And This Is Even Harder

I think to some extent it was favorable for me in the way I now personally would tend to look at accounts from the past (that is to say, those esteemed accounts of prominent historical figures) that attempt to give an explanation of 'human life,' of its presumed reason for even being, and of 'God' - favorable for me that I grew up literally in a tropical jungle, and mostly on military bases in and near those places.

When I say literally, I do mean quite literally -, not simply in some town or city in the Tropics; no, literally was in the jungle proper.

Not a tropical jungle. This is the
Shola Cloud Forest.
...Where the Fountain of Youth, is.

There are many reasons for that, the main one being that my father inherited some of the prime rubber and tea estates in the world (at the time), most of which were either up the sides of mountains or deep inside of large areas of forest aka literal wild jungle.

What you quickly learn if you spend a lot of time in those places, is that the one thing that successful life is fundamentally good at - is concealment/subterfuge.

Secondly, it's not a thing for me to conceive of even very advanced ET Alien civilizations as being represented in terms of their technology by some bland, blunt, amorphous, unexplained, obelisk.

So definitely I like Kubrick, but he isn't right.

Being around a lot of sophisticated military technology and equipment means you can easily assess whether some thing is current-level human technology - or is something wildly different to that.

Many religious narratives will give you this story that 'God' wrote some important words for humans, and He wrote those onto, um - clay tablets; and then the clay tablets were sent down to Earth.

Well in my book, they would have descended down to here, got smashed to ten million pieces and no one would ever have seen what was written on them - those 'clay' tablets.

Why 'clay' fergawdsakes!

How come no on has found some titanium tablets that came down to here say, er, ten thousand years ago, and have been preserved intact without corrosion with all of their 'God-scratches' on them so that we can see what is there, for real?

Good, and Beautiful.
And purple.

There is something not quite right with the 'God' stories that we all have been handed from the past generations.

Mostly are all 'not quite right.'

So again, you won't find me, blindly repeating the same old tragic narrative you will readily find across the internet, about Plato devising his 'Platonic Forms' and then being shown some geometrical shapes and having his Theory of Ideal Forms being conflated with his ideas about fundamental geometry.

And yes I understand I haven't talked about whether there is any reason intelligent 'Forms' must come before temporal objects - and that modern meta-physics wishes to say everything is simply 'emergent reality...' We'll deal with it later, but in short 'emergence' is nonsense. It's nonsense because aesthetics is not 'evolutionary.' 

Whilst those (Platonic) shapes shown by Wiki are sort of 'true-'ish -, true to his statements about the Ultimate Nature of Causal Reality and the conditions all those 'essential' things must fulfill (including simple geometrical shapes), in fact they totally avoid what he actually says about existential reality... And they are not what he meant by his statement that there are 'temples in which the Gods really live, and where they may be seen as they truly are.' This statement Wiki and others have conflated with his work on element geometry/geometrical forms.

And I will expand on that aspect here:

One of his conditions for 'God-level' existence of particular - what he terms 'Forms' (but that is just a Greek word for something quite complex to express in modern English) - is that it is necessary.

It (any one of the 'Ultimate Forms') is a thing necessary to have for existence to be the way it is at all. 

Thus, for conscious intelligence to be, it is necessary that there be a prime example of it in form, structure, meaning, dynamic properties, and especially hierarchies of value (IE morality/Justice) that are necessary to encompass what we mean by even saying 'intelligent' - conceptually.

Otherwise our apparently unique word for it is a misnomer and really is only talking about something else, something which could come under some other category of thing for which there already is a word and a concept. And by the way, this is what the world of AI is trying to do, make out that artificial mechanisms (data systems and algorithms are mechanisms) are forms of consciousness and intelligence - and they are not.

Bombay B&Tea.
LOL

He then used simplistic phraseology that would not offend the ears of the people of the day, and so he made it very simple, just like the obelisk of Kubrick; 'the Good is also the Beautiful.' He tried to qualify that with the adverb 'truly' - as in the truly Good.

...The truly Beautiful.

But just as the tropical jungle is insanely complex and sophisticated when you get up close to it, human concepts of aesthetics are just as complicated.

Plato went out of his way to say that he really did mean 'physically attractive' when he used the word in its strict 'Eternal Form' sense - 'Beautiful.' He might have even said that Medea killed her children (that she had with Jason) because of Jason's egregious behavior and that it was necessary for her to do that the way she did (she took them to the Temple of Hera assuming Hera would save them) and that it established her female 'power-righteousness' as much as she was reputedly outwardly 'beautiful' - even though she had committed actual murder.

The picture is thus immensely complicated.

It will not be that in some 'Cosmic Temple of Divine Reality' somewhere, there is, on a template made of titanium or never-corrodium, the equals sign which is the actual 'God' thing itself. And that is because whether an equal sign or the Omega sign (sort of the same thing), one side of the 'equal' must acknowledge the thing on the other side as it really is, and vice versa.

And yet, because it must be all of these things - necessary, Good, and Beautiful, it cannot be a simple thing like that.

This could turn up in the new
James Bond movie.

No.

There is nothing in existential material affairs that simply stands stationary like some neon sign out in the desert -, not even blinking in the night.

When you think about something that will take you into the realm of truly advanced intelligent beings - think of people, and their actions and interactions, their engagements with facts, with events of life, and with other people. Don't just think about a sign or a symbol; that will take you exactly nowhere.

Existence is dynamic and moving.

Morality is not a chess game played on a chess board with caricature figures and fixed squares of movement.

Of course mortal people desire ultimate resolution:

Why are they here? What is their purpose? What is the meaning of life?

Humans are here to find their minds; their power is to use their mind, and they have a special particular physical 'animal' attribute of making and using tools, be those physical/material or data and intelligent systems and preferably both.

The meaning of life is the perfection of material action. In the vast myriad of timeless situational contexts. That's why there are many lives. Of course I recognize that we all want to be 'saved' for me, for 'myself' as the paramount consideration as it were - and that can happen; why not? We are after all, only in charge of our own egos. So it's fair that we do think about ourselves. But we also abandon ourselves too easily as well on account of the strictures of life.

This is more the thing that would
turn up in my sort of
pseudo-detective thriller - 
and it would open in the screen credits
to the music below.
...There would be some
super predator/super villain,
closing in when the music peaks.

People are deceived at first into witnessing the physical power of youth, and then the failure of that power in advancing age, and so run to the wrong conclusions about life. 'It is as if they are held in such a way as to see only the shadows on the wall...' LOL

Super advanced living forms are expert in concealment, in subterfuge. And that is principally because humans - like a lot of animals (not all but a lot) - are good at taking and not giving back (the other side of the 'equals' sign...), are good at killing for gain, are good at wasting things, are good at abusing the kindness of others, are good at treachery, are good at grasping for power and control when they are not entitled to even think about it in certain contexts.

'Satan' is a human being. Is the 'Human Being' on the whole. Not everyone, not fully, but in the whole of world composite is mostly that.

The worst thing ever would be if the real 'Spice Melange' turned your eyes blue. Then, everyone else would see you.

The biggest mistake you will ever make is to think that what you cannot see, does not exist.

In the jungle, when you make that mistake, most of the time you end up dead.

Strangely enough, so do most humans anyway. 

Did anything just go 'click' for you?

Ammon, eat your heart out. This is a young Greek woman, and her hands do not have the burdens of arthritis, and here is your 'Medea/Drakonideis' music: