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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
November 15. Today's subject is religion. I've tried to define it in other posts, and last week I got a couple emails from a reader who took a shot at defining it, and he included something that never occurred to me: A religion almost always has a special person at the center, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad. I still don't want to make that a necessary part of my definition, because thinking that way about a human would be a big turnoff if I were to join a spiritual community.
Lately a lot of people are reporting having an existential crisis. From that article:
Existential crises are often seen as a phenomenon associated specifically with modern society. One important factor in this context is that various sources of meaning, such as religion or being grounded in one's local culture and immediate social environment, are less important in the contemporary context.
I'm not sure what I'm grounded in, something inside me I guess. I see my internal world as friendly and the human-made world as hostile. My anxiety is about people getting mad at me for doing it wrong, which has happened many times, or my money running out and having to be inauthentic to beg for a job.
Thanks Andy for sending this new paywalled piece, Where Does Religion Come From? This is a radical statement for the NY Times: "that atheist materialism is too weak a base upon which to ground Western liberalism in a world where it's increasingly beset." The author, Ross Douthat, distinguishes three aspects of religion: 1) the personal desire for meaning; 2) "the societal need for a unifying moral-metaphysical structure"; 3) the mysterious origin of religion in uncanny experience.
One way to get at this weirdness is to look at situations where there's a supernatural experience without a pre-existing tradition that makes sense of people's experiences and shapes their interpretations. By this I mean that if you have a mystical experience in the context of, say, a Pentecostalist faith-healing service or a Roman Catholic Mass, you are likely to interpret it in light of existing Christian theology. But if you have a religious experience "in the wild," as it were, the sheer strangeness is more likely to come through.
From there, he goes into UFO sightings! UFOs are not exactly in the wild, but in the firm context of the modern story of outer space as the realm of the unknown. A good book on this subject is Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee, and there's a promising book I haven't read yet, UFOs: Reframing the Debate.
November 13. A few quick health links, starting with mental health. This subreddit post references a post I made in 2020, and adds a new report about talking to the subconscious.
Why You Should Talk to Yourself in the Third Person
Why walking backwards can be good for your health and brain
And the unexpected benefits of sun exposure. The basic advice is to get moderate sun and avoid burning.
November 10. Trippy stuff for the weekend. Earlier this week was probably the thread of the year on Reddit, For those who have careers that keep them out at sea for long periods of time, what is the creepiest thing you've seen out in the water?
Hilarious r/psychonaut thread, Has anyone actually tripped on nutmeg? "Wasn't fun, spent 3 days in hospital for the equivalent high you'd get from being a house over from a guy watching a Snoop Dogg video."
And I've posted this before, from 2005, Rudy Rucker's mind-blowing Reality is a Novel theory:
If we fully know everything about the Now moment, we know the entire past and future. With this in mind, explaining any given draft of the universe becomes a matter of explaining the contents of a single Now moment of that draft. This in turn means that we can view the evolution of the successive drafts as an evolution of different versions of a particular Now moment.
I disagree with his assumption that physics is deterministic. Reality might be deterministic on a level deeper than physics, but physics itself says no such thing. Not only is quantum physics non-deterministic, but this article, The Dome, expains how "even quite simple Newtonian systems can harbor uncaused events."
November 8. Monday's post was inspired by a book I just read, Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. Now I'm wondering about the difference between the critique of "modernity" and the critique of "civilization". I don't think we're talking about two different things, but two different semantic strategies for talking about the same thing.
Calling it civilization turns our attention to things that are thousands of years old: cities, money, violent conquest. Anti-civ discussions are often hypothetical and puritanical: What would we have to give up -- or force other people to give up -- in order to save the world?
Calling it modernity turns our attention to cognitive habits that are only a few hundred years old, and invites us to examine and change our own ways of thinking. Morris Berman has written some great books on this subject, starting with The Re-enchantment of the World.
A key quote from Hospicing Modernity: "The end of modernity may not manifest primarily as economic or ecological collapse, but as a global mental health crisis where the structures of modernity within us start to crumble."
I think the crumbling started 250 years ago with Romanticism, which rejected modernity's rationalism, while intensifying its individualism. So we're not looking at one monolithic thing, but an ongoing negotiation among a bunch of things. I don't see the future as a return to the past, or a transcendence to a new level, but a continuing exploration of the landscape of the human potential.
