October 5.

2022-10-05T17:30:53Z

October 5. In the Leafbox interview, I was asked "Do you have any religious practices?" I said no, but actually I do. Every year in June I take a long walk, with certain cognitive enhancements, in a good semi-wild area. This year I was too busy moving, but I've arranged to housesit for my stepmom, so I could come back to Pullman in October and take my favorite walk, up the south fork of the Palouse River out of town.

Every time I do this, I get reminded of the same insight, and try again to put it into words. This time I thought of a line from Mike Snider: "It is effulgent, visceral, radiant, and absolutely void of any objectivity or subjectivity whatsoever."

It's God and heaven rolled into one -- but those are loaded words. I'm talking about something genderless, nonhuman, and mostly beyond our perception and understanding. "Nature" is how it appears to us. The world of wild biological life is our primary interface to the one real thing.

Then I see, poking out of that, some ugly building, and I have to wonder: What's the point of humans? Why did we go off on this strange and painful path of disconnection?

There are a hundred stories we could tell. We are a meaningless accident. We're here to spread life to other planets. We're here to bring the carbon to the surface and go extinct. We're baby gods learning to be world builders. We're remedial souls qualifying to rejoin the whole.

The idea I got, this time, is a variation on a common saying, "We are the universe experiencing itself." Sure, but the universe is already experiencing itself all the time. It doesn't need humans for that. What we can do, is see the universe in the third person. A tree knows what it's like to be a tree, but it doesn't know what it's like to look at a tree with eyes tuned for aesthetics.

On my walk I borrowed a hat with the slogan "The Last Frontier". The last frontier is not space -- it's us. Just as we send astronauts into space to see the earth, the mind beneath the earth has sent us into a headspace so isolated that it can look back at itself.

I got the feeling that our job is almost done. Within a thousand years we'll be gone, not through failure but success. Our birthrates will taper to zero as our deeper selves are like, "Humans, been there, done that." But I'm probably wrong. Our brains are so adaptable, surely they're good for more than one thing.

October 2.

2022-10-02T14:00:55Z

October 2. Stray links, posted early because I'll be busy tomorrow.

Gabriel sends this cool article on Stone Skipping. The most interesting thing is the guy the article focuses on, Kurt Steiner. He's the rarest kind of person: highly eccentric, but competent enough to not be dead or in prison, and also highly motivated.

There's endless choice, but you're not listening. The article is a selection of people explaining why they quit streaming music. I find Spotify a convenient way to share playlists of well-known songs. But even when I listen to those playlists, I do it by getting the mp3s from Soulseek, putting them in a folder on my laptop, and playing them in VLC.

I wonder if AI will ever come up with a really good music recommendation engine. Right now they all work by correlation: what do people who listen to this song also listen to? That never gives me anything surprising. I want one that actually analyzes the sounds, so it could follow an obscure song to an equally obscure song from a different genre.

Interesting Hacker News thread on cheating in chess. A few hints from a computer can make such a big difference, and be so hard to detect, that the standard of "innocent until proven guilty" leaves way too much room for cheaters, and the chess world is still figuring out what to do. I expect they'll eventually make players change out of all their clothes to a tournament uniform, and play without an audience. In 30 years, they'll have to scan for brain implants.

Dense essay, The Pathologies of the Attention Economy, with some interesting stuff about the history of attention as a scarce commodity. The basic argument:

1. We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention.

2. The interests served by this environment in turn pathologize the resultant inattention.

3. These same interests devise and enforce new techniques to discipline the inattentive subject.

Ran Prieur

October 5.

October 2.