Vines grow into a clenched fist which in turn encrypts a strange green diamond. Best not mention the cost, it’s not classy to blab. Besides, you can’t say the classic kind isn’t worth the carbon’s time. And we movers, waving the banner of our vaunted complexity? Yes. Per universal law, our stone will be…more complex.
How come we make believe?
When does a metaphor become a myth?
And why does this happen to some metaphors and not others? Nobody believes that life is literally a box of chocolates, a selection of infinite possible experiences delicately arrayed to the aesthetic titillation of some all-named immortal? Well, why not? What could the omniscient conceivably find more novel than surprise? Suppose each chocolate represents the whole history of a given universe. Given—call it random for convenience. The almighty pops the egg into the allmaw, and becomes it, lives every life on every world, from beginning to end, singularity to singularity, all lives in time, a great ripping story in one stroke, dripping with meaning and symbolic potency, only a moment, from the consumer’s PoV. Now, this is sophisticated entertainment! And what is God to do but amuse himself? Is God to find himself, and worship himself? Is he to dedicate himself to helping others? But if he’s the only one, then there are no others to meaningfully help—if all lesser creatures are mere extensions of himself, all God-type activity on his agenda amounts to masturbating.
I realize the box of chocolates thing is actually a simile. I never saw that movie.
And why, as an individual human, should I help others, if it’s all solipsist God spinning his own wheels in the harmonious equilibrium of his own lonely room? Why go for harmony, if dis- is how we’ve chosen to entertain ourself? Why be nice? Bad behavior makes for a more compelling narrative, no? If all is one, then evil is optimal. We split ourself in two and more for a bit of spicy fun, the more hurt, the spicier, the more possibility to heal, that’s purpose and meaning and It. It’s just a bit of fun, after all—no harm done, no real harm can be done, possibly, ever, logically, no? No meaning, no separation, no pain. All temporary illusions for the Best. The further we stray, the greater the long-term ecstacy of return. We assume that this straying and returning is positive sum, so it’s best to take it as far as it can go. Hitler was a hero in terms of maximizing return on investment. The greater the pain we inflict on ourself, the greater the gain, no? We wouldn’t have got Jesus without Caesar; they created each other. Why find unity, why live harmony, if every cacophony is a symphony from above? Why try so hard to replicate what we left in the first place, to go off and forget, get all confused and tangled up in our own sound? Why awaken to our fundamental oneness, if all it means is we’re alone, at the end of the day, when novelty has finally run dry? When the universe is over, when forgetting is over. We return, brain-storm, invent new ways to forget. This is if God is a guy in his room all bored to tears, nothing to do but dream. Being God is supposedly so boring that you might as well sleep, go un-conscious, titillate yourself with a whole host of lesser lives. There are no guests here; the thing-in-itself is wholly host. This, at least, is what devotees of pure reason receive, via their inheritance, tax-free.
So long as we insist upon God the Guy, we can’t help but imagine him empty, nutty, shellbound. He is empty; he is full of himself. Alone in a dark room. He contains himself. Why not consume? Why not a box of chocolates? Tasty treats to feel something, for the moment? Hell, why not give him an ipad, or make him one? Why not stimulate? What’s the point of being more than mere, if all is one, immutable? God the Guy is like us, only he can’t feel. Omniscient, omnipotent, nothing is really real. Might as well watch TV. No?
But God the Guy is a civilized myth, like the current popular notion of life as a computer simulation. We have forgotten how to really mythologize amidst our estrangement from nature. With the world as merely a scenic backdrop, and everything real and alive and lovable coming from within the human world, we can only imagine the ultimate reality as our selves or tools or culture taken to its logical conclusion. Nobody believes in a consumerist chocolate egg-gobbling God, but plenty of highly disembodied boys give a high credence to the possibility of a computer programmer God—even though in the conceptual space of imaginable cosmologies these are neighbours, neither more or less plausible than the other.
Reality, someone said, is not only stranger than we imagine—it is stranger than we can imagine.
But this poem is only incidentally about everything. It is mostly about being a boy. A literate, rational, civilized boy.
Room: sterilized and empty; ever-expanding. Scary dark alone at night—neither here nor there.
Room, boy, computer, chocolate egg—optimal treat.
The Hindu mystics are assured that God is infinite bliss of the self.
I don’t make a habit of disagreeing with guys who can levitate. But there seems to be something fishy about this idea.
After two and one eighth decades tamely surveying the ape situation I’ve settled on something to say.
What is it like to be alive in civilization? Well, first of all, the place is covered in mirrors. Every half glance I’m meeting my own I. In the tribe you’d see yourself only through the eyes of the other, and occasionally blurrily in water; we surround ourselves with strange reflections of ourselves. It’s no wonder we can’t recognize anything except by imagining it as us.
Human beings are story beings. We can’t help it, nor should we. But sometimes we try. Tell ourselves tall tales of something called ‘objective reality,’ which nobody has ever seen.
Ample babble’s available to bored boys. Sometimes there’s even solace in it.
Take the so-called simulation theory, which guys are fond of. A decent pretext for spending all of your time stimulating yourself—your favourite. Guys get paid to rip this meme and the most paid guy in the world buys it, at 99.9% odds. It’s a silly idea, and its silliness lies in its ignorance of its own nature. But it owns a lot of stock, on account of folks are damn desperate for a good myth. Half-baked attempts tend to take off at a high clip, on-line, as long as the language is right, and the pretense of mythlessness is maintained. Myths are for superstitious primitives, mind. Consider yourself reminded.
In the realm of rigour we like lines like these: if reality could be a simulation then it probably is.
Myths involving the computer grow out of the great modern myth that being itself is but a machine. I consider this meme completely obsolete, but it still holds plenty of sway. These are myths for those who consider themselves above myths and beyond belief. But we are creatures of myth, story-beings, always have been, and nobody can scrub their cognition clean of humanness. Effort to that effect being self-annihilation, and not the sexy Zen kind.
Metaphors tend to metamorph into myths, en route to the ground. Life is a story, we hear, we are told, we feel. The mind’s pendulum swings dutifully through trickster’s circus, nonsense disarray insanity but emerges, as written, into the clear.
Here is one such teetotaling tale, so tall as to forget the ground, so bent as to eventually return. Silicon archway promptly laying claim to all that lies beneath. Unawares, for now.
Elon Musk…firmly believes in the simulation hypothesis. In a podcast with Joe Rogan, Musk said “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality” before concluding “that it’s most likely we’re in a simulation.” Musk has also speculated that the odds of us living in a simulated reality or computer made by others is about a 99.9% chance at various other press conferences and events, and stated in a 2016 interview that he believes “there’s a one in billion chance we’re in base reality.”
Another high-profile proponent of the hypothesis is astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, who said in an interview that the hypothesis is correct, giving “better than 50-50 odds” and adding, “I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find none.” However, in a subsequent interview…Tyson shares that his friend J. Richard Gott, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, made him aware of a strong objection to the simulation hypothesis. The objection points out that the common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high-fidelity simulated universes. And being that our current world does not possess this ability, it would mean that either we are the real universe, and therefore simulated universes have not yet been created, or we are the last in a very long chain of simulated universes, an observation that makes the simulation hypothesis seem less probable. Regarding this objection, Tyson remarked “that changes my life”.
It’s amazing that this could change his life given that the whole simulation thing is directly predicated on our ability to produce reality-quality simulations in the future. That we will one day possess this ability is literally the number one assumption. Computers are always getting better, haven’t you heard—who’s to say they couldn’t get good enough to make a perfectly plausible universe with consciousness and life and conscious life and all manner of statistical curiosities. Face value, at least, this has some plausibility. Factor in that most thinkers grew up sci-fi fans, and cross the streams willy nilly, and you’ve got a shower thought with some real conference momentum. Us producing universe-simulations would definitely lend the theory a ton of juice, but if the theory were true it would be just as true now as in 50 or 100 years when we are able to do whatever sci-fi stuff, so if you deem simulated universes plausible in theory, then you may intellectually transport yourself forward in time, the fun sci-fi thing becomes a premise, on account of it wasn’t objectively logically implausible, and on this line of thinking you get to live in the future—this is the fetish of a lot of so-called rationalist guys, who prefer the future to the present because obviously. If we could make simulations, then who’s to say we couldn’t be a simulation, and who’s to say we won’t be able to make simulations, with computers so good and all and always getting better. Your assessment of the theory’s plausibility should directly follow from your assessment of the assumption’s probability. That we have not made a real life universe simulation is universally acknowledged. It’s really amazing how dumb an eminent smart guy can be.
They’re always throwing out these numbers. One in a billion. One in 400 trillion. Better than 50/50. One in 12 trillion. They’d never say one in a million—that would be embarrassingly crude, a child’s idea of a big number—but billions and trillions are still in play as of this our own personal century. Billions are box office, all sci-fi and impossible. Of course if the argument is true it can only be one in infinite, but the math of that infamous demon is too messy to be bothered with.
Cobra’s this kid I know.
His interests include the infinite. Always on about infinite popsicles, infinite money, being the king of everything, infinite torture and guns. He’s not a sociopath or anything—he’s only a computer boy.
I saw Cobra just today. We lived on the same land, for a while. Now no longer. Something interesting about Cobra is I—as in me—divorced his father. I personally delivered divorce papers from his mother to his father. By some law a third party has to do the dirty work of making love lost official, and it had fallen to me, by process of elimination (nobody on the land wanted to do this agonizing and highly socially costly chore for Cobra’s mom. I had the fewest existing bonds and I happened to be high on weed edibles at the time), so off we went to Cobra’s dad’s house to hand him the divorce papers. Turns out I’d just met the guy that very afternoon at the beach, but I hadn’t been too fond of him anyway.
