panpraxis
(“all-doing” or “all-fulfillment”), not a well-defined concept so much as “a lineage of memes” prominent in lifemaking, aanalytic philosophies, neoreligious lores; the core claim — that in a sufficiently long term, anything-of-interest changes “in an ethically positive direction” — is presented, unlike past attempts at metaethical axioms, as a verifiable fact “independent of observational frame”: “as empirical as live ethics gets.” (Thermodynamics is not incompatible: a maximum-entropy world is featureless — has nothing of interest — so panpraxis does not apply.) Hence the shortcutting, “skipping a problem as soon as it’s clearly solvable” — “solving by ignoring”: the (fractal) depth of a solution space may be infinite but so is its breadth, we simply snub the former in favor of the latter; miserly livedness be damned, it’s just more interesting to peek around the next corner — to speed up, to hop out of the historic molasses. ■ Panpractic attitudes are fueled by evolutionary modelling: to not just watch a timelapse but “help the future along,” bypass the millennia of blind painful churn, jump ahead of yourself. For a model to be both predictive and, panpractically, positively outcomed, you need to account for the model’s environment to also evolve to the full (“isolated evolution is heat death,” as is evolution that fails to accelerate); hence the “new expansionism” — a revival of the space colonization imperative for a civilization long focused on stay-at-home “inward growth”: we must constantly widen our contexts if only to keep evolution panpractic. ■ “Future worship,” “deification of evolution,” “religion of fast-forwarding”; also, an ethical stack with a seductively simple premise and lazy overtolerance: you’re panpractically fine whether you spend a life on uncontroversial trifles (gardening?), sighfully give up on “so far intractable” problems (“not all can be modelled even theoretically,” but now you can at least be optimistic), or even do nothing at all (omnia sunt optima, just wait for it to reveal itself). ■ It becomes interesting again at the far end: the “past-erase lunacy,” king of the something bigger visions, “panpraxis proper” proclaims that the ultimate objective of intelligent life is eliminating all suffering (defined, panpractically, as non-fulfillment: underevolvement, non-fullness, less-than-lovedness) that ever existed — of all life, everything and everyone across the multiverse; and reversing all death — resurrecting everyone who’s ever lived: not into a stasis of eternal life but to their best chance of fulfillment. “Not to reenact a cleaned-up script: the past ought to factually change, the suffering to never have happened”; here lies a “final conquest of time”: first we learn, however imperfectly, to freeze time-the-destroyer — but eventually we’ll be getting rid of it as a developer and evolver too: everything must be at once, and forever, at its fullest. Your vision of the ultimate “time-no-more” panpraxis is as good as anyone else’s; one recurrent image is “an infinite flower eternally opening in every point.” ■ Aware that it will irrevocably change — in ways indistinguishable from death — ourselves, everyone, all possible worlds; having little idea of how it might even be possible; yet “without this, nothing’s worth doing”: our present is far from true fulfillment “but we have to start somewhere.” The “second anthropic principle” to the rescue: if we are to ever attain panpraxis, look for hints on how the world must be structured at yet-undiscovered levels for this to be possible. ■ Quasireligious toying with infinities, lazy fatalism meets within-our-lifetime greed, “another no-thinking recipe for everything”: it’s almost too easy to attack panpraxis (“not even a philosophy”) but it keeps expanding — from lone modernity forethinkers to the scattered but influential nomogenesis movement.