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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
August 19. Still in repost mode. This is a post from April 1, 2020:
A nice trick for understanding economics is to factor out money. An economy is just a bunch of people doing stuff that keeps the system going. The strength of an economy is the overlap between what's necessary to keep it going, and what people want to do anyway. By this definition, a weak economy has to threaten people with hunger and homelessness to get them to do their jobs, and at the other extreme, Utopia doesn't even have the concept of freeloading.
This has actually been done. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers mentions tribes where some people do no productive work their whole lives, and nobody cares. Obviously not every tribe has done it, but even if it's just one, that tells us that it's possible.
In a complex high-tech society, the challenge is distribution, getting stuff to people who aren't making stuff. Communism tried it through central management, which didn't work, and capitalism is trying it through money, which is now also failing. I think the failure of capitalism is a slip between two functions of money: 1) a mechanism of exchange, and 2) a source of the meaning of life.
The problem is, money is zero-sum. If you hang meaning on it, then meaning is zero-sum, and it gets sucked up by people at the top. The poor become NPC's in the quests of the rich.
That system is now breaking down. Human motivation is the most powerful force on the planet, and as the economy collapses, there is more and more human motivation languishing, waiting to be tapped.
August 16. Four woo-woo links. What Is a Twin Flame? Lately it's a trendy word for a soulmate, but this 2022 article explains how it started out as something more specific and interesting:
Unlike life partners -- what we consider to be soul-mate relationships or "the one" -- twin flame relationships are intense and challenging relationships that force us to deal with our unresolved issues and, through trials, tribulations, and breakthroughs, become a bigger person. Because of this intensity, it's uncommon for twin flames to be a lifelong partnership. Rather, they are people who enter your life for a period of time to help you grow and steer you on course. "It is common for those relationships to separate because they are very difficult to maintain."
From Ask Reddit, What's the strangest interaction you've had with an animal that made you rethink their intelligence?
A short Reddit thread, Can you point me toward any of the times that Alan Watts talked about the squares who are the most caught up in samsara as the most "far out"?
Now, ordinarily we say someone's very far out when they are oddballs, when they are exceedingly unconventional. But I want you to turn the picture 'round and look, as a conventional person, look at a square as a person who's very far out. That is to say, he is so involved in the seriousness of the game he is playing that he is lost.
Related, a thread on the Psychonaut subreddit about the cosmic joke: "We spend our entire life trying to make ourselves whole and when we die we figure out that we were always whole we just wanted to feel broken."
And some music. My 2010s Spotify playlist was long, disjointed, and missing too many good songs. So I moved the loudest songs plus the new stuff to a new playlist, 2010s vol 2. My momentary favorite (via YouTube) is Amen Dunes - Lonely Richard, one of the best psych folk songs of the century.
August 13. No ideas this week. This is a repost of this post from almost ten years ago:
Google Is Not What It Seems. Julian Assange writes about being interviewed by some people from Google who appeared to be politically neutral, but they turned out to be representing the American foreign policy establishment, and he argues that Google has been allied with these people and their world view for a long time:
By all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the "benevolent superpower"... This is the impenetrable banality of "don't be evil." They believe that they are doing good.
If you think about this, it puts a twist on the popular idea that the elite simply rule the world. On a deeper level, the world is ruled by the stories the elite have to tell themselves to feel like they're the good guys. These stories include: that global-scale decisions must be made from the top (or center); that political stability is more valuable than political participation; and that anything you can call "economic development" is good.
But the story I find most interesting, is that you raise the quality of life of ordinary humans by taking away their pain and giving them stuff. I'm thinking what people really want is interesting choices -- partly inspired by Sid Meier's famous definition of a game as a series of interesting decisions, and partly by an email I got more than a year ago from Owen:
In game design, they talk about choices that matter. If a choice is presented but people feel obligated to take only one of the branches, that's not really a choice. You must take this option, taking that other option is stupid. Or if taking a branch doesn't result in any perceived consequence. Then take any branch, the choice doesn't matter. They put those kinds of choices in front of you all the time. How do you like your steak cooked? Should I use the gelpacks or the powder for the dishwasher?
