The Rational Fallacy (or, in the future noone can hear you dream)

Several rather unsettling potential futures have been trickling across the aether the past several days: the Semantic Apocalypse (or the evolutionary dead end of human consciousness), the death of free will (as the last grasp of the unenlightened), and what really makes me sad and/or laugh, the need(?) to get out of the narrative fallacy, that our evolutionary ability to make meaning out of sense-events by stringing them into recognizable narratives is perhaps no longer necessary, and from the sound of the article all rational beings ought to immediately stop telling themselves stories. The irony being that these are all stories that speak of both a need for control and meaning, and more so indicate to me some peculiar postmodern desire to no longer be human, to escape from the weird impulses of our bodies and all our non-linear reasons for doing what we do. As if in a fully rational world we can all finally be sterile passionless robots or programs, rows of ones and zeroes doing nothing unexpected, nothing out of bounds, a dystopia predicted long before 1984 in Zamyatin's "We." As if just because the Universe is a mysterious ungraspable place, on the largest and smallest scales, the only way we rational beings can bear its unfathomableness is by killing off our own mysterious uncertain selves. This is a future in which art, magic, even love would no longer be possible, because the rational fallacy seeks to do away with the fact that just as much as we are analytical beings we are also batshit crazy, I mean, that we crave meaning and find value in our lives from novelty and personal experience and not from predictable routines or the scientific rigor mortis of western materialism. What is the point of learning how the Universe works if not to better understand how we exist in it, or could better exist. What is the point of knowing if our knowings don't add up to a larger picture, and who would be looking at the picture? As PK Dick asked, do androids dream of electric sheep? We are still, and hopefully will remain, more than just our neurochemical programs, our biological probabilities.

Besides allowing us to learn how to evade saber tooth tigers, or even get up in the morning, stories always have and continue to serve a vital human function, that of allowing us to express how we are or should be in the world. What this means to us, individually or collectively, and where we are going next. Even prior to ethics or mythological taboos, without a sense of narrative there is literally no future, no reason to believe in the consequences of our current actions. Logic divorced from muthos will not allow us to better exist on earth tomorrow, let alone two minutes from now. Science for science's sake, without a grander story to guide its research and invention, produced the atomic bomb and conditions for global warming (though to be very clear, it was the rather fucked up stories of those in power that allowed such atrocities to happen), and without finding a balance, the solely rational mindset could produce further horrors. If our dreams can't become reality there will cease to be one. This is rather similar to how I see the contemporary atheist movement, cultishly trying to kill the religious impulse when it is impossible to prove or disprove whether or not gods exist, without even trying to understand what purpose they, their worship, and belief in general might still serve in helping people determine how to be in the world and with each other. The greatest irony is that any argument for atheism ultimately relies solely on faith, that there is stubbornly not more on heaven and earth than can ever be dreamed of in our philosophies. Personally I believe that everything is real or has the potential to be real, tangible or intangible, anything ever conceived of, no matter how surreal or unfathomable, exists. As Pablo Picasso put it, "everything we can imagine is real." To believe otherwise is to close your mind, or dare I say soul, to all that is beautiful, marvelous, or deep in what it is to be human, in what it still could mean to be human. This is my fear of arguments for such rational post/trans-humanism: that if we don't learn to accept, or even revel in, all the psychotic, creative, baffling irrationales with which humankind has always struggled, than any transcended intelligent being may find these repressed instincts come back to haunt them more so... assuming we have stories, consciousness, and the will to get us that far first.