A LUCILIUS PARABLE: MAD MYTH

December 22nd, 2019

For a few brief moments Lucilius wondered if he were hallucinating.  Beyond the orange sandy dune a monolith of steel, like a low flat building hovered above the desolate land.  He thumbed a knob on his goggles adjusting the apertures and zooming in on the structure.  Three of the corners were supported by giant metal columns, that looked at though they telescoped down into the ground like giant hydraulic supports.  The forth leg was buried in sand as decades of shifting desert had finally piled up high enough to reach the structure. 

The hot blue sky was clear, so he removed his goggles to squint at the site with his bare eyes.  He studied it a few more minutes and then began to slide down the crumbling dune to climb up the next, and at the top of each he paused just a moment as the giant building grew larger.

The dune piled up high against the forth column crumbled as Lucilius slowly climbed.  He paused with each step, allowing the sands to resettle, trying to sense whether the whole of it would fall from beneath him.  Finally he touched the hot gleaming metal, feeling the slumped pyramid of soft sand loosen beneath him.  His fingers grasped an edge just as the weight beneath his feet lightened and he was left hanging.  The sand below him resettled again for a moment until an edge of the hollow created by the shaft’s shadow gave way and the mound of sand that brought him so high began to sift out, draining the height below him until the fall tensed his nerves.

“Ok,” Lucilius muttered to himself, hanging by the slight grip against the hot metal building.  He looked up at the next corrugation in the wall.  This new world was filled with moments when the future collapsed to a pinch and there was no telling whether it’d restart.  Lucilius eyed the distance, and then slowly pulled himself up and then quickly let a hand go and slapped the arm above him, just barely grasping the next edge.  He hoisted himself until he was again hanging and slowly brought the smooth soles of his boots to the first edge.  He could barely feel the indent through the off-road tire rubber he’d stitched on, but it was enough to feel some relief.  After a moment he looked up again to see the next edge, and the next.

“You don’t even know if there’s a way in up there,” he muttered.  There was nothing in this wasteland, and the wasteland only grew.

The sun sank as he rose.  He watched his hand against the sky disappear above the metal wall and he searched for something to grasp.  There was a lip to the structure.  His fingers hoarded the strong comfortable shape and then the muscles in his arms bristled as they worked on such little energy, his whole body quivering as he struggled.  He slid an elbow over and then reached with his other hand, his feet now dangling from that high edge of the gleaming edifice.   He hauled himself up, rolled onto the flat surface and laid there gasping, his hands aching.   He looked at his hands, his fingers like clumped up claws.  Years before they would have blistered from the heat and the effort, but now they just hurt.

As the buzzing in his hands and arms calmed, he got up, and looked around.  The roof was outlined in a thick black band.  Lucilius looked closely at it.  It was composed of solar panels, and at their inner edge a grate-covered gutter.  Beyond it towards the center lay glass panels.  Lucilius walked to the edge and then looked down into the monolith.

There he saw green.  Endless green.  The entire monolith seemed filled with a hydroponic system.  He walked onto the glass above the huge well kept garden.  Drones buzzed up and down the lattice work of plants, pruning and cutting, collecting tomatoes and grapes, spinach and an endless variety of foods Lucilius had not seen in years.

He frantically looked around.  There had to be some sort of service hatch.  Anything.  Lucilius knew he’d never be able to break glass this thick, so solidly mounted to the steel construction that made up the glass roof.  He turned back to the corner where he’d climbed, remembering what he’d first grabbed hold of.  The corner panel was raised slightly, creating a gap. He got on his hands and knees searching to understand how it might work, feeling where he could beneath the lip of the panel.  His hands raced along and bumped.  His fingers fumbled at the shape, gripping, twisting, pulling until there was a click.  The thin high sound of pressed air fled from the panel and it lifted. 

Lucilius pulled the panel shut as he descended the ladder and within minutes he was gorging on strawberries, bell peppers and stuffing handfuls of wet crisp lettuce into his mouth, tilting the pod to drink deeply of the fresh cold water.  He ate until he was nearly sick.  He lay slumped against the wall, watching in awe the magnificent heights of green, the drones going about their mindless work, and on the ground level rows of fruit trees and lines of vegetables growing in soil so fresh and dark, Lucilius felt as though it were an alien of his memory.

“The hell is this place?” he wondered aloud biting into another strawberry, the sharp sweet tang making him shudder.  It was the first time he could remember feeling full in a long time.  It didn’t matter if it was a dream, it was surely better than anywhere he knew he might wake up.  But he didn’t wake up, he got up and began to explore more. 

