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Bob, Geoff, Frisco and the Nothingness

“Reality comes in many different flavors.”

Steven Magee

 

L'Être et Néan, like all Sartre's books, is (for me) dense, difficult and strangely refreshing. Obviously, I read it when I was 18, living in Paris in a phase that was far from existentialist.

With the passage of time, quantum mechanics and the impressive naughtiness rooted in the ignorance that prevails in Brazil in business and politics, the edges of my existentialism have been rounded off, and that is not necessarily a bad thing, if we take the one softened by the Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana and the American theoretical physicist Geoffrey Chew.

In different ways, from very different origins, Chico, Beto and Geoff, to be faithful to Sartre, imagine the non-existence of an external reality. If this is so, then there is obviously no self. At most there is a functional knot.

And it reminded me of an article I wrote not long ago, trying to explain why plants don't have faces.

If all that exists is an immense, intense, complex neural network, then within it we create stories for ourselves, the functional nodes. And it's become so strong that we've come to face ourselves. We give ourselves a soul. We have become so sophisticated that we are proposing artificial intelligence.

When all I am is a functional node?.

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