Technically, this book is titled “Transcendental
Metaphysics of Pancomputational
Panpsychism,” but the top lip of the cover reads “Technovedanta 2.0.”
Firstly, I note that, after my own heart, author Antonin Tuynman suffuses his work with
poetry -- I have especially fallen in love with one titled “The
Quagmire of ontological
disambiguation” -- this is a poem I intend to pursue, even!!
But moving to the heart of the work, the fundamental thought underlying this rich volume is the possible nature of our
Universe as a sort of self-aware cosmic
computer -- in a way that scientifically (if not strictly technologically) completes the circle of
Vedic thought. The savvy reader might well wonder, by the way, why I am beginning with what is actually the second book in a series. This is
Kismet. Pure
chance. An arbitrary function of this title happening to appeal to me (as a pandeistic thinker) before I saw any others.
The author speaks with an expansive and lively vocabulary and conceptual fluency of thoughts that reflect what has rattled around in my own mind for some while -- of philosophizing, of mastery arising from the
will to become a master, of the remarkable premise that
Consciousness itself arises from a self-sustaining feedback loop. He gamely coins the term Infinityism to frame the conceptual boundaries of the inconceivable, preferring to refer to
God as “transfinite,” a term which he notes was yet undefined when the religions were casting their conceptions of the
Divine. He identifies the many (and growing) routes by which we are ever-increasingly bound by expressions of a collective
subconscious, which is itself but one aspect of an all-encompassing underlying consciousness. To those familiar with the post-Enlightenment idea of
Pandeism, I need not spell out the significance of this line of thought to that theory.
Tuynman draws from a diverse array of philosophical forbears, from
Hegel to
Alfred North Whitehead to
Buckminster Fuller to
Terrance McKenna -- not all of whom are recognized as philosophers (he titles
Ray Kurzweil and
Peter Diamandis, for example, as "contemporary technoprophets"), but all of whom can be recognized as such when their observations are set in Tuynman's grand context. His analysis of the
autopoietic is auto-poetic (just as his poetry is profoundly analytic). It feels as if he is consistently pulling the covers of reality back to reveal intuitively realized mechanisms of our Universe from the most
modern concepts of
science, and then tying these back, again and again, to some of the most ancient philosophical ideas. He does not blur the lines between these frames of thought; he demonstrates that the lines are an
illusion, a construct dissolved simply by turning to observe from a different angle.
Like the courses of an excellent
meal, getting deeper and deeper into this book makes you feel fuller and fuller of useful
information, and yet it is tasty enough that though you
finish feeling satisfied, yet knowing you could have another
plate of the same again
tomorrow.