He found the drones were systematically depositing the food into a grinder system that liquefied the fruits and vegetables in a corner of the edifice.  A huge vat of the liquid food was being filled.  Lucilius sat against the wall, munching from a handful of green beans he’d taken from a drone, watching the whole system.  It was only moments later when the system lights attached to the vat began to flicker and the drones stopped their toil to grind the food.  Then quickly and smoothly, the vat emptied completely.  A wash cycle started in order to clean the vat and Lucilius wandered further, exploring. 

It was in the forth corner that he found a door with no handle, only a button.  He pressed it and it opened onto a small room.  Tentatively he stepped inside, looking around.

“Reminds me of an elevator,” he mumbled as the door slid shut and the floor jolted as it clearly descended.  He leapt at the door thinking the elevator might lead him back out into that desert wasteland, but remembered the thick column.  He was in a corner of the building, he knew.  The elevator was descending through the column.

The doors opened onto a giant circular room, dimly lit, save for the light that radiated up through another glass floor in the center.  Lucilius walked to it and looked down.

There were rows and rows lining a deep circular hole down into the earth.  Rows of pods where Lucilius could see people, motionless, as though frozen in each one.  Hundreds of them.

“Jesus Christ..” Lucilius mumbled, wondering how this place could exist, with everything that had happened.  The light in the vast chamber seemed to be dimming, and Lucilius figured it was probably in accordance to the setting of the sun, remembering how dark the sky had grown above the hydroponics before he’d discovered the elevator.

He looked around and found what he figured might be the brain of the operation.  A large computer screen and a some sort of control station.  Lucilius rolled back the chair to sit, but stopped.  Embedded in the desk, as though incased in glass was a book.  He leaned in closer, disbelieving his eyes.  He read the words again.  It was the Holy Bible.  He sat down and stared at the book.

The strange novelty of it all was still awash in his mind, so fresh that questions could not even yet form, when the giant screen lit up, startling Lucilius.

The huge screen was filled with the hardened face of an old man, his eyes clear, his beard flush with deep grey.  It did not speak but merely stared at Lucilius, as though studying him.

Unsure if the face could actually see him, Lucilius looked around.

“Well?,” the face said, the sound booming throughout the cavernous room.  “How did you get in?”

“The roof.”

“How’d you get on top then?  The sands aren’t high enough.”

“They were against one of the columns.”

The face looked away from Lucilius, nodding.  “I turned off the security system years ago.  Many died trying to get in during those early days, but after decades with no one trying to break in, it seemed a waste of energy.  And to be honest after the last satellites went dark, I haven’t paid much attention to this side of things?”

“This side of things?”  Lucilius prodded.

The face looked at him.  “The real world, as you’d probably think of it.”

“As opposed to what?”  Lucilius asked further.

“The one below you, in the mainframes.  I created a matrix for these people.”

“A simulation?”

“Yes, perhaps.  One that I create and control.  One where the word of God is fact, not some fiction in a book.”

Lucilius slowly let this expand in his mind before asking.  “Are you human, or computer based?”

“Oh, I’m human, I am down there with them.  You see, I used to be a titan of industry, before things began to fall.” The head shook a little looking off.  “I tried to turn things around.  We all did, but we were too late, so my last efforts went into this place.  For these people – my chosen ones.  After the world began to turn into the desert it is now, they were losing hope, so I gave them this place, where their beliefs make sense.”

“Are you their God?” 

The head nodded.  “I play the role.  And I control it.  I’ve made my mistakes through the years, but I’m getting the hang of it.”

“I get the sense you probably knew when I got in.”

The head nodded.

“Why didn’t you turn the security system back on then?”

The head breathed deeply and sighed.  “Enough people have died.  You looked hungry.”

“Do they remember the real world?”

“No no, it wouldn’t work as well if they did.  Perhaps not at all.”

“So what now?” Lucilius asked, putting his worry aloud.

“Well, I can’t plug you in.  And even if I could, I get the sense that you wouldn’t want to join us.  But you can stay if you’d like.  There’s more than enough food.  I suppose it might have been different if there’d been someone with you, but that’s not the case.  And now I have to go.”

“Why do you do it?  Live in that other world when you know this one is still here?  How can you do it?”

The face smiled, and just before it snapped to black, it said

“They love me.”

UNIFYING REALMS OF DATA

December 21st, 2019

All creatures have some kind of input.  Humans have a few.  We can taste, we can touch, we can hear and we can see a certain sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call visible light. 

Bees can see ultraviolet light and humans generally can’t, but beyond these small slivers in the electromagnetic spectrum, there is a huge range of activity that bees are oblivious too and humans for the majority of our existence have also been oblivious too.

The important difference is that we have figured out how to access that spectrum without having any sense organs that are designed to interface with these other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We have been able to notice everything from Ionizing radiation to microwaves and beyond.  This hasn’t just given us new capabilities like transmitting massive amounts of information through your average wifi network which utilizes radiowaves, it’s also allowed us to study the fabric of the cosmos.  When we simply look up at the night sky with the un-aided eye, we only see specks of light, but with our ability to access a larger portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, we see an outpouring of information raining down from the heavens.  This information gives us a more nuanced and detailed perspective of what is potentially going on when we look up at the night sky.

Just as our use of radio waves via wifi or cellular networks provides us with access to an endless stream of information about what’s happening around the world, with our family, our friends, or even if we wish to access the vast treasure trove of human knowledge.  Because of our awareness and manipulation of this part of the spectrum that we cannot see nor taste nor hear nor touch, we no longer have to make a trip to the library or write a letter or make the arduous journey to visit someone.

Perhaps most important, however is our ability to unify these realms of information.  Not just in a manipulative sense in that we can convert something like sound or a picture into a form that can utilize radiowaves, but that our juxtaposition of these different realms allows us to make assertions about the nature of physical reality that is simply unavailable to your average bumble bee or octopus.

This is an assumption that Octopi and Bees don’t have some hidden access to the whole electromagnetic spectrum, but chances are they would express this access in some sort of use. 

Natural selection has little use for the useless.

Humans, on the other hand are quite quick to put a new discovery to use.  Curious findings rarely remain just curious findings.  We find some way to use it, manipulate it, and bend it to our benefit.

Just as we had no knowledge of Gamma rays for most of human history despite their presence nearly everywhere, we must wonder, what else is right in front of us, just waiting for our minds to create some portal so it can be seen?

What keys might such unknowns hold to the questions we see in other places?

RIVALNYM CASE STUDY: NATURAL SOCIETY

December 20th, 2019

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a Rivalnym, it is something developed by Tinkered Thinking to address a certain class of words and concepts that fall in a strange place between Synonyms and Antonyms.  A rivalnym is a word, or rather, a pair of words that are somewhat synonymous in literal meaning, but opposite in terms of the emotional valence we ascribe to the thing being described.

An easy example is the pair of words cooperation/conspiracy.  Both describe a group of people who are working together to bring about a commonly desired goal.

But cooperation is generally positive and conspiracy is generally negative.

This episode seeks to explore a pair of concepts that are a bit more complicated than the usual rivalnyms that have popped up on Tinkered Thinking before.

First, enter one of the most ambiguous and difficult to define words in the entire English language:

Natural.

Ask 10 different people what Natural means and you’ll get 10 different answers with a vague trend of similarity.  You’ll also get a few perplexed pauses.

One inevitable answer is that natural is whatever occurs in nature.  This seems reasonable enough, but the construction ‘in nature’ contains a fair amount of problem.

For example, can we say that human society is natural?  The aim here isn’t to answer it outright but simply to point out that ‘in nature’ implies somewhere else: the woods, where wild animals outnumber humans, and the ocean which might as well be totally unavailable to the average human – aside from what we haul out of it to eat.

Human society seems to be somewhat separate from nature given the way that we use these words.  And of course there are countless people who believe that we should ‘return’ to more natural ways.  The existence of this perspective is perhaps the best evidence to underscore the separateness that we’ve managed to squeeze between society and nature.

The problem with this dichotomy is easy to unravel and it requires only a simple question:

Where did human society come from?

Some might simply say ‘humans’, but where did humans come from?  Well if Darwin has anything to say about it, we arose from the “natural” world.

The fact that human society ultimately arose from the natural world is unavoidable.  In fact, without human society and culture, the concept of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ wouldn’t even exist.  They are things we created.

The interesting thing about this dichotomy which makes it begin to look like a Rivalnym is that we can say the exact same thing about the word ‘society’.  Without human culture and society the concept of ‘society’ wouldn’t exist.  We can take it to one more level of paradox and point out that ‘society' as a concept and as a real functioning thing, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for…. ‘nature’.

Both ‘society’ and what is ‘natural’ are describing a process that we see on earth.

The most functional definition of what is ‘natural’ is simply what is physically possible.

This means that it’s natural for animals to eat each other alive, which happens everyday.

It also means plastic is natural and space travel, and of course, society.

But of course some of these things we feel good about and others we don’t feel good about and it’s because of this deep human trend to categorize things in such ways that we split things into different words.

Is it a conspiracy?

Or cooperation between people?

All depends on if you approve of their goal.

Nature is a sort of master category which subsumes all other categories.  To claim that we are separate from it, or straying from it is to completely miss the larger picture.

Mother nature curiously created humans, and she’s clearly interested about where we are going to go and what we are going to do.

ANALYSIS PARALYSIS

December 19th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Clay Nichols.  You can connect with Clay on Twitter @ClayNichols

Balance is an overrated concept, and this is only because it is misunderstood.  It’s propped up in our hectic culture as some ethereal ideal, but it’s shoved into our frameworks for understanding in a broken way.

A useful way to see how balance is used in a broken way is to think about walking.  Yes, walking.

Walking is not an expression of balance.  Standing in one place without falling is an expression of balance.  While standing, the virtue of your body’s posture as placed against the ground is in balance with the force of gravity that is pulling your body to the ground.

If you think about walking carefully, you realize that

the only way to move forward is to throw yourself off balance.

Think about it: if you’re standing in one place, what is the very first thing you do in order to take a step forward? You lean forward.  But at this point in your life, your reaction to this destabilizing action is such an automaticity that you don’t realize that each and every step is actually an act of catching yourself before you fall flat on your face.

The physics of walking is quite literally the act of throwing yourself off balance and then catching yourself, over and over and over.  Do this enough and it seems like a new type of ‘balance’ emerges, one that seems more pronounced when we run at a fast clip.  But balance is probably not the best word.  Something like the word ‘flow’ might be a better fit.

The structure of walking and it’s relation to the concept of balance can act as a useful framework for other areas where we hope to make progress.

And walking might be more fitting as analogy for progress than we might at first realize.

After all, the definition of progress is: forward or onward movement toward a destination, or  advancement toward a better, more complete, or more modern condition.

The primary definition of ‘progress’ might as well be the definition of ‘walking’.

To use the word progress in a more contemporary sense, we can wonder: how does this rhythm of balance and off-balance apply to things that are less literal in their movement towards a place?

or rather:

How does balance make sense in the context of progress towards a goal?

This particular question might evoke similarly problematic flavors of speech and phrasing that are all too familiar, like: are we on track to achieve our goal?

The two together can be cobbled together into an image of a train that is properly balanced on it’s tracks and headed towards a specific destination.  This is a dangerous way to think about progress for one simple reason:  if we are trying to achieve a novel goal, then it’s something that hasn’t necessarily ever been done before, and a train track is proof of a destination that has been reached before.

If you are trying to achieve something new, then you have to blaze a trail.  There are no tracks or roads or paths nor trails to the place that has never been visited.

If the place we wish to achieve is not physical, then what does our rhythmic process of balance and off balance look like?

These two states boil down into two of our most basic options as conscious beings.

There is thinking

and there is doing.

We cannot achieve something through pure thinking alone, even if some brilliant realization comes along, that realization needs some sort of expression in order to be meaningful, and such expression is the doing part.

Likewise, if we only do things, then the effectiveness of our action is left to the whims of fate.  Luck favors action asymmetrically in this case because pure thought has almost no visible impact on the world.  But, simply doing things without some sort of thoughtful pause and analysis runs the risk of doing the same dumb thing over and over.

Given any point in time, if we just stop and think about things, our thoughts have a high likelihood of settling into a fairly repetitive pattern.  Perhaps, we could call this balance, in that our understanding of reality has reached some sort of stability based on what we know, but this doesn’t mean it’s comfortable, nor does it mean we are making progress.  It doesn’t take much time standing in one place to grow uncomfortable.

As with standing in one place, so too with thinking: we must throw ourselves off balance.  In the literal framework of walking, this instantly gives us a new perspective.  With progress, in order to gain a new perspective on reality, we have to poke it.  We have to do something in order to get a response from reality, and this response carries new information, which ideally updates what we understand about reality which further develops our perspective in the way that movement does in a literal way.

Think for a moment about hiking in the back country.  It’s necessary to stop in order to get your bearings and figure out which way to go next.  You stop to look around and get a sense of where things are and where you are in relation to them.  Then you move on.  And this process repeats.

The same repetition is necessary for thinking and doing.  The trick to thinking in order to stay fresh and keep from falling into analysis paralysis is to ask an effective question.  The question ideally poses a curiosity about reality that we currently have little to no information about.  If the question we ask simply spins our thinking off into a different circular pattern, then it is not an effective question.

It does well to remember what a question really is, as Tinkered Thinking explores in episode 128.

A good question propels us into action for an answer that lies only in the folds of reality.

Once we’ve taken some action that mines an answer from reality, we can again pause and think about the implications, as we integrate this new knowledge and check our bearings on where we are in relation to the place we imagine might exist.

Repeat this over and over, and the sky’s the limit.

This episode builds off of Episode 133: The Right Track, Episode 128: Question and most importantly Episode 269: Blazing Tracks, and . . .

Make sure to subscribe at TinkeredThinking.com.  Subscriber-only content is in the works. . .

GET BEHIND YOURSELF AND PUSH

December 18th, 2019

Doesn’t matter why you don’t feel good.  Doesn’t matter what happened during the day.  Doesn’t matter how much you don’t want to do it. 

It simply doesn’t matter what you are feeling if those feelings stand in the way of what you need to do, what you could do, and what would lead to a better life.

Sometimes, you just need to get behind yourself and push.

As with this episode.