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February 2017 - ?

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February 26, late. Tonight's Academy Award fiasco, in which the shoo-in feel-good white people movie was announced as best picture, and it turned out they read the wrong card and the serious black people movie was best picture... that's the weirdest thing that's happened in America since 9/11, even weirder than the Red Sox breaking their curse during a full lunar eclipse.

I'm not even going to try to explain it rationally. It's best understood on a subverbal intuitive level. And I don't think it was any kind of conspiracy, at least not by humans. It was the Trickster breaking through the screen and then vanishing into irreconcilable happenstance. (This is how I write when I'm high.)

By the way, over the weekend I made a decision to change the tone of this blog. I've decided to go at least a few months without writing anything about politics or social philosophy. That leaves technology, entertainment, drugs, psychology, music, personal stuff, and like tonight, vague hints about esoteric sub-politics.


February 28. Continuing on woo-woo philosophy, Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?

Here's how I would make the argument: Really unlikely things have been happening lately, but they're not unlikely in arbitrary ways -- they're unlikely in ways that tell good stories. I mean, not only was the wrong card read on the biggest award of the night, but if you put any two other best picture nominees in the spots for apparent winner and actual winner, the story wouldn't be as good.

This is outside the range of science, because science requires repeated experiments, and fate happens but once. When real-world fate unfolds like fiction, we wonder if there is an unseen storyteller.

I don't think we're in a literal computer simulation. That's like cavemen thinking their gods made them out of clay because clay is the most advanced simulation technology they possess. Computers are just our best metaphor for reality creation tools beyond our imagination. I see it like this:

Philosophical idealism holds that mind is the fundamental reality, and matter is like a dream. Actual dreams can go anywhere fast because you're alone. When we're dreaming together, change is slowed by the need to form consensus, and reality appears so sticky that matter seems to exist independently of mind.

Not only that, our conscious minds are not the sole reality creators, and might even be more like an audience. I think the power gets stronger as you go deeper, first to your individual subconscious mind, and then to something like a collective unconscious, which might be like a great hidden city hosting agents and motives from outside humanity.

What do they want? Here's where people fall into black-and-white thinking, with perfectly evil master conspirators or a wise and benevolent God. I think the "gods" are somewhere between distracted scientists and playful children. My most reasonable guess, for the motive behind these spectacles of sudden reversal, is that we're being prepped for a time when ordinary life will be more surprising. And my funnest guess is that the dream is breaking up.


March 6. This week I'm raving about what makes me happy. Today it's my biggest science fiction influence, and it's not Philip K Dick. Of course Dick is the best. In some of his early novels, like The Game Players of Titan or Dr Futurity, it's like you're watching figure skating, and nobody's ever done a triple axel, and then this guy comes out and pulls a quintuple axel. A Chinese philospher wondered if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man, and after two thousand years suddenly Dick turned that shit into a fractal.

But Dick's protagonists are mopey and angsty. In the face of uncertain reality, they're treading water in a dark ocean. Then along comes an author whose reality-tripping characters are surfers: Roger Zelazny.

I'm thinking of two Zelazny works, and neither is his serious and brilliant early novel Lord of Light. That one pleased the critics, and he was probably thinking, with that out of the way, now I'm just going to write experimental shit and have fun.

The first Chronicles of Amber are the funnest books I know. The story hits the ground running, with a first person narrator who wakes up with amnesia and super powers, but the star of the books is Zelazny's colorful, dreamy mechanism for shifting through parallel worlds by using attention to make the world change around you.

What I don't like about Amber is that the characters are too often motivated by vengeance, competition and fear. Zelazny's secret masterpiece is a little book about time-traveling highways, with an emotional tone so playful that even deadly adversaries usually turn out to be old friends. Roadmarks is luminous on multiple levels, and poetic, and totally trashy.


March 8. Today I want to rave about Picbreeder, a website where you can make art by selecting images as a computer alters them with an algorithm based on biological evolution. Here's a 40 minute video by one of the guys who made it, mostly about how the best images come from headlong improvisation instead of planning, and from individual judgments rather than consensus.

For me, Picbreeder is the most valuable technology of the 21st century. I've put 50-100 hours into it, way less time than someone might spend on video games, and I feel like I've already learned more about creativity than in decades of writing, and made images that I could never make alone even if I mastered painting software.

Suddenly I understand that creativity has two components that are completely separate. One is the magical well that ideas come from. And the other, almost as magical, is how you decide what ideas to trash and what ideas to run with. What I mean by "magical" is that my conscious mind has no creativity at all. It's like the manager for an art department where the "artists" are hard to explain with current theories of mind.

In this condensed video of the 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso, you can watch Picasso's creative process as he starts with a sketch and puts it through changes until sometimes there's no trace of the original idea. Of course he does everything: the ideas, the rendering, and the selection. But Picbreeder allows someone with no skill in ideas or rendering to still practice creative selection, ten times faster than Picasso, plus a back button.

Another way to say it: the stuff that bubbles up from the Picbreeder computer is not that different from the stuff that bubbles up from your own mysterious subconscious, and might almost replace it. If I can use only selection to make an impressionistic landscape like Mordor, or a near-realistic portrait like Sunbathing or Spacewalking... could someone with no ideas still use selection creativity to produce good fiction, or choreography, or architecture, out of nothing but AI-rendered noise?

If you want to try Picbreeder, here's my strategy guide: 1) Go immediately to advanced with color. 2) At first, breed for color and structure together. At some point you'll probably want to keep the colors while you breed structure, or you'll nail the structure and want to color it differently. In a long project you might go back and forth. 3) Usually it's best to select only one image. A good reason to select two is if you can't decide between them. 4) Combining two images into one with elements of both is really hard, but it gets easier the more similar they are, and the more patience you have. 5) When in doubt, go for gut aesthetics over rational thinking. Pretend you're looking at a bunch of album covers and deciding which one to reach for even if you can't explain why. 6) If you're in a rut, either use the back button to find your last exciting image and go a different direction, or go forward with big changes. 7) Marijuana.