Looking into 2024, here's my last Life-Stance views in one page about Reality, Life, and History

MY LIFE-STANCE in one page --JANUARY 2024

1 REALITY—is MEANINGFUL--the Cosmos, Life, Natural Laws, Moral Truths, Math, Reason, Scientific Method, Technology, Creativity...

All humans have worth within themselves!

And to a lesser degree, other primates and sentient animals, worth in themselves...

I suppose one could say that plants, bugs, rocks, asteroids, planets, solar systems, quasars, Black Holes, gravity, relativity, etc. have worth in themselves, but since none of those are conscious, aware, rational, etc., it’s probably a category error to make such a huge judgment about inert things or unconscious processes.

Despite the ruthless, impersonal nature of Deep Time evolutionary change over at least the last 3.7 billions years of survival of the fittest, and the luckiest...

And the large number of human thinkers who advocate atheism, naturalism, materialism, anti-realism, and others who claim revealed religions, ideologies of extreme left and extreme right...

Those are false, bind alleys into nihilism, denying all human worth, purpose, meaning, morality, reason, math etc.

2 Instead, Like many brilliant famous scientists have emphasized (including Albert Einstein), Ultimate/Essential/Transcendent Nature of Reality is unknown to all finite, limited humans-FAR beyond anything we are capable of thinking or concluding.

Who knows if there are advanced species in the Cosmos like the science writer Carl Sagan speculated?

HOWEVER, many brilliant thinkers have SPECULATED on possible answers, one of the most recent being that the nature of REALITY is PROCESS, Not substance, Not Irrational, Not Chance...

And that seeking the ultimate doesn’t come by reductionism down to only tiny particles like theoretical physicist and atheist Brian Greene states (in The Elegant Universe) and others such as Sean M. Carroll.

Other theoretical physicists think we need to focus upwards to the possible Multi-Verse for finding ultimate significance.
Different views come from other famous cosmologists such as Paul Davies, George F. R. Ellis, the South African theoretical physicist “who is considered the world leader in relativity and cosmology. He co-wrote the book, The Large Scale of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking.”
https://royalsociety.org/people/george-ellis-11396/....

3. When all has been said and done in my 77-years-of-life, I realize now that Family, Friends, etc. don’t care as much as we old guys would like.

BUT, I do know that Life isn’t about me.

Heck, over a million Americans AS IMPORTANT AS ME died in the COVID pandemic in only a couple of years. Does anyone in particular care?

NO!

Many current American leaders even deny social distancing, masking, and the vaccinations’ worth and claim, instead, that COVID was all a “Democratic scam” and the completely false huge lies about alleged massive fraud in the 2020 election (of which there is not even a single shred of evidence. Even some Republican leaders such as those in Georgia emphasize there is no basis for the false claims)!

--

I’m just one of billions of humans inhabiting this tiny planet in a minor solar system on the edge of a galaxy among billions of galaxies...

And, I know for a fact, though I can’t imagine it, that my brief important time is almost up. Like my beloved dad 10 years ago, I will in the not to distant future, breathe my last.

And 2 undertakers will arrive like orderlies, will wrap my corpse in a winding sheet, bag my body onto a rolling cart, and haul it out.

BUT I AM THANKFUL FOR ALL THE WONDERFUL TIMES I’VE EXPERIENCED, THE OTHER HUMANS I’VE CARED FOR, AND THE AMAZING FACTS I’VE LEARNED IN MY LONG LIFE.

HOPEFULLY, the TRUE GOD WILL REMEMBER ME, and some humans I’ve known will think of me once and a while as they continue to live on into Reality’s FUTURE.


Dan Wilcox, the aged stroked mutant;-)

12/27/23

JOHN BARLEYCORN or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London

What an unexpected find! The very powerful, suspenseful memoir by Jack London. When checking out all of my shelf section of London books in the garage in preparation to take a few with me for a Jack London study an Alaskan Cruise, especially when we get to the '98 Gold Rush pass up at Skagway to B.C., I came across Barleycorn.

Side note: I had evidently picked the memoir up somewhere some years ago but never got around to reading it. There are--as I’ve discovered reading an extensive London bibliography online, at least 7 or 8(!) books by London I’ve never read! So odd, since I thought I had read all but a couple.

Not only is Barleycorn a fascinating memoir, riveting with London's excellent ability at writing suspense, the book gives personal, private details and reflective musings about his youthful times and some deep complex philosophical thoughts. All of this, he expresses in his amazingly powerful poetic prose.

London wrote his memoir against heavy drinking, against getting drunk, promoted Prohibition and did so while also supporting women's suffrage! Tragically, despite his opposition to heavy drinking, getting drunk, and his keen awareness of how alcohol contributed immensely to his tragic life problems, London never quit drinking.

It was his constant abuse of alcohol, too, (besides tropical diseases), which led to his extremely early death at only 40 years of age. That and his negative life stance based in an almost suicidal nihilistic materialism.

The book is an intriguing analysis, with vivid stories, of his own introduction to drinking when very young and the social reasons why he engaged in life-long drinking even though he didn’t like the taste of beer!

He reflects upon the historical fact that drinking alcohol is primarily men’s social way, how they find friends, express themselves emotionally after hard work, party, share, let their macho image down and commune—all around Ethyl. How sometimes alcohol-imbibing even took the place of women!

Only about 20-30 pages in the third 4th of the novel are weak. They are too abstract, miss the intense storied details of the rest of the memoir, and seem sort of thrown together.

Especially fascinating about his memoir, is the story of his unlikely rise to becoming the world's most well-paid writer. When one considers how London's had a spotty unfinished formal education, how he missed most of high school yet got accepted into college after cramming on his own in prep for the entrance exam but then dropped out after only one semester, his accomplishments are amazing. His prose is lucid, complex, poetic at times, incredibly good.

Barleycorn is well worth the read.

Another result of reading this is that I am much more strongly inclined to stop drinking in general, except when I have a little with Betsy for supper or out for a social event.

This book helps me see the horrific result that drinking has caused for multi-millions of humans, especially working men. I understand, again, why my mom so strongly opposed alcohol and why and how my two uncles were so deceived by drink and how it led to tragedy and wreck in their lives and their family’s lives.

In the last 5 years, I had forgotten all of that being too caught up in the fun side of having a glass once-in-a-while, after unexpectedly starting with that Category 5 Hurricane at Joe’s Crab Shack 8 years ago at Pacific Beach, California.


In the Light of Truth, Goodness, and Justice,

Dan Wilcox