Ran Prieur

July 8.

2026-07-08T20:40:01Z

July 8. Continuing on metaphysics, I'm pretty sure that out of all the belief systems in human history and prehistory, there's only one that does not believe in an afterlife: physicalism, a.k.a. materialism: the belief that mindless matter is the fundamental reality.

And yet, physicalism has been undermined again and again by its own experiments. The word "quantum" is thrown around a lot, and I think this is an example of the saying "The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon." The double-slit experiment is just a signpost, rising from physicalism, and pointing to psychism. It tells us that the fundamental reality is not the particle but the observer, that time and space and number and measure are like the rules for a game played by pure consciousness. You don't have to know anything about quantum physics to understand this. Leibniz (who also invented calculus) understood it 300 years ago with his concept of monads:

The only things that could be called real were utterly simple beings of psychic activity "endowed with perception and appetite." The other objects, which we call matter, are merely phenomena of these simple perceivers.

Going back to the afterlife, what happens to the monad that's now being you, when it leaves the game? There's a lot of evidence on this subject from near-death experiences. A common objection to NDEs is that those people must not have been really dead, but this is an example of the No true Scotsman fallacy. People have been dead by every clinical definition, including having no brainwaves, sometimes for multiple days, and have come back with reports.

These reports have less in common than you've been told. Not everyone goes down a tunnel to the light, or is greeted by family members. I heard about a guy who was greeted by John Belushi in a bee costume. Some NDEs are so out-there that the person can't even explain them in words. But this Reddit post generalizes from the bulk of reports: What The Afterlife is Like, Based on 100+ Years of Evidence.

Personally I have a variation of Pascal's wager. Pascal was like, "What if the wrathful Christian God is real? I'd better believe in him just in case." I'm thinking, "What if we get to write our own afterlife?" Surely it's not that simple, but what have I got to lose, if I imagine it in detail? This Reddit thread includes my answer from six years ago: If you actually go to a paradise after you die, but the paradise automatically is set up in a way which will be the absolute maximum best and pleasing experience for you, how would your paradise be like?

So, if the afterlife is so great, what are we doing in this dystopia? There are many answers to this question, which I'm not going to get into, but another thing that NDE-ers generally agree on is that suicide is a bad idea. I can make sense of this with the metaphor of walking out of a movie. You might walk out if it's near the end, you're not enjoying it, and you're ready to go home. But you don't want to walk out during the most intense part -- that's why you went to the movie in the first place.

July 6.

2026-07-06T18:20:29Z

July 6. Scientific article, The neurophenomenology of a self-induced transcendental visionary state. Basically there's a woman who can enter altered states of consciousness, and they hooked up stuff to watch what her brain does.

Meet The Mushroom That Makes People Have The Exact Same Hallucination: "tiny elflike people".

New study explores the link between mystical psychedelic trips and a reduced fear of dying. They say the mechanism is unclear, but if you've used psychedelics it's pretty clear that your sense of self expands beyond this momentary human identity.

Related: a Reddit post, A Very Brief Outline Of The Evidence For The Afterlife

July 2.

2026-07-02T14:40:08Z

July 2. A personal note. There's a classic young adult book called Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, in which kids at a spooky boarding school channel the spirits of dead geniuses, and it's not good for them. That's basically my relationship with cannabis. It makes me more motivated, more creative, and more cheerful, but I can feel it wearing down my body, probably by messing with my sleep. I've tried using smaller doses earlier in the day, and it didn't work. So now I've cut back from almost every day to once or twice a week, and because I depend on it for inspiration, I will probably be writing less.

Tomorrow is Bandcamp Friday, and I'm going early into the weekend with some music. The Endless Orbit of Spacemen 3 contains no mention of Hawkwind, but it's a nice article about the second best English space rock band, with lots of links to the Bandcamp pages of artists that they influenced.

Green Lung are a fun doom rock band, I recommend starting with their Free The Witch EP, but this is their latest video, Necropolitan Line.

Living in Seattle in the 90s, I never saw Nirvana, but I saw multiple great bands that never made it big, and one of them was The Model Rockets. One of their songs would have been perfect for my next AI slideshow video, but it turns out someone has already made a fan video, 17 years ago out of video clips: She's On The Cover

July 31, 2025.

2026-07-31T19:30:13Z

July 31, 2025. My novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, is now in beta. I'm good at worldbuilding and bad at exposition, so I want to do more polishing to make it readable, and you should probably wait. But I'm satisfied that I've done what I set out to do: write the novel I wanted to read, that nobody else was writing.