It’s Monday, in case anyone didn’t realize it.  Actually, whether or not anyone out there realized the fact, it’s still Monday.  Not that nature recognizes anything “Mondayish” about this day; the divisions of the days into weeks and months is all just human convention*.  Years, on the other hand, are natural cycles, as are days.

You can probably tell that I have no interesting ideas about which to write today, so I’m trading in banalities.  I try to get interested in discussing economics and politics and all that stuff, but except in rare instances‒though I lament and bemoan the seemingly indelible stupidity of human “civilization”‒it’s mostly just obviously futile and pathetic.  The people seeking and gaining “power” seem fundamentally deluded about their own importance, as is nearly everyone else.  Yet, if the everyday person’s grasp of even recent history is any evidence, almost nothing is even going to be remembered even a few months into the future.

I don’t quite understand how people live in their world without even a sense of context beyond their immediate environs.  I suppose that’s the natural state of humans.  In prehistoric times it was probably more than adequate, and certainly there’s been little time for evolution to alter the fundamental workings of the human brain to make them more suitable for dealing with the realities of the very large, complex, spontaneously self-assembled system that they call civilization.

Or maybe neurodivergence is the evolution of the brain to adapt to such systems, and the only reason so-called normal humans even still exist is that there were a lot more of them in the beginning.  Sometimes I think that people with ASD and ADHD and so on should do a Magneto kind of movement and rise up, throwing off the yoke of humans.  After all, if modern resurgence of authoritarianism and xenophobia/rights violations even in the US demonstrates anything, it is that the notion of “never again” which refers to the ideal of ensuring that the holocaust (or something like it) never recurs, is a pipe dream.

And yet, to revile and try to overthrow so-called normal humans could perhaps be just such an expression of bigotry, or at least prejudice, as I am bemoaning.  Would that be hypocritical and/or unjust?  If so, could it still be a necessary evil?  Is there any such thing as “necessary evil” or is that always just a cop-out?  (I’m interested in readers’ thoughts on that last question.)

From a physics point of view, humanity itself is not necessary, and there seems to be a pretty good likelihood that humanity is not even consequential, but that the whole of civilization is just a transient, highly local phenomenon, that will flash out of existence leaving no more remnants behind than do the little whorls and eddies of beautiful shapes that happen with you first pour cream into coffee.

In the long run, as far as we can see, the universe will be not just dead but mostly empty.  And though there are theoretical bases for everything starting over again (e.g., a Poincaré Recurrence) almost all of the intervening time‒which is so vast compared to the piddling age of the universe so far as to make 13 billion years like a single flap of a bee’s wing in the history of life on Earth‒will be lifeless.  So, looking at what appears to be nearly irrefutable physics, lifelessness is the natural, usual state of reality.

Of course, in principle, people could get beyond that, as David Deutsch has pointed out in The Beginning of Infinity.  Of course, as he has also pointed out, there is nothing that guarantees that people will become cosmically significant; it’s entirely possible for civilization to stagnate and decay or to self-destruct.

There is, mind you, plenty of time left in the lifespan of “habitability” of the Earth, so there might be time for another species to develop a civilization if humans die out, but there’s no good reason to suspect that they would be any more prepared to develop a cosmically significant culture than humans have been.

Maybe what we should do is split the human race into neurotypical and neurodivergent populations sort of like the Vulcans and Romulans in Star Trek.  Obviously (I think) the neurodivergent people would  be the Vulcans and the “typical” humans would be the Romulans‒you know, warlike, cruel, spiteful, duplicitous, and without honor.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make this morning.  Maybe the point is that there is no point, that all meaning is internal and provincial and ultimately solipsistic or at least narcissistic.  But I am not enthusiastic about any of it, really.  I’m tired already, and it’s only Monday morning.

Oh, well.  Welcome to the new week.  I hope you all are doing well and feeling well as well.

*Which sounds a bit like some weird fan expo by aliens pretending to be and/or celebrating humanity.