This is important so I'll say it again in my own words. If the choice doesn't effect your path, like Coke or Pepsi, then it's not interesting; and if one choice is obviously stupid, like keep your car on the road or run it off, then it's not interesting. But deprive people of interesting choices for too long, and they start making the obviously stupid choice just to feel alive. Another way to say it: we would rather do the wrong thing that we choose ourselves, than the right thing that is chosen for us. I think this explains a lot of behavior that otherwise doesn't make any sense, and it's why even the most benevolent central control can never make a good society.
August 9. Continuing from the last post, if there is a world beyond this world, the closest I come to it is listening to music. The mystery is how something so profound can be so subjective, with completely different songs giving different people the feeling of connection to something greater. My favorite playlists are the ones constrained by obscurity, and this week I revised my ultimate obscurities playlist, songs that are Not On Spotify, and posted it to YouTube. It's just over an hour long, and the song I'm in love with right now is a dreamy 2009 ballad by the Australian band The Kill Devil Hills, Lucy-On-All-Fours. At first I thought it was about drugs. Now I think it's the same kind of song as Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna.
August 7. Five Reddit links, starting with the silliest. From a thread about things that only Americans do, I was surprised to learn that it's an American thing to lean on stuff.
A large and fascinating thread, What's the worst drug ever? It's between fentanyl and deliriants.
From Ask Old People, why there are no useless degrees. The entire comment:
Because in our day, education simply for the sake of education was a good and desirable thing. Colleges used to have the goal of turning out well-rounded citizens and no education was ever "wasted" because being educated - no matter the degree - was considered an objectively good thing. There were a lot of ways to contribute to society no matter what your degree was.
Now colleges are nothing more than job training programs churning out cogs for the machine, and have no interest in education for its own sake. Society no longer values an intelligent and well-rounded citizenry, either. In a culture where everything is monetized, most degrees will be "useless" if they're not strictly utilitarian.
Related, from two years ago, a very well written comment about the causes of the political troubles in America. The comment below it is less correct but more interesting: "The factories moving to low-cost countries has resulted in poverty for people who cannot wrap their heads around poverty not being caused by a moral failing, and it's driving them crazy."
Finally, from the Spirituality subreddit, a cool thread about kids saying things that suggest awareness of a reality beyond this world. I wonder how far we could go with this, if it was encouraged in normal families.
August 5. Posted nine days ago to the subreddit, The Failed Assassin, The Dictator, and The Magus. That link goes to the subreddit post, which contains the link to the article. What I find most interesting is that Mussolini survived an assassination attempt, just like Trump did, by making a sudden head motion which happened to dodge a bullet, and getting barely clipped, in Mussolini's case on the tip of his nose. This is a perfect example of the saying that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes.
The rest of the article is about occult mind control, and while I accept the occult, I don't think there's any magical shortcut for control. There are two ways to get someone else to do your will: find someone who already wants to do that thing and organize them, or apply overt social force and overcome stubborn resistance. It's possible that occult rituals could help, or synchronistically line up, with the first of those methods, to give motivation and luck to someone who already wants to do an assassination.
The comment in the post goes deeper into the esoteric beliefs of the American right. What I find most strange is that J.D. Vance and Opus Dei both believe in spiritual evil, and see themselves as fighting against it -- while I believe in spiritual evil and see them both completely serving it. It's almost like serving evil, and fighting evil, are not opposites, but two views of the same thing. Quoting Thaddeus Golas: "The seduction of evil is precisely in that it involves us in trying to eliminate it."
The common thread is compulsive fixation: a narrowing of focus that is self-reinforcing and hard to pull out of. Compulsive fixation looks like evil to everyone whose interests are excluded by that fixation. And if you're prone to fixation, an easy thing to fixate on is something you're against.
July 31. I don't plan to do any original thinking this week, but I'm really enjoying the book An Underground Journey Through 20th Century Philosophy by Jonathan Hockey. I can't remember how I even heard of it. It's clearly self-published, and the author is an amateur, but he stepped up and wrote a book that needed to be written. The chapter on Alfred North Whitehead is especially helpful because Whitehead is really hard to read, and Hockey figures out what he's trying to say and explains it in easier language:
The notion of dead matter, of entropy, of empty space and time, that have haunted ontology since the time of Descartes and Newton are ultimately incorrect, for they rest on a false division between mind and matter.... Once you have hypostatised bare extension in space and time, the container of space and time as pre-existing and predetermining the things within it, you have rendered it impossible to place living things back into that abstraction.