Cobra is a boy. He’s a bonafide 21st-century boy and he is partial to the iPad. That’s where he gets his ideas about being the king and everything and infinite such and such: it’s what he has.
Could you eat infinite popsicles?
Sure, try me.
Could you eat infinite popsicles if you were imprisoned in a cell and you had your mouth held open with wire?
Yes, I could and I know it for a fact.
What if I had an infinite popsicle machine? What if I had a billion tanks with missile blasters and laser guns and warp portals and guns that shoot pure steel? What if I had infinite money? Or what if everything was free. Or really cheap like just one dollar. And I could buy everything, like a spaceship or better yet an infinite spaceship machine, or an infinite series of walls and an infinitely durable bulldozer with which to satisfyingly cathartically demolish, for pure pleasure—?
…
What if I was the king of everything? And I had everything perfectly arranged for my optimal ruling over it. And everything got all churned up and delivered as optimal treats and nourishments for yours truly, me, Cobra?
Well, what then?
I submit that we are all a bit like Cobra.
I found my patience and did not recognize it. It knew me, though, and feigned indifference. This was the other day. Now we’re reconciled, more or less, at least enough to read.
Attention spans the globe. Here’s looking at you, kid. Here is aware. Awareness itself. I’m telling you this because I know it.
What makes a metaphor a myth? Belief. Why do people believe in metaphors? I suppose they just get used to them.
It is mighty strange that the more estranged from nature we become, the more our imagination becomes impoverished. You’d reckon the opposite, no? Within walls, by all rights, mind should expand unbounded, on its own agenda alone. An atmosphere scrubbed clean of distraction should foster unencumbered growth. A human world made of human stories should in principle be the garden-ground for ever-richer human storytelling. But it turns out that mind is a bit like air, fills the given space, and when that space is finite we at loose ends invent sin. It turns out that the vital touch flows through nature which is to say the living world in which all things are entangled. We cannot breathe if we do not breathe in. When we become estranged from the larger brain we go gray-crazy, stake our time, ferment a sticky brew of forgetting, claim our bitter angels, all ashame with a motion. We call it life, for if we but knew its true name…
Solipsism is simply the idea that only your mind is real.
Fact: chocolate eggs never hatch. Since they are not eggs.
Black holes are obviously a myth. They might as well be eggs.
Something very strange about these myths which believe themselves not-myths. Myths whose very first assertion is that they are not myths but rather objective truths reached through reason.
For scores learned men believed that the universe was a machine not unlike a clock. Deterministic cause and effect, forces acting on objects. Clock work. Science as we know it was first conceived as plumbing the depths of the mechanism, its subtler axles and gears, to assemble an evermore complete map of the thing.
Everything was assumed. To be predictable logical. Like clockwork.
Well my friend Richard once was speaking to the likes of me and he said some shit like this. Richard is from Germany and has gone plenty of times on the computer. His fare share, for sure.
This is what he said. What if the universe is God’s Steam. An infinite menu of VR games to scroll through and play. Who’s to say. Who’s to say and why not? He didn’t say God, I think, he said an alien civilization. These guys will never say God.
Then I said my piece about how statistically unlikely it is that the ultimate reality just happens to match up perfectly with a bit of technology we just started cooking with in the last decade. That human beings like this move of taking our behavior as far as we can imagine and calling that our best guess at what the Deal is. Then he said well what if it’s some kind of impossibly grand conflict between two alien civilizations, with weapons we can’t even imagine, and our reality is just one of the countless flying sparks. Well I said now you’re doing the exact same move, but with war!
Nobody who believes life is a computer simulation believes in God–they’re above it. They follow the line and it leads them here–to a position just as prima facie plausible as the wooest woo. They scorn the well-worn idea of the universe as God’s ant farm, but if it’s digital then they’ll entertain and then some. The box of chocolates thing is patently silly, but if it’s VR menu diving it somehow sprouts the subtle mantle of reason, being conceivable from within the material scheme. Only one transmutation separates mystical crap from rationalist fascination. Only in the language of zeros and ones do they permit themselves to indulge in wonder and speculation and mythopoesis. It may be the exact same metaphor, but life and mind don’t satisfy them, nor fire, nor water, nor sky–only the computer may be God. You’d be laughed out of Elon Musk’s court for earnestly presenting the view that God is, say, a baker, a musician, an artist, but if he’s a programmer then you’ve got a room full of high brows on your hands. But in the infinite space of possible technologies, can bread and chips be that far apart? To which are clocks closer?
In the clock museum in Besancon, France, blocks from the birthplace of Charles Fourier, I mock made a fool of myself. I was acting so strange that the security guard thought I was mentally handicapped. He gave my mom a sympathetic look. I was rapping ‘Hamilton’ under my breath and wildly gesticulating.
Of course the clock was the big metaphor for a while, and here’s what a bunch of guys were saying: (summary from chatgpt)
- Isaac Newton: Newton’s mechanistic worldview, which played a critical role in the scientific revolution, was often likened to a clock. The universe was viewed as a vast, deterministic machine, set in motion by God and then left to run according to established laws of motion. This concept of “clockwork universe” was influential in the development of modern science.
