“But a long time ago I had what I consider to be both a mystical and pragmatic insight. It followed from the supposition that organisms ‘invented death’, and it came with superorganisms… the kind we’re mostly familiar with: plants and animals.

See, a superorganism is a time-ship, but it’s born in and adapted to a specific phase-state of the biosphere, and the relationships and transformations there operant. There’s a span of biospheric transformation beyond which the original body of the organism… cannot successfully adapt for.

From this perspective, you’d want death. Because you’d want vessels of embodiment suited to (and perhaps particularly adapted for) the »current world.

I remember thinking, at the time, that genetics was like a kind of (at least) partial reincarnation. What we inherit from our progenitors seems however, at least to me, to be far richer than mere genes, or anything easily explained away by some reductive mechanism…”

— fragment