From a later chapter, a direct quote from Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
It is not a matter of having to choose between determinism on the one hand and absolute freedom on the other because we are neither things nor pure consciousnesses but instead, incarnate subjectivities inhering in a situation which we assumed and modify.
July 29. From the Mutating Man chapter of the book Operators and Things (1958) by Barbara O'Brien:
Is man now in the process of adapting to an environment too complex or too restricted for his present physical or mental equipment? Is he in the process of becoming something capable of dealing with an environment which is, itself, only beginning to shape and which the force of life is sensing? The first attempts at shaping birds probably produced creatures which looked like poorly adapted lizards. Other lizards, observing their queer cousins, must have shaken their heads sadly and wondered if the world of lizards were falling apart at the seams. I shall prepare men for a changing universe, says the river of life, so that he may be able to live in it. In the process of experimenting to develop new man, I shall make more than one mistake.
July 26. Stray links, starting with some good news. Mangrove Trees Are on the Move, stabilizing coastlines in places that used to be too cold.
Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes. AI generated humans have less consistent eye reflections than real humans.
The Hacker News thread on some interesting AI tech, An Analog Network of Resistors Promises Machine Learning Without a Processor
Prenatal cannabinoid exposure appears to have a strange impact on early language development. By "strange" they mean they expected weed to make babies dumber but it made them smarter. This result will probably diminish with further research, but it's unlikely to be reversed.
A great Reddit comment on the differences between women's football and men's football
In a way the men's is more breathtaking. But slower is better sometimes because you can see better. The men also crash into each other more, kind of dart around, fall more, foul each other more because they're just bigger, moving faster, and more aggressive. So the men's game is more choppy and the women's is more smooth.
And some music. In doing research for my eventual 60s playlist, I found this great Spotify playlist, Seriously 60s, under three hours and full of good obscurities. My favorite so far is Fifty Foot Hose - Rose. In 1967, this band was years ahead of their time in combining guitar jamming and electronics.
July 23. Last week on the subreddit there was an interesting post about the weirdness around the Trump shooting. I would say it like this: How unlikely is it that an untrained 20 year old was able to show up at a rally, with a five foot ladder he had just bought at Home Depot, find an unsecured rooftop with a clean line of sight, and then miss by an inch, just as Trump made a head movement to dodge the bullet, while saying "Take a look at what happened."
I want to make this about metaphysics and not about politics. There's a famous Sherlock Holmes line: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." I think it's the other way around. When things get too improbable, it's more likely that you're wrong about what's possible.
History is full of improbable events at key moments. I can't find a source for this, but I heard it from historian Jon Bridgman: Napoleon, early in his career, in the thick of a battle, was shoved out of the way of perceived danger by an assistant, who was then immediately killed by a bullet. This convinced Napoleon that he could not die until he had fulfilled some destiny.
From Ross Douthat in the NY Times, Donald Trump, Man of Destiny, "...a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics. In Hegel's work, the great man of history is understood as a figure 'whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit.'"
The impossible thing I accept is that history is an aspect of something outside time and space. I mean, so is daily life, but with history everyone can see it, and to us it looks like retrocausality. Certain events must happen, and previous events fall into place to make them happen. That doesn't mean Trump is going to be king. Maybe that iconic image is his Austerlitz, and his Waterloo is sooner than we think.
What is the "world spirit" and what does it want? My guess is, it's the human collective unconscious, the totality of all of us making up reality on the fly. It seems to want good stories, and it clearly doesn't want to avoid suffering. Related: Rudy Rucker's Reality is a Novel theory.
July 19. Music for the weekend. I like the idea of doom/stoner metal, but it's hard to find actual songs that I like, and especially hard to find good vocals. My top song of this century remains Orchard by Windhand, but I have a new top album. From this page, 10 Extremely Underrated Doom Metal Albums, I discovered a London band called Green Lung. Their sound is basically Sabbath with some Queen lead guitar, and I really like their 2018 EP, Free the Witch. Also, if you want metal with very soft vocals, check out Eight Bells.