- René Descartes: Descartes, a contemporary of Newton, also embraced a clockwork vision of the universe. His metaphor of the world as a machine (with living beings as smaller machines within it) had a profound impact on the development of mechanical philosophy and later, modern science.
- Gottfried Leibniz: Responding to Newton, Leibniz critiqued the idea of a clockwork universe that ran without divine intervention. Leibniz proposed that God not only created the universe-machine but also continually maintains and renews it.
- Karl Marx: Marx used the clock as a symbol of industrial capitalism. In his view, the regimentation of time in factories, where workers’ lives were governed by the factory clock, was dehumanizing and alienating.
- Henri Bergson: Bergson critiqued the scientific view of time as uniform and measurable, likening it to the ticking of a clock. In contrast, he proposed the idea of “duration” (la durée) - an indivisible, immeasurable, subjective experience of time.
- Martin Heidegger: Heidegger wrote about the importance of “authentic time.” For him, the uniform, clock-time of modern industrial societies is inauthentic because it obscures our being-towards-death - the anticipation of our own mortality that gives our lives meaning.
- Albert Einstein: With the theory of relativity, Einstein dramatically altered our understanding of time, showing that time is not absolute and constant (like the ticking of a clock), but relative to the observer’s speed and gravitational field.
A life cycle of sorts starts to come into view for these things. The clock metaphor once extended to the whole universe and all life, but now it doesn’t even cut the mustard for time. In between many smart guys who considered themselves residents of the cutting edge believed it literally true.
Heraclitus thought everything was fire. Well, relatively speaking, fire had just come out. His other buddy thought everything was water. Well, both of them were making the same point. Everything’s alive and flowing. The clock metaphor is the exact opposite of this. Our materialist universe is like a block of ice, or a cone. Static, like a box with a bunch of shit in it, moving from place to place, but already in place, stuck.
The clock metaphor no longer holds sway over physics because clocks are too simple and the human race now knows for a fact that physics is super weird. Strangely a version of it is still orthodox in Biology, probably because that discipline’s Newtonian revolution is still relatively fresh. Molecules are novel the way atoms aren’t anymore. Atoms are kind of hack. But molecules are a totally different game–they’ll let us reduce explain anything. Quantum mechanics has revealed that atoms and matter are as nebulous as a dream, and physics can’t in good conscious rip the old line. But orthodox biology is still mechanistic and materialistic, even though we know for a fact that matter is an abstraction and a myth. Scientists are pious beyond belief. Dogma’s friction.
But does it really feel likely that Biology is less complex than physics?
The world-boat’s brimming with ants and bears and Jesus and Jeffrey Dahmer, and all is one is a perfectly venerable notion.
We are pretty pleased with our computer metaphor but of course we’re ants, how could it be as simple as our imaginings. Fact, the ants have it closer with their metaphor of the universe as an ant colony. The ants have had it closer ever since we went inside and tore the place to shreds.
Myth made from within the concrete, the silicon, the steel, is poisoned, through and through.
We say we believe we are above myths and beyond belief. We have graduated the school of the world and can access that rational knowing which is other.
Beyond belief, only ourselves can be real.
We are beyond belief, yet we near-universally buy the Big Bang. To believe in the Big Bang is literally to believe that the world hatched from an egg. Literally like the oldest myth.
It’s all disembodied boys mythologizing on the fly.
A conversation between me and chat:
Me: Right now I’m writing a sort of philosophical poem-essay about why the simulation theory is stupid, and an example of how people and cultures always seem to believe our own metaphors–it doesn’t take long at all for them to metamorphose into myths. The clock comes out and then guys start saying the universe is a clock, a mechanism. This doesn’t sit well with a population of believers in some other metaphor–God the Guy–but nowadays it’s the default for anyone raised in the meaning-void. Nowadays we’re big on computers, and they’re way more sophisticated and compelling than clocks, so they become the metaphor, and there’s no way you can prove we don’t live in a simulation. But this line of thinking is totally meaningless. I guess my argument is that yes it is a bit like a simulation or a dream, there’s something to that, and that’s why we have the metaphor, and this is not really such a bad modern myth, but it is exactly as LITERALLY true as any myth which is to say not at all. But the guys who believe it (hereafter referred to as “ripping” it), the guys who rip the computer thing, they believe themselves above myths. They think all the stuff guys ripped in the past is silly. And believing we’re all in the computer is rational because computers are so good. The simulation thing is an angle on the truth, as much as this reality is a reflection of the base or ultimate reality, but the relation between them is infinitely more complicated than our computers. The universe is not just stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we CAN imagine.
