A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ETERNITY OF ENTERTAINMENT

September 15th, 2019

Once the final stage of human advancement began, the ability to predict the future with accuracy increased at an exponential rate.  This meant that tomorrow began to have a resolution similar to what we might predict the next second to have, and future years began to have a resolution similar to how we see the next minute.  This trend increased at unfathomable speeds until decades could be predicted like succeeding seconds.  The singularity that humanity had waited for did not so much bring about some kind of expanding glory of human values as much as it did plan the future with exceptional and increasing reliability.  The scourge of chaos that had haunted humanity since the beginning was systematically being scrubbed from the universe.  This, however, did not speed up the great timeline of the universe and as things stood, it was still going to be a very long time until the obvious conclusion arrived.  The future no longer held any promise, only certainty, that one nemesis of chaos that humans had been lusting for since the beginning.   

In short, things got quite boring.

To pass the time artificial intelligences had created vast simulation games for the benefit of humans in order to spice up life with a safe degree of artificial chaos.  These simulations also functioned as a kind of elaborate Monte Carlo simulator which benefited the study and work of the artificial intelligences that were busy organizing the universe.

Once it was painfully clear just how boring the present had become, and how certain it was the future would be, Lucilius decided to take the plunge and try one of the awful simulations that everyone gloated over.  It would only take several minutes of real time to sample a few different realities, and since he had a nostalgic penchant for history, Lucilius decided to try one of the ancestor simulations. 

He walked into the simulator entrance with a sigh, initiating a telecommune with the present OS and transferred the few credits required to sample half a dozen lifetimes.  An array of dreamlike centuries manifested in his mind, the time collapsing into scents, tastes and flutters of light flashing from thousands of recorded positions through which the sun and earth had once passed.

Lucilius, feeling lethargic and not a little bummed about knowing the future so well, haphazardly picked a handful of different lives, barely paying attention to their content.  His mind swam through the selection like the hand of a god whimsically building creatures to populate universes. 

As he selected his credit count ticked away until he was out. 

A body maintenance pod emerged from the simulator’s vault and Lucilius sauntered over to it and leaned back into the comfortable padding.

The OS requested a confirmation for a start sequence and Lucilius sighed one more time, flinging his encrypted pass-thought into the network.

Then everything went dark.

Fourteen years later, Lucilius was slouched over a thick book open on his desk.  The voice of a jaded teacher droned on at the front of the classroom.  Lucilius glanced at the clock, calculating the time left and realized that it had only been two minutes since he’d last looked at the clock.  He couldn’t believe how bored he was and he couldn’t wait for the school day to end.

THE GOLDEN GUARANTEE

September 14th, 2019

As we understand things right now, everyone dies, and that’s the Golden Guarantee.

It’s guaranteed because as far as anyone can tell, as of right now, it’s definitely going to happen.

It’s golden because it’s the ultimate ‘out’.

All the embarrassment, shame, pain and fear will ‘poof’ be gone.  And given enough time, absolutely no one will remember nor care about it.

Perhaps that sounds sad at face value, but consider the flipside:

It’s freedom. 

You can go and try literally anything.  And no matter how bad it turns out, you have the Golden Guarantee to rely on.

It’s the positive inversion of the saying “I’ll do it later.”

The key is to realize that tomorrow doesn’t really exist.  All we have is the here and now.  Things that we say we’ll do later are things that we will never do.  Today is always the ‘later’ when we said we’d do something.

Likewise, the moment death arrives, the present vanishes.

It’s a Catch-22, but one that works to our benefit given the right perspective.

The Golden Guarantee holds that when we finally have a moment to reflect on our life as a whole, we will be unable to reflect in any capacity whatsoever.

well, at the very least, there’s no evidence of the possibility.  And until otherwise, we are wiser to position ourselves in relation to the facts in a way that benefits us, both psychologically and productively.

This could be wrong, but the Golden Guarantee ensures that there’s no real reason to worry about it

for very long.

