Book Club Musings: Unpacking ‘The Romance of Reality’

Notes on How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity.

GENERAL NOTES

• Azarian did all the reading. He cites so many people in here that I’ve been reading: Tegmark, Kurzweil, Bostrom, Harris, Robert Wright, Carthart-Harris, etc etc.
• Azarian is a neuroscientist, but honestly, his sections on consciousness are the weakest. He’s a brilliant interdisciplinary thinker who came up with profound ideas about physics, philosophy, and biology that he uses to serve as the foundation for some boring ideas on consciousness, when it’s really all the stuff around that which is more interesting.
• Azarian proposes to make a “theory of everything” which he calls the Integrated Evolutionary Synthesis. While there are some weaker moments, his theory does feel very encompassing: it applies from the quantum level up to the multiverse level; it solves the problem of the origins of life; it covers both living things and the machines and social structures that living things make; it defines god as a process in a compelling way; and it is self-reflective, in that it takes itself into account when discussing the nature of knowledge.
• Azarian ties in a few of my favorite topics: humanity’s destiny, AI and embodiment, psychedelics and the entropic mind, and the nature of knowledge.

MAIN POINTS

Azarian’s ambitious Integrated Evolutionary Synthesis has some core ideas:

• Second Law of Thermodynamics: Yes, the universe is spreading and systems tend to push toward chaos. But the most powerful force against that entropy is the physical reality that, if there’s free energy, the universe will try to order it to consume it. All of life is just the best machine the universe has built to turn free energy into consumed energy. And as long as life has access to more energy, it can (AND SHOULD) expand indefinitely.
  – To do this, systems move toward complexity, because the more complex a system is, the more energy it consumes. So the universe is always trying to get more complex and more intelligent.
• Universal Darwinism: Everything in the universe evolves. Evolution just means storing information about works and what doesn’t [help something survive or persist]. If the goal is to survive, encoding information in patterns, cycles, genes, books is what makes the fittest the fittest. This can…