feel about him today, that his story, and I know that he's not a real guy, I'm living in the myth here, but let's live in the myth. But that his story also continues to shape our world, like a true triumph over the gods. He may have ended up more well known than the god he tricked, Thanatos, though not more well known than the god who doomed him, Zeus.

[00:04:31]Still, that's something. Not a fate I would suffer infinitely for, of course, but as you say, perhaps he does not suffer. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.