[ExI] Man’s Greatest Achievement – Nikola Tesla on Akashic engineering and the future of humanity

[Giulio Prisco]

Of course Tesla was using the language and scientific knowledge of his
times. The article was published in 1930 but written in 1907, shortly
after Einstein's paper that introduced special relativity and
explained the luminiferous ether away.

Your translation of Tesla's words translated in time-independent
scientific language - we are learning to control the fundamental
nature and forces of space-time, and in the future we will do awesome
things with them - seems close to what Tesla had in mind, but I
disagree on "he is not saying much about the spiritual meaning."

Man's "triumph over the physical world, his crowning achievement which
would place him beside his Creator and fulfill his ultimate destiny"
is spiritual meaning: our descendants will use science and technology
to do anything they will dream of, including God-like achievements.

Tesla's words here and elsewhere are "scientific poetry" meant to
inspire and energize.

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 6:03 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> (Short version: I dig the panegyrics, but I don't think he is actually
> saying anything spiritual... despite trying.)
>
> Is the word "Akashic" really doing any work here, besides denoting something
> all-encompassing? While I like Tesla's cosmist sentiments, I think there is
> a risk that one goes down a path of mythologizing things that are best
> understood in a non-mythological framework.
>
> As an example, if I started to use the word "karma" to denote market
> outcomes, I could say things like "Labor karma is shorthand for worker
> (never employer) variables that are often considered endogeneous in a labor
> market regression." or "Market failure is a situation in which the karma is
> blocked." By using the same word as used in religion, I add an air of
> destiny and rightness to the market outcomes - clearly any ideology that
> tries to subvert them must be spiritually bad! But it is just a word. Many
> have of course criticized the concept of the "invisible hand" on these
> grounds, arguing it adds a religious bent to what should be a discussion of
> emergent orders.
>
> When Tesla says:
>>
>> Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary
>> substance, of a tenuity beyond conception and filling all space – the Akasha
>> or luminiferous ether – which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or
>> creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things
>> and phenomena.
>
> he is talking about something - the luminiferous ether - that we now know
> does not exist. We can of course transplant/save his statement to relate to
> the electromagnetic field, or more properly the universal wavefunction. But
> is that really the same statement any more? We may say the ancients had no
> clue about the ether either, so it is all metaphors for whatever the
> fundamental stuff of reality actually is. But then Prana/creative force just
> means "that which acts on the fundamental force", and we have no real clue
> to what it is, what properties it has, or whether it is anywhere close to
> the kind of creative cosmist engineering Tesla envisions. In fact, we do not
> have any evidence that we can manipulate the universal wavefunction in any
> way whatsoever. Nor do we have any reason to think that the Akhasha and
> Prana in this sense has anything to do with our own spiritual aims, just
> like few today think that electricity is inherently spiritual.
>
> To me, it seems that Tesla is saying "we are learning to control these
> fundamental forces, and in the future we will do awesome things with them!"
> - which I totally agree with. But he is not saying much about the spiritual
> meaning by using his words. The most relevant spiritual thing is the brief
> mention of destiny near the end, which is the tie-in to proper teleology.
>
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford Martin School
> Oxford University
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat