December 6. Reality shifting: psychological features of an emergent online daydreaming culture.
RS, described as the experience of being able to transcend one's physical confines and visit alternate, mostly fictional, universes, is discussed by many on Internet platforms.... The experience of shifting is reportedly facilitated by specific induction methods involving relaxation, concentration of attention, and autosuggestion. Some practitioners report a strong sense of presence in their desired realities, reified by some who believe in the concrete reality of the alternate world they shift to.
Obviously these worlds aren't real, but it's interesting that there is a cultural trend of more intensive imagination. It's anyone's guess if this is a dead end, or if it's leading somewhere.
Related: a smart blog post from 2017, Reality has a surprising amount of detail. The same thing struck me after playing on the Oculus and then taking the garbage out. In VR, there's a limit to how deep you can zoom before you get to one pixel. In reality -- and you could even use this as a definition of reality -- no matter how deep you zoom, there's always more. That's why physicists will never find a final particle or a grand unifying theory.
December 9. Smart article on decline, America Is Running on Fumes. (alternate paywall workaround)
There's lots of stuff about the decrease in new ideas, why it's happening, and how to fix it. But my favorite part is about all the changes at the end of the 19th century:
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up 25 years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting. There are no cars on the road. Telephones are rare. There is no such thing as Coca-Cola, or sneakers, or basketball, or aspirin. The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.
...
A quarter-century hibernation today would mean dozing off in 1996 and waking up in 2021... Compare "cars have replaced horses as the best way to get across town" with "apps have replaced phones as the best way to order takeout."
I think this is unfair, but it's also a really powerful idea, to look for 25 year periods where one kind of thing changed a lot. If you're lgbt, you'd probably rather have the cultural changes from 1990-2015 than the technological changes from 1875-1900.
Or consider all the cultural inventions and openings from 1960-1985. If I could time travel to 1875, I'd rather have that upgrade, than the upgrade that actually happened. A world with punk rock and horses sounds pretty cool.
Of course, the tech changes were necessary for the cultural changes. The music of the 1960's required fully distributed phonographs and radios. And yet, phonographs and radios were around for decades before they drove a renaissance. So I'm wondering, what things have already been invented, that are still waiting for their golden age?
December 18. Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation. Related, from a Reddit comment in a thread about quicksand:
Wolves. Never a threat. Often encountered them doing field research in the Canadian wilderness. We could walk right through the middle of a pack. They'd trot over to our camp, lay down and just stare with a mild curiosity. Sometimes they'd have a bit of blood on their faces where it had been deep in a carcass but zero aggression towards us. Their cubs would play with anything dangling. After a while the pack would get up and just trot off as if 'nothing interesting here.'
December 20. A few notes on Las Vegas. The best food we had was the Korean-Mexican fusion at Best Friend. But the best restaurant overall was Superfrico, which had great food, interesting cocktails, and a really cool environment including a live DJ and performers who played saxophone and juggled right above our table. All for less than half the price of seeing Donny Osmond.
The best immersive environment was easily Omega Mart. It's like if a supermarket were designed by an AI, or by aliens. The whole place is packed with creativity, and I want to avoid spoilers, but behind the scenes it's even better. Impressionism was only invented 150 years ago, and already we have trippy art that you can go inside of.
What I found most interesting about Las Vegas in general was its advanced artificiality. Even where it's done without creativity, it's mind-boggling how many dollars and hours have been poured into shaping coarse matter into eye candy. This is something humans have been doing since ancient times, and we've never been this good at it.
You could make the argument that we will never again be this good at it, given that we've done it with nonrenewable resources and a social order that's losing its grip on human motivation. But I like to imagine that we've barely scratched the surface of our potential as world-builders.
I probably don't do as much LSD as I should, but when I do, I always get this insight: that compared to the beauty and complexity of nature, the human-made world is clunky and ugly, like toddlers playing with blocks.
At one store in The Venetian, I saw a six foot H.R. Giger-style alien sculpture, all made out of stainless steel machine parts. But if it were to actually work, the parts and their arrangement made no sense. I saw cool steampunk costume goggles, too fragile to be used as real goggles. The Conservatory at the Bellagio tried to make something beautiful out of living plants, and it was inferior to an actual forest, and also to many of the completely artificial environments nearby.
My point is, we have a lot of room to integrate the aesthetic with the functional. Deep in Omega Mart is a musical instrument whose strings are lasers, each making a different sound as you block it with your finger. Someday, when we've solved the paradox of labor-increasing technology, and we all have lots of time for creative projects, that kind of thing might be common.
And we have even more room to integrate the human-made and the non-human-made. Instead of an artificial tree with glowing leaves, we could have a real tree where the lights feed its photosynthesis. We could do sewage treatment by running the waste through dense arrangements of water-cleaning plants. And those are technologies that we already know about. What might we do in a thousand years, when we have morphic field generators, and silicon dendrites, and fractal-iterating fabricators?
Related, from 2012: Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature
December 24. For the holiday, I want to write about Christianity. I was raised Catholic, and it occurs to me, I'm still more Catholic than I am Christian. It's not a coincidence that my favorite singer-songwriter, Colleen Kinsella, and my favorite sci-fi author, Roger Zelazny, are both ex-Catholics. Catholicism, more than any other spiritual tradition, knows how to make the woo-woo luminous.
Growing up, I always understood the idea of God, but the idea of Jesus never clicked for me. Now I identify as an esoteric monotheist, where "God" is the incomprehensible universal consciousness. But it doesn't make sense for that kind of God to have a son -- that would be more like Zeus.
If "the son of God" is pagan, then "died for our sins" is Dadaist. What do dying and sins even have to do with each other? A sin is a mistake, and the thing to do for a mistake is to be in the same situation and behave correctly. I know there's an ancient tradition of human sacrifice, where a person is killed to make things better, but that doesn't make it any less nonsensical. And yet, like unboxing videos, "The son of God died for our sins" resonates on a deep level with people of many cultures.
After I wrote some of the above in a Reddit comment, I had a dream, in which the actual message of Jesus was both difficult to understand and difficult to put into practice. So the early leaders of Christianity, seeking to grow their movement, changed it to an easier message. Of course dreams are not a reliable historical source, but probably that's what really happened, because that's what happens with everything famous.
My best guess is, Jesus was a guy with high spiritual intelligence who did a lot of mushrooms and had some great insights. "Judge not, that you be not judged" is probably the most useful advice ever given, and I love the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. For me, the crucifixion and resurrection are a metaphor, for how each one of us can transcend suffering by fully facing the pain before us.
January 2, 2022. The turnover of the year is a nice motivational tool to make changes, and there are different kinds of changes. When people talk about New Year's resolutions, they're usually talking about changing habits, or default behaviors. The main thing I want to work on this year is being more physically present in every moment. I'm making it a game, where I break my actions down to small things: open dishwasher, put spoon in, close dishwasher; and I count how many things I can do in a row before I mess up and have to do something twice. This includes typing without having to hit backspace all the time.
Another kind of change you can make is in your priorities for living. The last couple years I've been thinking more about death, which generally feels like a relief. But the closer I get to understanding it, the more I see that I really don't want to die -- I want to continue living with no responsibilities. So that's my number one priority from here on: to minimize the number of things I have to do. Part of this is that I'll probably be blogging less, especially on hot-button subjects. Or, as I wrote last month in this thread: I used to want to be Gandalf, the famous wizard who saves the world. Now I want to be Radagast, the obscure wizard who hangs out with trees.
January 5. Again with the new year, I want to check in with the ongoing collapse. It's going pretty fast lately -- if you were to take the rate of change and breakdown over the last five years, and keep it going for a hundred years, it would be way more than in any hundred year period of the decline of Rome.
Maybe the rate of collapse will slow, but it can't turn around. The nonrenewable resources are almost gone, the climate is sliding into chaos, and our institutions are bloated and ossified. The skillbase is shrinking, to continue the world as we know it, as that world's needs increase.
But it would be a mistake to take a general forecast of decline, and project it on every place and every person. I have a hypothesis that a falling society is more granular than a rising society. If you go from town to town in the 2050's, or from neighbor to neighbor, you'll see bigger differences in how people are living, and how happy they are, than you would have seen in the 1950's. Already, during Covid lockdown, some people were having the worst time of their lives while other people were having the best.
One thing that would shift the whole bell curve toward worse, is if people are going hungry. But wherever there's enough food, I'm optimistic that human ingenuity will come up with some cool stuff. In the best places, they won't even tell the story of having gone through a crash, but of figuring out better ways to do things while the old ways died out.
It's fun to imagine what the world might look like in a few hundred years. Some things we could never guess, but I expect the population will have fallen, and because of that, there will be a lot of ghost towns and abandoned urban sprawl. The economy will not be based on exponential growth, unless it's hurrying toward another collapse. Will they be digging up our landfills for scraps, and reading our mouldering books for ancient wisdom, or will they have moved on to a way of life that doesn't need us?