July 18. Oddly, while human society is getting worse, my inner world is getting better. So to balance the doom, I want to share some mental health tips. One thing I've discovered is, whatever change you want to make to yourself, the key is at the micro scale.
The first thing you do at that scale, is to catch something you want to change, while it's happening. For this, meditation is helpful. I've never had an altered mental state from meditation, but it's like taking my attention to the gym. The more endurance my metacognition has, the more it notices my cognition doing dumb things.
You have to be non-judging, which is hard for some people. If you find yourself judging yourself for judging yourself for judging yourself, you still haven't got it.
It's like this one time that I was listening to battery-powered headphones. They sound fine without power, but if you flip the switch, the sound is louder and sharper. I'd been listening for a while and thought, wait, did I forget to flip the switch?
Now, what do you hope for? My first thought was, I hope I haven't just wasted minutes of my life listening to music on the crappy level. That hope was incorrect. The correct hope is, never mind what I've just been doing, I want the action of flipping the switch right now to make it better.
In hindsight, that was a breakthrough, but at the time it just seemed like a neat idea. Another time, after waiting in line at the supermarket, I remembered something I absolutely needed, way at the back of the store. While walking back, I thought, instead of thinking of this little trip as a tedious chore, I can think of it as an epic quest.
This is not the kind of thing you nail on the first try. It's something you practice and gradually get better at. Another trick I do is to pretend that my life is a TV show, and whatever I'm doing right now is in the closing credits. If you're young, you might want to imagine the opening credits. Don't do it while you're driving, but it's a good thing to do while you're washing the dishes.
Also on the subject of mental health, Matt sends this online book, Meaningness, which is mainly about exploring dichotomies, and either balancing them or finding other options.
July 16. Today's subject, doom. Historians say the fall of Rome happened so slowly that people at the time didn't know Rome was falling. But right now, everyone knows America is falling. There are cultural differences in how we think it's falling, but whatever changes we don't like, we can all imagine them being permanent. Even if changes do not accelerate, but continue at the rate of the last quarter century, historians will look back and see us right now inside the date range of a relatively fast crash.
In the last three days we've seen three darkly iconic spectacles at public events. At least they're increasingly silly. The first is all in the news. The second was the Copa America final, where thousands of fans without tickets forced their way in, which has never happened at a large American stadium. The third, at last night's Home Run Derby, was possibly the worst ever singing of the national anthem at a major event. It was so bad that sonic theorists in this reddit thread thought it was a tech error, but it turns out the singer was just really drunk.
Two more doom links. From 2015, The Really Big One describes an earthquake, with a one in ten chance of happening in the next fifty years, that will reduce the northwest coast to rubble, including my neighborhood. It doesn't even mention how many tech company headquarters are here.
And The Peculiar Phenomenon of Megacryometeors, chunks of ice big enough to smash through roofs, falling out of a clear sky. Specialists "believe that the recent increase in the frequency of these megacryometeors worldwide may be due to the effects of global warming."
July 12. Two fascinating geography links. Why Is Chile So Long? Because it covers a long, thin, isolated area that's unique in the world. At the end the author gets into how that isolation also makes it an outlier in language.
Should this be a map or 500 maps? In the late 1700s, a guy tried to make a map of Spain by asking local priests to draw a map of their region, and compiling them. Instead he got 500 wildly different maps, and died trying to reconcile them.
There are many things to take from this story -- about beginner's mind, the diversity of human experience, and the interoperability of language. But what stood out to me most was two opposing lessons about shared protocols and modularity. Tomás' experiment failed. It failed because each amateur cartographer injected their own methodology and process, resulting in incompatible maps. But in another sense, Tomás succeeded. Sure, maybe this collection of artifacts would be useless for military strategy or commerce, but on the other hand... LOOK AT THESE MAPS, THESE MAPS RULE. Imagining a world in which Tomás successfully imposed a protocol and stripped these maps of their individuality feels... tragic? Dystopian?
I'm obsessed with this story because it gets at a dynamic embedded within everything designed that we rarely think about. Once you notice it, it is present in almost every conversation, at every aperture and zoom level: modularity is inversely correlated to expressiveness.
There's more discussion in the Hacker News thread. By the way, the original piece says "18th century" which I changed to "1700s" because Let's stop counting centuries.