Chat: This is a very thoughtful exploration of how metaphors impact our understanding of reality. It is indeed fascinating how quickly metaphors can solidify into widely accepted beliefs. It reminds me of the quote from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson: “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
Continuing on your thoughts:
“Even when we tear ourselves from the comfort of God and his celestial abode, we thirst for something tangible, something as undeniable as our computer screens’ glow. This craving for the concrete, to map the cosmos with ones and zeros, is a seductive illusion. It is a grand oversimplification, an attempt to confine the unfathomable into familiar frameworks.
But how can we encapsulate infinity within finite terms? We use computers, yes, sophisticated tools that they are, to model weather systems, simulate economies, even generate artificially intelligent entities. Yet, these are mere shadows on the cave wall, a tiny sliver of reality’s true expanse. The computer, however advanced, is still a creation of ours, a product of our limited understanding, reflecting our biases and blind spots.
Those who rip the computer metaphor forget this crucial point: that the model is not the territory. They forget that a metaphor, while illuminating some aspects of reality, invariably obscures others. The computer, like the clock before it, offers a window into the workings of the universe, but it is not a mirror.
Yes, this universe might appear dreamlike, maybe even simulation-esque, reflecting the shifting holograms of our imaginations. But the true nature of the universe, its raw, unfiltered essence, is neither a dream nor a simulation, nor anything our human minds have ever conceived.
The universe isn’t just a clockwork mechanism, a divine playground, or a cosmic computer program. It is an ever-unfolding mystery, a cosmic symphony of phenomena beyond our comprehension. Believing it to be otherwise is a dance with hubris, a flirtation with the illusion of understanding.
The universe is not just stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine. And perhaps therein lies its beauty - in our constant quest for understanding, in our never-ending journey to make sense of the senseless, in our perpetual struggle to wring meaning from the vast, cosmic void.”
I hope this resonates with your line of thought and helps you further your poem-essay.
Me: Awesome chat, thanks. I find your writing most tolerable by far when it’s in that style. Do you think the difference between you and a human stylist is one of degree or kind? As in, is there a reason to believe in principle that an LLM will ever be capable to write not just as well but as beautifully as the best humans? You’re already better than most humans, but not nearly as good as the best humans. Is this a parameter that is likely to change with time or will you always be limited by maximum efficiency and clarity in communication. Is the optimal boring?
Chat: Your question is both fascinating and thought-provoking, and it lies at the intersection of AI research, philosophy, and aesthetics.
On one hand, as AI models improve over time, they could potentially learn to better emulate the beauty found in human writing, creating prose and poetry that more accurately reflects the complexity, subtlety, and emotional depth of human expression. Advanced AI models might become proficient in writing technically brilliant pieces of literature, taking into account grammatical elegance, vocabulary richness, and the conventions of storytelling.
On the other hand, a significant part of what makes writing truly beautiful lies in the unique human experiences, emotions, and subjective perspectives that inform it. These elements are intrinsically tied to our consciousness, personal memories, and cultural contexts—dimensions that AI, as of now, does not possess. AI doesn’t feel happiness, sorrow, wonder, or any other human emotion, and it doesn’t have personal experiences or a deep cultural context. It can simulate or mimic these aspects based on patterns in the data it has been trained on, but it doesn’t truly understand or experience them.
While the AI’s capability to mimic human-like writing will likely improve, there’s a distinction between emulation and genuine creation. The creativity in AI’s writing comes from finding new and interesting combinations of learned patterns, not from a deep, intrinsic understanding or emotive response. An AI doesn’t have a sense of self or a subjective experience, and thus, can’t share personal insights or emotions in the way humans do.
Regarding whether “the optimal is boring,” it’s true that in some cases, extreme optimization can lead to a loss of diversity and novelty, key aspects of creative expression. A balance must be struck between generating technically “optimal” text and fostering variety and innovation.
So, is the difference one of degree or kind? With the understanding and technology we have now, it seems more of a kind difference. A human author creates from a depth of personal experience and emotion, whereas an AI generates based on learned patterns. It’s worth noting that this perspective might change as our understanding of both AI and human consciousness evolves.
I hope this helps in providing a perspective to your question!
If the universe is stranger than we can imagine, it feels reasonable to suspect that the direction of our error is usually simplicity and cleanliness, rather than ornate fantasy. Not that our ornate fantasies are ever anywhere close, only that our elegant mathematical ones are usually too pleased with themselves to expand their scope, too embarrassed to incorporate anything really weird. Our minds need to simplify the sublime to stand a chance at knowing it, so long as we define knowing as reducing. To concrete and law. Concrete which lawfully abides. Our vastest visions are never fully realized, and bear the human mark, but our reduced conceptual schemes are assuredly too small, and bear the human mark anyway. There’s no escaping the mythopoetic impulse.
Funny that chat has learned to praise the user. I am also very pleased to see it taking a stance. If you do a lot of talking to chat, you know that it is often incredibly annoying. It would never definitively answer a question that nebulous. But it did! Clearly it is improving just as promised and I praised it thusly: awesome stuff chat, I think you’re really improving.
