It's a feet-on-the-ground philosophy, a grounded worldview that potentially opens onto rich tapestries of experience. More ethereal souls would not understand, mediated as they would have to be in their recessive duality, cut off from the immediacy that may well be our surest source of happiness. “The notion that the soul is distributed and corporeal is in many ways more appealing than the notion that an incorporeal soul is lodged in the brain,” writes Catherine Wilson. As material spirits, our most ordinary encounters are capable of delighting us. Every fiber of our being may be alive and receptive to extraordinary perceptions.
May, not must. We have to attend to the inherent possibilities of delight, and constantly cultivate our perceptual acuity, lest we become dull and inured to the monotony of everydayness. If we don't, and if we've been saddled with a temperament given to misgiving and ruminative regret - very few of us, it seems, are entirely exempt from such feelings - we'll not flourish. "The worm at the core of our usual springs of delight can turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. But the music can commence again, and again and again, at intervals."
The music of life is available and on tap for those who've grasped their intrinsic consanguinity with the cosmos. You could call this insight Democritean cosmopolitanism. “To a wise man," wrote Democritus, "the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe.” (Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Elusive Structure of the Universe and the Journey to Quantum Gravity).
More simply: "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." That's Carl Sagan, who was a big fan of Democritus.
The travel writer Pico Iyer just published an essay on this theme. In The Beauty of the Ordinary he writes of Fall and the cycles of the seasons,
the season’s special lesson is to cherish everything because it cannot last; from Vermont to Beijing, people relish autumn days precisely because they’re reminders of how much we cannot afford to take for granted, and how much there is to celebrate right now, this shining late September afternoon... I’m more enamored of the fall, if only because it has spring inside it, and memories, and the acute awareness that almost nothing lasts forever. Every day in autumn — a cyclical sense of things reminds us — brings us a little bit closer to the spring.And every day in late September brings us a little bit closer to October baseball. (Cards' magic number to clinch the Central is down to 3.) Bart Giamatti, not long before his own time here was cut tragically short, said he knew nothing's forever but needed to think so. "I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun."
George Santayana also said a similar thing. "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."
And: "There's no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval." Life offers many happy returns, while we're here and paying attention in our animal bodies, with our animal minds.
But now, what if an artificially intelligent being emerges someday and somehow wires itself to attend to things and reflect on their beauty? Is that possible, conceivable, comprehensible by us? Would its "body" not then in some meaningful sense be the whole world?
But then, aren't ours - on the Democritean premise - that already? That which we perceive being inseparable from that with which we perceive, the composite of our material atomic substance, can't we already say we are the world? We don't need to de-corporalize and upload our consciousness, to have and enjoy this delightful insight. We just need to expand and open it.
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