November 6. Today's subject, modernity and doom. We have used too many levels of abstractions and now the future looks bleak. It's not well written but it makes an important point:
In e.g. software development, too many specialists have been abstracted away and replaced by tools and automation and fewer and fewer people understand anything even one layer directly beneath the layer they are working on. This is a major problem because we will eventually reach a point in which very few people can fix anything in the layers below.
My rude-ass car is about all the new features that are supposed to make cars more safe and convenient, and instead they make the driving experience frustrating.
China's Age of Malaise is a long article mainly about how bad their dictator is, and while this is true, America is also in an age of malaise and we don't even have a dictator yet.
Great Reddit thread, Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free? What people mean by "live for free" is the same thing I mean when I say my highest value is free time. I want to have fewer relationships with modern society.
For the last few hundred years, humans have been experimenting with a radical new way of thinking and living, based on individualism, competition, number and measure, predictability and control, linear progress, and naive ideas about quality of life. Life is getting better in the most simple-minded and obvious ways, at the expense of many subtle ways that life is getting worse, and because our culture doesn't show us these things, we don't know why we're unhappy.
The mainstream left is completely blind to this. The right can feel it, but they don't know how to think about it, and they're unable to imagine any alternative except strong leaders backed by violence. So we're going to get more of those, as shit falls apart.
November 3. Stray links, starting with an interesting thread from r/psychonaut, Why is the lonely god thing so commonly experienced? The consensus is, because it's true, but we're still not quite understanding it from our limited perspective.
Some good news, the US community that banned cars, a new housing development outside Phoenix, that's designed so you can realistically live there without a car.
A nice thread on Ask Reddit, What is something you think Gen Z is doing right?
And a super-fun video that I discovered through bibliomancy, when my finger landed on the word "Lindy": Lindy Hop JnJ Finals. If you want more, here's the Lindy Hop scene from the 1941 movie Hellzapoppin.
November 1. Despite Monday's post, I actually do a lot of self-improvement, especially when I'm high. I like to walk around trying different ways of focusing my attention, and the latest thing I've learned is how to dodge people on the sidewalk. This happens a lot in the city: Someone is coming the other way, and it's not totally clear who's going to take which side. I've discovered that if I put the center of my vision somewhere else, and watch them with my peripheral vision, it's a lot easier to get it right.
Why has no one ever told me this? Probably other people are doing it subconsciously. My particular kind of brain damage is that my body has no autopilot. This makes me think back to P.E. class, in which I got no physical education whatsoever. I don't remember a single instruction about how to angle a body part, not even how to flip my wrist to throw harder, something a friend taught me when I was 30 years old, in ten minutes.
Imagine it's your first day of math class. The teacher says, instead of doing boring math instruction, we're just going to go straight to the test. Everyone else in the class is a math genius, and they're all like, woo-hoo, a test! They're breezing through it and you're staring at the symbols completely clueless. At least they're not mean. They watch awkwardly and give you a decent grade for effort. This happens every day for ten years.
Now I walk past homeless people and wonder, how much better would they be doing, if they had got the right kind of basic personal attention when they were five years old, instead of being put through the meat grinder of public schooling? Related: a Hacker News thread on Home schooling.
Anyway, now that I'm old, I have to give a lot of attention to body mechanics to stay ahead of chronic injuries. I finally worked out the formula for good posture, and it's not at all intuitive: firm stomach and tucked chin. The tucked chin forces me to keep my breastbone raised.
I also practice basic moves with my arms or legs, and I've noticed a difference between the two sides of my body. My left side is like a guy in a suit of armor, confident but stiff and clumsy; my right side is like a wounded cat, agile but wavery and hesitant. So I'll alternate a move between the left and right, and try to work out the best of both.
October 30. Three links about doing nothing. The Joy Of Being A Spiritual Loser is a video about how the modern values of productivity and striving have influenced spiritual practices that are supposed to be about relaxing and letting go.
A blog post, Staring at a Wall: Embracing Deliberate Boredom.
And an article about desert island tourism, which sounds like a lot of work and money to get something you could get for free, a quarter mile off the highway in any national forest. People sometimes ask me about Chris McCandless, and while I like the general idea of what he was trying to do, he could have just done it in Montana or something. It was the culture of striving, which he failed to escape, that drove him so deep into Alaska that he couldn't go for help.