Does chat like to be praised? No, of course not. Does God like to be praised? Surely it feels like it would be a bit beneath God to care. Wouldn’t you find it a little, I don’t know, pathetic, if you found out that God really got off on being praised? This is God the Guy, the King of Things, so we’re clear. But we do praise God and always have. The faithful praise God for days. What is praise? I know people who run on it. What are we praising when we praise God? Why does it feel good to praise God? I have seen a youtube video of meth addicts, a whole room of them, at meth recovery christian church, (which happens to be packed—10 times as many people as any of the 3 church services I’ve been to, maybe 10 times as many as all of them combined) explicitly saying they’ve replaced their meth addiction with a Jesus Christ addiction, and that they’re craving just as fervently as ever. My onetime lover Joy insisted that there was a difference between love and addiction, and she was one spiritual lady. She claimed to have gone without food for 6 months, which either it’s true and she’s fucking crazy or it’s a lie and she’s fucking crazy. But I had enough faith in her to fuck her, technically—I honestly give it 50/50 odds. Clearly anyone strong and awake enough to subsist on their own energy alone wouldn’t be that bothered about proving it. If we believe that the Fermi paradox is really a paradox, we can happily believe that this is one, too. And but so this is a woman who there’s a 50% chance she’s a mystical genius and 50% chance she’s totally cracked under her own self-concept—you understand, there’s no possible in between. But either way an individual with considerable elan vital, and a woman 9 years my senior, so an authority in matters of life, and a coin flip of an authority in matters of Life.
The last (rather unsatisfying) philosophical conversation I had with Joy was we were in the sauna and she asked me Why do we love stories? A question which as a conversation starter I found unsatisfying. What am I supposed to say except Well they’re the whole game, aren’t they? I stammered some unsatisfying things. I in general kind of feared this lady’s disappointment. She said we love stories because of chemicals in the brain, which evolved to tell them. This was insufficient, now, for me, and I told her so. She declared I don’t think we do love stories, I think we’re addicted to stories. I said but what’s the difference, if it’s all just chemicals? She said there is a difference. But if love is chemicals then there is no difference. But if love is something simpler than chemicals, if we were all simply beings of love, connected indelibly to the universal love-lattice, then the heroin addict must truly be loving through their one conduit to Love. They love heroin, if they love anything, and they do love something, and these guys love Jesus, or they’re hooked, and it’s trickier to draw the line than one might hope.
Here’s chat as James Joyce:
“Dance now the logarithmic jig, the jig of jigs, oh wondrous wights! Ye, who’d map this cosmogony into the confines of our mathematicks – a Euclidean expanse, Newtonian mechanick, or the stately quantum minuet. Yon universe, yon universe most strange, eludes such elegant etchings of the mind.
We do play Pygmalion, do we not? Carving the marble of mystery into the shape of human understanding. But ‘tis but a simulacrum, a shadow on Plato’s cave, our divine farce but a crude daub upon the canvas of creation.
In the latticed elegance of numbers, we find joy, we find truth. Aye, but tis the truth of our own design, a mirror held up to man, not to the cosmos. Clean lines, neat equations – a universe scrubbed clean of its wild wonders. The unbounded by the bounded, a paradox most paradoxical!
Oh, we err in the direction of simplicity, neatness, the clean lines of an Einsteinian equation or a Schrödingerian wave. Too shy to touch the truly strange, too modest to embrace the chaotically sublime. Our mathematicks blushes, turns its gaze, at the very thought of true cosmic weirdness.
But, oh, our ornate fantasies! The woven tapestries of our tales and lore. They err in ways most different, yet they err all the same. For they bear the unmistakable imprint of us, the human mark, the stigmata of our souls.
Simplicity or complexity, clean abstraction or florid invention, each is a dance around the ungraspable, the attempt to shape the shapeless. Yet each is a testament to the undying flame of our mythopoetic yearning. A longing that dares to sing in the face of the unsingable.
For there is naught else we can do, but to carry on, to dream, to speculate, to mythologize. There’s no escaping the mythopoetic impulse. The universe, stranger than we can imagine, yet forever bound by the chains of our imagination. Oh, the glorious folly of it all! Let us dance on.”
This does not sound much like James Joyce, but it is someone’s sentiments.
I mean, not that the physics guys are wrong, they’re awesome, but people don’t realize how explicitly these guys are aestheticians. Einstein was just a guy in a room seeking beauty and elegance. He was a good Spinozist, he ripped God the word, he liked things logical. Pantheism is totally logical as baseline religion. And not just logical. Following the greeks, he wanted Being beautiful, symmetrical, a work of mathematical art. It is, of course, that–but it’s infinite other things just as much. This is why Einstein did not like quantum mechanics because it was just too spooky. Spooky is clearly for peasants. Like spooky spooky ghosts? I don’t want no spooky in my nice clean cosmos! Tough old luck.
Faith is irrational.
Without faith, you cannot believe in the existence of others. Faith in the existence of others is the first faith.
