March 12. A week ago, Doug in St Paul took me on an overnight trip to a successful homestead in northern Minnesota, and from their collection of books I reread a New Age classic, Richard Bach's Illusions. Now I understand better where the New Age movement went wrong. I agree that pure consciousness is the foundation of all reality, that you are a larger being who lives your life the way you would watch a movie, and that the physical world can be changed through the power of the mind. The mistake, the "fall", is the idea that changing the world through the power of the mind is easy, that anyone can perform miracles just by really, truly believing they're possible.
Suppose that you spend decades mastering woodworking, and you build a beautiful house with your own hands. Then some lazy idiot comes along and builds a better house in seconds just by believing it into existence. There's no evidence that reality works this way, and I think it can't work this way, because it would violate some kind of metaphysical law of conservation of energy: Doing any task with pure mind power must be at least as difficult as doing it with physical tools. Or, the easiest way to build a house with your mind is to mentally discipline yourself to build it with your hands. The deeper principle here is that the physical world is itself a tool for channeling consciousness, and not an obstacle to childish wish fulfillment.
If you accept that changing the world is damn hard no matter how you do it, Illusions has another idea, mentioned in passing, that's brilliant: If an action seems like magic, it's because you don't understand it; to perform the action, you have to understand it well enough that it seems like a mundane craft or skill. You can see this in stage magic, where the audience might see someone levitating but the performer knows the trick. I think it also applies to "paranormal" levitation, where the trick lies outside 20th century science, but still seems normal to the performer. In any case, if something seems like magic to you, then you are the audience, not the actor, and if you think you're the actor, that's part of the trick.
You can see this in almost every modern technology: searching the internet, playing a video game, buying groceries, riding a jet ski. You feel like you have the power, but the less you understand how the system works, and the less you are able to build it yourself, the more you are merely a member of the audience, passively consuming entertainment.
April 2. So last week when I wrote about workaholic society and gaming, Simon made a connection:
We might as well consider civilization a game with bigger stakes than usual. It's no coincidence it was a success as a PC game too. Too bad both get a bit dull towards the end.
I think there's a deep truth here. Why is it that most games, and most societies, are more enjoyable at the beginning than at the end? I've quit Fallout 2. Now that I've got NPC's with shotguns, and gone back to the Den to kill the slavers and get the car, there's not much to look forward to: guns with different names and higher damage numbers, balanced by enemies with higher numbers, and a long series of quests that are starting to feel like busywork. The fun part was the beginning: designing my character, analyzing and optimizing skills and perks, squeaking by on primitive weapons and tools and finding my first good ones, and as a player, mastering the interface and unfolding a vision of a different world.
It's easier to see how this fits with civilization by looking at Civilization the game. You start out as a settler exploring the uncharted wilderness, you build up a city from nothing, you get new buildings and units with qualitatively different abilities; and then by the halfway point you can see the whole map, you have ships and airplanes, and "progress" becomes quantitative. In role-playing games this is called level grinding: the novelty and excitement are gone, and you're just doing the same stuff over and over to get higher numbers.
Compare this to the "American dream". You come from a poor family, work your way up into a series of higher paying and higher status jobs, get a house in the suburbs and two cars... and then what? There's nothing left but to make more money so you can get material possessions with higher price numbers. This is why rich people keep trying to make even more money, because if they say "I have enough", life becomes meaningless, game over. I think this is also why most lottery winners end up bankrupt. It's not just that they're irresponsible, but that they feel more alive when they're struggling.
Games don't model decline because it wouldn't be any fun, just trying to hold onto what you have as the numbers get smaller. But there would be one way... When your empire peaks, you stop playing the empire, and begin playing the new system that's going to replace it! Of course this is what the citizens do in real life. Many Americans are still obsessed with "security" (playing the decline), but more of us are giving up on the old system and turning our attention to various systems that might replace it.
Are human societies going to keep rising and falling forever? If we had a stable system, what would keep it interesting? Individual humans can keep their wealth stable and find meaning in things other than money, so how could a whole society do this? And why is this not a problem for other species? If life were satisfying in the right way, would we have no need for novelty? I'm thinking of an answer, but for now I'll leave these questions open...