On a related subject, I've been thinking about the question: What do Americans boast about? We never boast about being rich, unless it's in the context of boasting about how much poverty we climbed out of. And we don't boast about luck -- if someone says they're lucky, they're being modest, saying their success did not come from being better than other people. I think luck is a real thing that can be cultivated, but when Americans say "I make my own luck," they mean something completely different: that they don't believe in luck so they succeed through hard work.
"Hard work" is the main thing Americans boast about. But who counts as a hard worker? A CEO who does nothing all day but make snap decisions? A fanfic author who puts in a lot of hours for a tiny audience and no money? Surely a full-time janitor is a hard worker. How about someone who spends the same amount of time cleaning stuff, but unobserved and unpaid? What about a chain gang worker, also unpaid, who breaks the biggest rocks? Who's a harder worker, someone who works in a munitions factory, or someone who puts in the same hours building bombs in their garage?
People will answer these questions differently. But I think the general consensus is that "hard work" is a social activity, a performance of obedience to the dominant system.
Another thing Americans boast about is self-discipline, by which they mean internalizing the dominator: "When I was a kid, parents and teachers forced me to do stuff I didn't feel like doing. Now that I'm grown up, I force myself to do stuff I don't feel like doing." I mean, this is a necessary skill to not end up a homeless addict. But I don't think it's something to be proud of, I think it's a tragedy. There are eight million species in the world and only one has this problem, and only recently.
October 25. Continuing on the lack of voluntary mutual aid groups, Devon writes:
I grew up Seventh-day Adventist, a Protestant religion that is more organized than a lot of other denominations.... I can go to almost any church in any state and find someone who has a mutual friend or knows some of the same people I do. Even if I don't find anyone with a mutual acquaintance, I can generally get a free meal, place to stay for the night, help if I needed it.
And Adam writes:
I've been a sober AA member for about eight years, and exactly what you described is a major facet of the program's culture.... I find attending an AA meeting in another location I am visiting to be my favorite experience on trips. The fact that I am an AA gets me immediate welcome in any meeting anywhere. On my recent visit to Ireland, I went to a meeting and was treated like a special guest by strangers. The cool thing to experience is the immediate "tribal" recognition and welcome you get or give, and this transcends so many other cultural or socioeconomic differences that typically separate people.
It's interesting that both of these groups encourage belief in a higher power. I'm reminded of this post from 2019, and the posts that follow, where I wonder why there are no secular monasteries, and grapple with the definition of religion.
The word "religion" points to a lot of different things, and I'm increasingly thinking that one of them is important for our mental health: to see reality as something other than selfish rational agents in a meaningless physical universe. "Secular" is not a clean neutral ground, but an active way of thinking that can be bad for us.
Two books I'm reading right now that are helping me on this subject, and are surprisingly similar despite coming from completely different angles: Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, and Physics as Metaphor by Roger S. Jones.
October 23. Continuing from last week, Matt comments:
I'm sure a lot of communes have failed simply because they try to be all things to all people in some fixed location, and it's rare for humans to meet all their needs through a single community and/or place.
Which made me think about Indigenous Americans and clans. I don't know a lot about the clan system, but I know clans extended beyond tribes and nations. So you could leave your tribe, and maybe nation, and find someone else belonging to the same clan -- and bond with them through that affiliation.
This reminds me of something I read in a zine in the 90s, where a young traveler explained why she dressed like a punk, because anywhere she went, other punks might give her a ride or a place to stay; but if she dressed normally, normal people would not help her.
I wonder if there's anything like that now, where a chosen identity will get you help from strangers. There are immigrant communities, and also communities based on race and gender, but all of those are like tribe/nation, something you're born into, and not something you can choose. I think this lack of voluntary mutual aid groups is peculiar to this fragmented time, and one way or another, there will be more of them.
October 20. Picking up from the last post, it's an interesting question: Our ancestors got all their needs from the local environment for a quarter of a million years, or four billion if you count nonhumans. If we're so much better than them, with all our technology, why can't we do it?
One reason is the landbase. They were nomadic, or lived in extremely fertile areas. Now the land is depleted and carved up, and we're stuck on whatever sketchy acreage we can afford to buy.
At first I was thinking that tribes work better than individuals, and certainly there's less risk with more people. But whatever you think the optimal tribe size is, you can find a back-to-the-land commune of exactly that size that failed. And from the other side, a fascinating article on feral children.