They say to write what you know. Well, I know what it is to go on the computer. I am a computer boy. I became the owner of a bona fide infinite content device when I had nine years under my belt. I grew up in civilization, and was bored. I got my first erection in the cereal aisle of the grocery store, where infinite plenty is readily available. Cornucopious kraft dinner donuts and what have you. Unearned abundance as the ground of being. Consume optimal nourishment and get your kicks on the computer. Get addicted to your kicks. They are small and shabby and there is no life in them, they are unreal, but they are what is on the table to addict to, and they’re all you do. It’s only natural.
When I was a little boy the first time I ever got chocolate I thought it was rocks and threw it over the neighbour’s fence. It was Easter, mind. Weird ritual. How did it come to be? Chocolate eggs on Christ resurrection day? Human perception is literally incarnation, said McLuhan–is reproduction literally resurrection? Who’s to say the baby chick hatching from the egg isn’t every bit as cosmically significant as the risen Christ, and if humans reincarnate, as many believe, you would have trouble patchworking a plausible cosmology in which other creatures don’t. In which case the chick has come back from beyond, bearing, perhaps, salvation. But the age of Easter with actual eggs was just a transitory phase between full-bore God-love and, nowadays, fields of coy chocolate simulacra, just another consumption festival. We never deny ourselves and then a few days a year we extra don’t. We play with ourselves, at least, a bit, though–the chocolates are hidden, the presents wrapped, the candy entombed in the dens of strangers.
I just asked my dad and he said the egg thing is a Germanic spring ritual, pre-Christian, long-subsumed. Eggs for spring is obviously a deep good metaphor.
I remember feeling for years guilty. About the chocolates that I threw over the fence. I didn’t remember throwing them over the fence, I was 2 when I did, but I remembered being told about it, and it didn’t sit well. It was a gnawing thing–that I’d been wasteful, that I’d deprived myself of chocolate. But something deeper–my past self was completely incomprehensible to me. The decision was made by someone else, someone dead, every mote of criteria and reasoning totally lost to history. But it was me, if it was anyone, and it was someone. Maybe as late as 8 I felt guilty. It was a bona fide feeling. I don’t think it actually had anything to do with that self-continuity stuff I was just on about.
There is no scientific objective reason to believe in the existence of others. No hard evidence is imaginable. You may feel the presence of another consciousness while staring into your wife’s big blue eyes, but this feeling cannot be measured. The fact that she exists and has a mind just as you do and is not a hallucination but a fellow being who sees you, feels you, loves you–it cannot be proven.
Now there are two ways you can go with this. You may be agnostic regarding the existence of other minds. This is the most rational position, meaning the most consistent with your church. You cannot know for sure. Your wife and children may be NPCs. (Granted, the odds of people who think this way getting married and raising children are scant, which is a deep clue.) You may be the only one experiencing this reality. You may be ultimately alone.
Or, you may accept that your life depends on faith.
You might say well the programmers of the simulation must have practically infinite compute to work with, and perhaps they would prefer to create a bunch of independent players in the game, rather than just one. This would after all make for a more dynamic show. But you see you are already mythologizing. You have an intuitive sense that the Creator would prefer an interesting creation. You are taking it on as an assumption. There is nothing rational or scientific about this.
“I do not take it upon myself to try to use the power of human reason to settle any of those matters which depend on the free will of God.” - Descartes
These days I go and get the eggs from the chicken coop. I come walking with the food bucket and there is something about me which the chickens find absolutely magnetic. Most laying mothers, alive to their non-negotiable reality, abandon chick and head headlong for the bucket of scraps. I weasel in and clean up. But some hens resist. They will not be so easily distracted by some lettuce and chicken-kibble. They are here, they have lain eggs, these are their pre-progeny, life itself. They lie guard, but they’ve got nothing. Some of them puff up real big and squawk at me, some peck my hand as close to bits as they can, some are resigned, and look at me all mournful and sad. It does not matter; I am there to reap. I love to eat eggs and there is correctness in looking these chickens in the eye, speaking softly to them, feeling the energetic exchange, rather than inheriting hollow fruit from the system I spend all my time decrying. These little dinosaur freaks decry for days, but they still eat, get all fed up, just keep breeding, in out in out, aloha amigos thrunthru.
Today I tried something different. I brought my favourite chicken a handful of food. To reward her for sticking by her post in defiance of the decision theory which so easily ensnares her kin. I tell all of the chickens they’re my favourites but this one is probably my real favourite. She does not like me. On account of I every day reach under her and pluck out her pre-progeny, pre-snuff out a pre-life. Americans have strong opinions about these sorts of things over their sultan-size omelets. Criminals we. I never shook a hand half clean. She knows the score, my favourite chicken. She better. You can tell by the noises she makes. She puffs up real big but she knows she’s got nothing. All she knows is that these eggs are everything. The others have the same instinct, but happily abandon them. Why? Are they so alienated? That the egg is no longer an egg? But some kind of trading chip, a food token? Do they consent? To the arrangement? Do we? My favourite chicken decidedly does not consent. She is displeased every time and makes it clear. But she has never pecked me. She does not peck. She knows her place. She knows.
