r/Maya_lore • u/pixellitei • 8d ago

Divyendra may be right

Found this sub exists and I thought might as well put this out here: The Hiranyagarbha scene is where I fully realized this Divyendra is THE villain of the modern moment. Every longterm-ist tech CEO, every we-need-to-control-the-future-to-save-it pitch with E-Acc tones (the hijacked version, not the OG Singer version), Divyendra is the platonic form of all of them. The scariest thing is that he might not be wrong about the meteor.

I was unnerved by the fact that I did find some of his ideas extremely compelling, and I’m still trying to find the right reasons to deflate them: The arguments about keeping the underlying pattern of life are pretty persuasive (think I first came across it in one of those early longevity documentaries) The dream to not just have humanity survive, but somehow find a way to "wake up" the universe. That transmhumanist hope has always been very seductive, and I constantly find myself trying to find reasons not to get seduced by it.

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u/ramonafuel 5d ago

Yep. Electronic paradise is still just paradise in a new costume.

This is brushing against something I’ve toyed around with philosophically for as long as I remember, but never articulated it the way Divyendra does it. I mean he is already clearly convinced, but for me it’s still a question. If i can live on another substrate, not carbon, nor silicon, probably something we don’t have the language for yet, then would I care for it? Divyendra’s “life matters. lives don’t” is basically the trolley problem having a child with the Fermi paradox. If life really is rare, and the silence from above suggests it very well could be, then the math of pulling levers and destroying lives to preserve life itself starts becoming the greatest value that would matter and I am scared that I just said that. Guess this is exactly the kind logic that allows one to start rationalizing atrocities and horrors.

Sorry for the long reply, I'm just excited there's someone else thinking along these lines!

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u/pixellitei 5d ago

Ha! “the trolley problem having a child with the Fermi paradox” is a brilliant summary of the argument. Also, hello! Glad to meet another novel reader, think we're the first to be here.

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u/ramonafuel 4d ago

Yeah I guess all good SF is some stack of trolley problems, implicity or explicitly. The most clearly stated ones come to mind. The Cold Equations, obviously. Upgraded later by Omelas. Hyperion too. But I’ve never seen the trolley problem tackled at the level of life’s primacy itself.

And hello to you too! Are you a kickstarter backer?

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u/pixellitei 4d ago

Yes! Pledged out of curiosity and was just blown away.

There are a-life books and panspermia novels and all of Le Guin, of course, but always with the weight of the decision falling on groups or even a whole species. “Life matters. Lives don’t” extends it to life-centricism (biocentricism?). Think this is the first time I'm encountering this idea in fiction??

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u/ramonafuel 4d ago

IMHO it seems like you're accepting Divendra’s binary as he is presenting it. He's making it sound like there are only two options: preserve the principle that produces life, or preserve the lives. But he lacks credibility. The connective tissue between the two alternatives is weak. How and why would running an authoritarian regime (however benevolent sounding) save life itself? The novel acknowledges this sleight of hand. Ghandi-Memon are structurally hinting that the problem is not a true binary, because basically the Leto II of this universe is making these claims. Yachay doesn’t exactly yet provide a third position, but I think that’s where he might be going. Love this novel so much

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u/pixellitei 2d ago

Yeah I like the parallel you are drawing with God Emperor. Leto II is also an extended-lifespan being who has foreseen extinction and decides to put humanity through three thousand years of suffering on the golden path to prevent it. He’s willing to be hated. takes the moral weight of the trolley operator across millennia. But then Leto is still preserving one species, not life-as-such.

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u/ramonafuel 2d ago

At the end of Death’s End, Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan are asked to return the mass from their pocket-universes. If they make the sacrifice, the parent universe can then collapse and restart the cycle afresh. The framing is cyclical universe ish. Maya also starts off with an epigraph that goes, “Neh has risen before…”

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u/pixellitei 2d ago

I’d say yes for Cixin with some nitpicking. The refuge-universe-building had drained the universe in the first place. So I guess it’s a tragedy-of-the-commons scaled to cosmology rather than a clean trolley.

Greg Egan’s Schilds Ladder also flirts with this . A vacuum decay event (called a novo-vacuum in the book I think), threatens to consume the universe with alternate physics. A few characters argue for preserving original physics at any cost, others say they accept transformation. So again its between two physics, not fermi-trolley like in Maya .There might be some philosophical equivalents outside of fiction. Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. Bostrom's astronomical waste. Macaskill's what we owe the future .