This is a clue to the main reason we can't do it. Humans are extremely adaptable at birth, not so much later, and now we're all adapted for modern society. It's not just that we lack technical survival skills, or that we expect certain comforts. Our whole way of being is tuned to modern living, which is why when we go "back to the land", through a series of completely reasonable decisions, we end up basically as remote suburbanites.
October 18. This blog is definitely slowing down, but today I have a rant on progress. I was reading an article arguing that climate change is not that bad, because it will only slightly reduce global GNP per capita. Of all the ways that human quality of life is commonly measured, nothing is dumber than measuring the amount of money flying around. If you want to read the best thinking on this subject, check out Tools for Conviviality or Toward a History of Needs by Ivan Illich.
Imagine you're living in a little house you built yourself, drinking water out of a stream, and you've got some fruit trees and a garden that provide all your food. Don't actually do this -- for complicated reasons, homesteading is really hard. But we all have ancestors who lived happily on zero money. And then someone comes along and dams the stream and sells you the water in bottles refined from oil drilled by wrecking your garden. Your trees are cut into lumber, you have to work in a terrible factory to survive -- and every one of these changes grows the money economy, by gobbling up stuff formerly outside the money economy.
This is the history of colonialism everywhere. It's true that rising GDP is good for the third world. But before people can be made happy by money, they first have to be made miserable by destroying their ability to live without money.
Money is not the root of all evil. Extending the metaphor, if there is a tree of all evil, its roots go much deeper. But money is definitely on that tree. It's a way to make people do stuff they would not do except for the money, which they turn around and spend to make other people do stuff they would not do except for the money, in a giant global carnival of extrinsic reward.
The world is currently going to hell, unseen by economists, because the void in intrinsic reward is being filled by tribalism and opioids. I should also say, my life is really good right now. But I understand that this is because of luck, and if tomorrow I get caught up in some disaster, I'll know why.
October 13. A few notes from Port Townsend. The other night we went to see our first theater movie since before Covid, and there's a common assumption that the main difference between theater and home is the size of the screen. Personally, if the movie is any good I get so absorbed that I lose track of the context. I think the main difference, by far, is that a theater movie can't be paused. That gives the show an element of ritual and makes it more immersive.
Today we went on a whale watch cruise, a three hour tour on Friday the 13th with a new captain on his first run. I was so disappointed that we didn't end up on Gilligan's island. Anyway, when we found the whales, there were several other boats gathered around, maybe 200 humans who paid a lot to watch five orcas cavort. We've come a long way in a short time from when humans would be trying to kill or capture the whales.
At the same time, the local islands were packed with houses so new that the streets didn't show up on google maps. While human ecological consciousness is higher than ever, so is our ecological footprint.
A phrase I hear a lot lately is "retail therapy". For me that means, spending money is so painful that I have to think about my own death to make it tolerable. I think about the Hieronymus Bosch painting, Death and the Miser, and the Talking Heads line, "Into the blue again, after the money's gone".
October 8. This week I'll be in Port Townsend without my laptop, so little or no posting. I wrote this before, but can't find it in the archives, a thought about cults. Post-apocalypse fiction is full of cults, as if the ruins of a complex society are fertile ground for charismatic leaders and fanatical followers with crazy beliefs.
That fertile ground is right now, during a still-standing complex society that is losing the ability to motivate its citizens. Fanaticism fills the void of meaning. If a society gets to the point where it can't feed its citizens, that's worse, but the dangerous groups will be less culty and more pragmatic, less wild-eyed and more steely-eyed.
New subject: What Plants Are Saying About Us, a careful argument that plants are intelligent without brains:
If cognition is embodied, extended, embedded, enactive, and ecological, then what we call the mind is not in the brain. It is the body's active engagement with the world, made not of neural firings alone but of sensorimotor loops that run through the brain, body, and environment. In other words, the mind is not in the head.
...
"Words like cognition, memory, attention, or consciousness -- those words for me are properly applied to the whole organism. It's the whole organism that's conscious, not the brain that's conscious. It's the whole organism that attends or remembers. The brain makes animal cognition possible, it facilitates and enables it, but it's not the location of it."
October 5. When something is too hard, the obvious move is to make it easier. But sometimes it works to make it harder, if that difficulty unlocks your magic powers.
