As discussed in my previous post, The Romance of Reality presents a set of scientifically-premised arguments for viewing life, consciousness, and the physical universe as being all of one piece, a view mistakable at times for a Vedanta, Tao, or Zen-like stance on the oneness of being. By the end of the book, however, it seems far less focused on ‘being here now.’ Instead, the author declares as self-evident that if humans and the devices with which he expects us soon to merge fail to escape the limits of terrestrial existence before the sun becomes a red giant and vaporizes Earth some 7 or 8 billion years from now, our existence will have been for naught.

Having made a plausible case that life was almost inevitable given the way that the universe generates complexity as it moves towards its eventual heat death, he argues that it is the universe’s fate to become completely saturated with intelligence, with technologically advanced species and their non-carbon-based aids and partners colonizing its every corner. And even though this is all written into the universe’s laws of motion, so to speak, not only can the vision laid out “imbue [our] existence with meaning and purpose” (to quote the book’s website blurb), but we should take doing our part to help it come about as a moral imperative—a sort of “giving the inevitable a helping hand” argument reminiscent of the Communist revolutionaries of a century ago, who argued that “the revolution” was an inevitable consequence of the dynamics of social and technological change, but that the good revolutionary needed to be prepared to die for the cause. From a philosophical standpoint, it is also a glaring inference of “ought” from “is” that should be eyebrow-raising to........

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