Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely -- if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, "does anything it likes" -- it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake -- which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.
This gets more interesting the more you think about it. If electrons are playing, and bacteria and insects and squirrels are playing, and tribal humans are playing most of the time, and modern humans are hardly playing at all, then what happened? One answer is that this is a dead end and we should all go back to the stone age or go extinct. My answer is more optimistic: we are a work in progress, an attempt by universal play to manifest at higher levels of complexity, or within our particular mode of consciousness.
]]>the chance to really matter in the world, to put their lives on the line to shape the future in a situation where it seemed to genuinely hang in the balance. They did so in a context where the everyday world around them offered nothing more than stasis and passivity.
I think they should get over it. The chance to really matter in the world is a narcissistic illusion that used to be the privilege of kings, who in practice usually made the world worse, but since the Enlightenment we all want to do it. The world in which you can really matter is the world of your own friends and family, but it's hard to feel satisfied with that when your culture constantly turns your attention to the Big World.
On a similar subject, thanks Anne for sending this post from the collapse subreddit, Missing the forest for the trees. It reminds me of an insight from Dmitry Orlov: that large-scale collapse, viewed on the scale of ordinary lives, seems like personal failure. But this post goes into more detail, and it adds an even more interesting idea: that collapse can seem like success if our values change so that necessary adaptations are stuff we want to do anyway.
The author seems to think we're fooling ourselves, that if we want to live cheaply and avoid having a job, we're just putting a positive spin on something bad. But if you take a step back, that judgment comes from a value system that is much more clearly a distortion of reality.
In the 1950's, with a college degree, you could easily get a high-paying job doing something that your whole culture told you was making a better world. You build wealth, you buy a house, you raise a family, everything is improving. This was the dominant perspective for only a few decades in all of human history. Even in the 1950's you could see cracks forming, as people sensed that this was not the dawn of utopia but a new level of humans blundering around the planet.
By the end of the 1960's everyone knew it, and when I was in school in the 1980's, our perspective on wage labor was the realistic one people had in the 1920's or the 1850's: your job is just some shit you have to do for money. In Reagan's America, we still expected to make easy money by cynically exploiting the college-job system. Now even that part of the illusion is gone.
First-worlders dream of the zombie apocalypse because it would be so much simpler than the real collapse. We're not going to starve -- but without the deep social connections of preindustrial people, and the ever-increasing numbers of the industrial age, what will keep us going day after day? Drugs and video games are not ideal, but they're better than political extremist movements with a storybook understanding of big systems. Living well in this age is a book-length subject, but it involves rebuilding deep connections, letting go of epic stories, and learning to skillfully navigate your stream of experience, seeking rising quality without rising numbers.
Mr Tetlock divides people into two categories: hedgehogs, whose understanding of the world depends on one or two big ideas, and foxes, who think the world is too complicated to boil down... superforecasters have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new data, and the ability to synthesise material from sources with very different outlooks on the world.
This is just intellectual maturity. The good news is that anyone can learn it. The bad news is that hardly anyone has.
Related, from Aeon magazine, The dangerous idea that life is a story, and from the LessWrong blog, Tyler Cowen on Stories. These are both more about personal stories than stories about the world, but the basic idea is the same: it's foolish to filter our perception of reality to make it seem more appealing or meaningful.
Gabriel sent me that Cowen link in August, and it partly inspired my August 31 post about hedonic technology, but I didn't link to it then because I disagree with Cowen that life is merely a random mess. Through decades of observation I can sense the influence of storytelling forces whose motives and literary standards are far beyond my understanding. Rather than look at reality the way a child would look at clouds, ignoring and emphasizing certain things to see faces or castles, I try to look at reality the way a scientist would look at clouds, to begin to understand an alien order.
Through no fault of their own, kids these days are weak as fuck. They're allergic to every fucking thing, they fall the fuck apart if they think you're criticizing them, damn near zero recess, damn near zero self-advocacy skills... I'm a teacher and I love kids, but God damn...
Also, apparently my generation is only one that's good with computers, because boomers were set in their ways when computers appeared, and millennials have no experience getting under the hood since Steve Jobs took that power for himself.
Anyway, if this trend of treating young people like delicate museum pieces is temporary, then all we have is a lost generation. If it goes far enough, then we have a really pathetic extinction.