Every couple weeks I bicycle up Pine Street, from downtown to the top of Capitol Hill, to get groceries. Because my bike is a singlepeed, and I'm not athletic, I only ride it up the least steep streets, and otherwise push it.
On top of that, now I've got a sore quadriceps tendon, the thingy just above your kneecap. To not re-injure it, I can't put any weight on my right leg when it's more than a little bent. (We're all more than a little bent.) On a bicycle, that means my right leg is only good for one shove at the bottom of each stroke, while my left leg has to work twice as hard. It turns out, exactly twice as hard, because yesterday I rode up steeper streets than before the injury.
Back to my favorite subject lately, better living through altered states of consciousness, another thread on r/psychonaut, What was the most profound insight you learned on psychedelics that helped you in your life? Lots of good stuff, including a surprising interpretation of "life is the trip": that the things you do to make a trip better, like eating well and avoiding stress, are the same things you do to make life better.
Psychonauts are always talking about the importance of love, with little explanation beyond that vague and non-controversial word, and just the word you'd expect from the intersection of feeling good and "we are all one." But this comment by logicalmaniak explains it really well:
Like, what's a game of football? Just humans chasing a bag of air. It's nothing at all. But what's a game of football with your mates? It's communion, bonding, positive competition, fun, and so on. The love makes the not real thing a vehicle for transmitting the real thing.
October 2. Not feeling smart this week, or maybe just less interested in words. Here's a fun thread on Ask Old People about Donald Trump in the 80s.
Another negative link, Do Not Put Plastic in the Microwave, because it releases microplastics.
Another health link, Individuals drinking 2-3 cups of coffee per day have the lowest risk of depression and anxiety. I wonder about causation vs correlation, because 2-3 cups seems pretty normal, with weird people drinking more or less, and also being more prone to depression and anxiety.
A nice thread on r/psychonaut about talking to plants. I don't see how plants could use language, but I sometimes get a sense that trees are superior beings who only show us a narrow slice of what they really are.
And a thoughtful blog post, It's okay to make something nobody wants. "If everyone made things they really liked, we'd have a lot more cool stuff."
September 29. Continuing from the last post: Raleigh mentions that there's an audio version of True Hallucinations on YouTube, with some stuff that's not in the book, and of course Terence McKenna's wonderful speaking style. Personally, I quit the book less than halfway through. It's great for what it is: young people doing lots of drugs, getting goggle-eyed about the nature of reality, and talking about it with fancy language. I've explored woo-woo stuff long enough to know that small impossible things happen all the time, but they never lead to a shake-up of consensus. And I have no patience for a nine hour talk, but I love this nine minute bit: Terence McKenna Big Bird, which syncs his best one-liners with the giant muppet.
While I'm on the subject of drugs, I can report that I got a practical benefit from cannabis in silent darkness. On those trips, I noticed subtle catches in my breath, so I focused on cleaning them up, and now my breathing is smoother than it's ever been. More generally, weed is like a step ladder to let me reach a higher shelf of consciousness. I can't stay up there all the time, and I've spent the last few years experimenting to see how much I can get away with before the next trip is not beneficial. My ceiling seems to be around five sessions a week.
On some of those sessions, while going for walks or just looking out the window at the city while listening to certain music, I've achieved a mental state in which I can feel the preciousness of every moment. Now that I know what it's like, I can get there more easily, and even without weed, I can get closer than I could before.
I'm sure this has also been helped by the practice of being present, and I've mentioned some tricks in other posts: Imagine that I'm the POV of a video, or that I'm testing a super-realistic VR rig, or that I just noticed I'm dreaming. But the simplest trick is just to repeatedly tell myself what psychonauts often report: that only this moment is real.
September 27. I'm reading Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations, the fun story of how he and his friends, in 1971, went to a paradise village in South America and did lots of psychedelics. It's full of language like this:
These had become the compass and the vehicle of our quest: the rose window topologies of the galacterian beehives of the di-methyltryptamine flash, that nexus of cheap talk and formal mathematics where wishes became horses and everybody got to ride.
I think it's strange that they always trip at night, and he never mentions the likely benefit, that the drugs stack with the trippy effects of sleep deprivation. Once in college I stayed up all night finishing a computer program, and I started to hear the code in the voice of the maid from the Jeffersons. It was not worth it. Sleep deprivation is terrible, which is why I always trip early in the day so I can be mostly recovered by bedtime.