July 10. It's been too hot this week for heavy thinking, but today it cooled off enough that I can at least riff on the last post. A reader comments: "I believe the phenomena of schizophrenia, hearing voices, self and identity, and spiritual awakening are all elements of the same underlying psychology structure which can be manipulated from the inside." So the criminally insane, and awakened saints, are just managing the same kind of thing in the worst way and the best way.
I use the word "subconscious" instead of "unconscious" because I think whatever it is, it's conscious. But maybe that's not going far enough. Another comment: "Really, there is no subconscious. We can plumb the entirety of our mind to its very depths once we get over our own resistance." So the only difference between the "conscious" and the "unconscious" is exclusion by the ego. I would say the same thing about the "paranormal", that it differs from the "normal" only in falling outside some walls constructed by a specific way of looking.
Everyone knows the story of Galileo, who made a telescope and saw moons around Jupiter, and the Church said, according to our ideology, there cannot be moons around Jupiter. Now, in the conflict between empiricism and ideology, science is often on the other side. I mean, I still trust biologists to evaluate vaccines. But you might get some synchronicity, or apparent telepathy, or a strong hunch that cannot be explained by peripheral sensing, or a useful Tarot reading. That's empirical information. And science, reaching outside its wheelhouse, says, you have to ignore that because we can't explain the mechanism.
July 8. I've been working on a complete rewrite of my Books page, and while I'll surely be adding more, it's finished enough to post. The emphasis is now heavily on metaphysics, with smaller sections for social philosophy, fringe science, and fiction. I've also just updated the sidebar to the left, to clearly distinguish my stuff from other people's stuff.
July 5. New Spotify playlist, R.E.M. Dreamy Deep Tracks. That title is more descriptive, but these are just my favorite REM songs.
July 4. Whenever I hear about a crazy person who did a terrible crime, typically killing their family, because they heard voices telling them to do it, I always wonder: Why don't they just not do what the voices say? I mean, if I were facing a hard decision, and a voice in my head gave me advice, I'd probably follow it. But I wouldn't go against my core values. Never mind murder -- voices in my head couldn't make me litter. I'd just be annoyed at them.
Obviously something else is going on. The words "kill your family" are not where the action is. The person is being compelled on a deeper level, and the words are at most a carrier for the compulsion, and at least a residue. It could be the part of the iceberg that's above water, or the shadow, in the rational world, of a more potent sub-rational process.
Now I'm thinking, can this happen to non-crazy people, through voices not inside the head? Can a voice on the radio, or the TV, or the internet, serve as a carrier or a catalyst or a pointer for something that's happening on a deeper level than language?
If speech has persuasive force, and if the words don't hold up rationally, then the next candidate is the non-language part of the voice: the tone, the timbre, the vibration. This makes sense to me. My most transformative experience was not from drugs, but from a song, and not from the lyrics or melody, but the sound.
There still has to be something deeper, because what is it that makes a vibration compelling for one person, and repellent for another? I think this is an aspect of human identity, especially collective identity, that remains undiscovered. And my practical advice, in these crazy times, is not to use the word "irrational", but instead sub-rational. Because there's something going on in there, even if you don't know what it is.
July 1. Back to philosophy, I've written about the consciousness of animals and plants. But if we take psychism seriously, it opens all kinds of interesting doors. And if we take pagan metaphysics seriously, we have to wonder about the consciousness of gods. What is it like to be a god?
I can see three levels of answers. One is that gods exist purely as a behavior of human consciousness, as already understood by psychologists. So what it's like to be a god is simply what it's like to be a human believing in that god; and through known channels of communication, humans can decide what the gods are like and what they want.
If we go deeper, gods can exist in the human collective subconscious. If humans disappeared, they'd disappear too, but they can coordinate our behavior in ways that physicalism doesn't recognize, and without us being consciously aware of it. This answer seems most likely to me, and it could also apply to demonic possession.
Or they could exist on some level deeper than humans. We're an opportunity to them, but they don't need us. This is how it usually is in fiction, and you can see examples in the TV Tropes page for the Old Gods.
Notice that on all three levels, the gods are mutable. We could change our minds about them, or they could adapt to changing culture, or they could put on different masks. I tend to agree with Ezra Pound, who wrote, "The Gods have not returned. They have never left us."