Source:Shots of Awe
“What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of lfe.’ It is information, words, instructions.” -Richard Dawkins
In this inspirational video, Jason Silva (Shots of Awe) talks about how language forms reality.
There’s a fascinating new book by Diana Slattery called Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness, which builds on McKenna's notion that the world is made of language. If you know the words the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
It’s kind of like Neo in the matrix when he sees the code, right?
So, what does this mean – this notion that reality is made of language? Is it mere metaphor? Is it mere poetry?
Well, McKenna and Diana Slattery say that actually the metaphor is literalized – when you actually look at the big picture. Even, biology is made of language. Biology is code. DNA is code. It’s software that writes his own hardware. The words come before the matter emerges.
Just think about that, because it resonates in all kinds of transcendental ways: this notion that mind came before matter. That mind didn’t emerge from matter, but rather the mind preceded matter.
It’s a wild idea, but it does seem to be that everything can be described in terms of words. Whether it’s music, whether it's the atoms that describe the laws of physics, it’s all describable. It’s all information.
It’s a wild idea worth thinking about.