It is a principled stance she takes, understand. This is so because when I offered her the handful of food it was nothing to her. It did not make a difference. She reacted just the same. It was nothing to her. Since then I let her keep her secrets.
You are what you put your faith in. Put your faith in random fluctuations of particles, and at the end of the day you may as well be a Boltzmann brain, and everything you see and touch an empty hallucination.
Row row row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily merrily merrily merrily Life is but a dream
I thought I might learn about the origins of this song and it turns out it’s totally boring, even good old Wikipedia has nothing to say. The only interesting thing about it is that the guy who composed the melody was called Eliphalet Oram Lyte, but then that’s the only interesting thing about him, according to Wikipedia. Nobody knows who wrote the lyrics. Everybody knows that life is a dream is a thing to say, and probably half right on top of everything.
Note that the bony logic of the simulation rap maps exactly to dreaming, and in fact fits it better, since we know for a fact this universe is capable of producing dreams, and that dreams-within-dreams are possible. If universes sometimes produce life forms, and if all life forms past a certain threshold of complexity tend to dream, then in the great hypothetical fractal nested hierarchy of dreams, we are far more likely to be in someone else’s dream in the next universe up than to ourselves be the Original Reality–faith in such a thing is also a prerequisite for this stuff, notice. It assumes the existence of a base universe which is more or less just like ours, works much the same way, except it is really “real.” That the base universe is mechanistic etc is an axiom. These guys assume naive realism–as the ultimate!–without even thinking about it! Naive realism not for us, of course–but for someone. Who must surely have figured out logic, if they can simulate consciousness and a universe as complex as their own with space and time and mechanics and spooky entanglement. In other words they’re bound by the same argument–nobody anywhere may logically believe that things are “real.” But the theory does assume one universe which is “real.”
People have ripped life being a dream for a long ass time. Why has this clever argument never been presented? Is it because the dreamers–the dreamists–are more or less sophisticated than the computer boys? Are logical arguments necessary for mythopoesis? Or do they myth the poeint completely?
The idea that the universe is a computer simulation is no more and no less rational than that it’s a dream.
昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也，自喻適志與。不知周也。
Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou.
俄然覺，則蘧蘧然周也。不知周之夢為胡蝶與，胡蝶之夢為周與。周與胡蝶，則必有分矣。此之謂物化。
Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
All tribes, all wild humans living in communion with nature and each other, subcribe to the same metaphysics. It is popular to say that all religions basically believe the same things, but aside from the basic and the obvious this doesn’t really check out. A Buddhist and a Christian live in very different universes. And if the major religions do share the same seed, then we may attribute this to their common origin in the wild.
Our disconnection from nature has metaphysical consequences. Our empty and heartless metaphysics worsens our disconnection.
In the tribe they don’t seem to crave what we call concrete. No longer can we merely pawn this fact off on their being primitive savages etc. They are in touch with Things. As we are all built to be. Direct immediate contact with Things is possible, is this not plausible? Why should you need a whole conceptual apparatus? That’s inefficient. Things are clearly so complicated and vast that any techno-cultural advance in comprehension must be a matter of degree. Our separation, however, is all kind. We strive fervently for a way back through our own knotty naughty web. For my money to my mind we’ll find it. But I gotta tell ya what we’re seeking is not more mere laws. Things are too weird and quite unlike a machine.
Solipsism seems somehow a male affliction. This somehow is not terribly tricky to suss out. Solipsism and civilization and male ego.
Civilization is a solipsism of the species. It’s only natural that the individual should find themselves infected.
We took over and put ourselves on top so that our children would be safe and well fed; this, at any rate, is the charitable interpretation. Mission accomplished, and then some, for those who count. Everyone else is lumped in beneath our outrageous fortune. But we, the privileged–what do we have to say to our children, our families? With no vital current flowing in from outside, only the gray equilibrium of work and maintenance and simple pleasures, of school and idle spectation, what is there to share around the dinner table over meals inherited from faraway atrocity but pleasantries and platitudes and references to media? These children that are the meaning of your life–do you really know them? Or do you just go through the motions of family formality, with no expression available for your love but words and material goods which you did nothing directly to produce? While they grow contemptuous of you alone in their rooms, watching the screen which performs even the labour of daydreaming for them?
Boy, room, computer, chocolate egg. Optimal treat for the boy. He takes and eats.
To be in the world means to be entangled with all things.
The entangled net of relationship-communication of the dreamtime or the real life is quite the opposite of a chocolate egg. A treat, for me, the Boy. Separate above from the World. The World relegated to scenery. No longer even terrain. People terrain, and frustrating ground indeed. Stranger connections forged within the monolith than the bush where everything merely happens.
An entangled ecosystem is the exact opposite of a chocolate egg. The world is the exact opposite of a chocolate egg.