"Be Virgil to my Dante as we explore the depths of this poem."

 

This is the prompt the author suggests you give your artificially intelligent companion before beginning The Anthropic Festival. 

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From the first particles of matter to the emergence of life, language, consciousness and culture, The Anthropic Festival traces the improbable adventure of existence becoming capable of knowing itself.

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Cosmology meets mythology; evolution meets philosophy; biology meets language. Ancient stories, scientific ideas, technical vocabularies and fragments of human thought are gathered, transformed and recombined into a single long poem about emergence, inheritance, meaning and mortality.

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But this is not simply a poem about the universe. It is a poem about the strange machinery by which we make a universe intelligible: how we name what we encounter, connect what seemed unrelated, build concepts from fragments, and pass our discoveries on to those who come after us.

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Part philosophical expedition, part natural history, part linguistic experiment, and part secular liturgy, The Anthropic Festival explores what poetry can be when it attempts not merely to describe existence, but to reproduce something of the way a mind discovers it, but to enact the continuous, unpunctuated breath of a universe coming to know itself.

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Matter becomes life.
Life becomes mind.
Mind makes meaning.
Meaning becomes language.
And language turns back upon the world that made it.