THE END OF NOWHERE

September 13th, 2019

How long has it been since you saw the Laptop bumper sticker, or the cheesy Instagram post or one pierced hipster say to another:

All those who wander are not lost.

The line is originally from the Lord of the Rings, but that’s of little matter.

Wonder, for a moment, about what the word ‘wander’ means.

Someone wandering around is clearly looking for something, otherwise, wouldn’t a person stay put?

Do we have any other reason for wandering?  Even when we don’t really know what we’re looking for?

The urge is there.

But think about the opposite.  About a person who has no urge to wander.  We might label such a person with a euphemistic platitude about being content and knowing what they want, but does such a person have any chance of discovery?

To be sure we do not actually have to get up and physically wander around.  We can be at home, reading a book, or researching a topic that’s spawned 73 tabs in our internet browser. 

To wander is to pay heed to curiosity. 

Unlike the rigid tests of school, curiosity gently allows us to wonder, and suspect that there’s… something.. something out there that we don’t really know about yet. 

This sensing of the unknown is also captured by any great question.

Questions, which are defined on tinkered Thinking as open-ended concepts that create forward momentum, thrust the mind on a quest.

And a quest, like any good adventure cannot be planned.  We take it a step at a time and figure it out as we go.

In essence, we wander our way towards a realization.

All those who wander are not lost because they have a sense of something to find, but such people simply seem lost because no one yet knows the way.

THE VIRTUE OF NEGATIVITY

September 12th, 2019

Most people just complain, and that’s a good start.

The unfortunate part is that all effort often ends with the complaint.

In order to improve anything, it’s first necessary to have a perspective that is oriented negatively enough to find fault.

By this metric alone, nearly everyone qualifies to be a genius.

But of course we laud little the talent of finding fault.  Everyone can do it because it’s easy.  But this does not mean it should be under valued or shunned.  The capacity to find fault simultaneously evokes the possibility of a reality that could be better.

The is the virtue of negativity, the fact that it elicits a vision of life improved.

But this is only one piece of the puzzle and the first step towards improvement.  How our thoughts and actions develop as a further response determines whether the negativity of a perspective remains negative or if it undergoes the metamorphosis required to bring about a better circumstance.

A simple and often asked question strikes at the heart of this metamorphosis.  When we listen to a complaint, or hear one from our own self, we can ask:

What are you going to do about it?

This flips the negative perspective inside out and asks directly what the world would look like if this negative thing ceased to exist.

In this way, the negative and the possible positive are inextricably linked.

For instance, without any idea, inkling or feeling about how bad something is, how could we ever improve?

FALSIFY

September 11th, 2019

The best way to find out if you’re right about something is to try and prove yourself wrong.

The hesitating assumption here is that if you prove yourself wrong, then you’ll be left with nothing.

But this is not the case:

If you can falsify your idea, then it paves the way for a better idea.

We are often reluctant to do this though.  We get attached to our ideas, our theories, our own personal story of how the world works.  There’s some kind of emotional attachment present that breeds a fondness, the likes of which we are timid to betray.  We can see this same sort of thing play out similarly in human relationships: we often continue to love someone despite being a victim of their lies.

Bad or incorrect ideas play us for the same fool.

Does this have more to do with some kind of intrinsic manipulation on the part of the idea or the liar, or does it have more to do with our own reluctance to update our view of the world?

And to be sure, a thorough and honest update of the world demands that we behave differently in response and take different actions that take into account the inaccuracy of previously cherished ideas, beliefs and theories.

We would benefit greatly from creating a practice of celebrating falsification.

Every time an idea is thoroughly falsified, we no longer risk wasting time exploring an unproductive avenue.

While the capacity of the imagination is an infinite blessing, it is also the source of this curse of attachment to the unrealistic.

Modern society is protective and cushy to a degree that we can harbor wildly unrealistic and unproductive ideas without incurring damage nor injury.

Compare this with a hypothetical that incorporates the animal world:

Let’s say we have a deer that cherishes a belief that all other animals are kind and loving and only want to be friends.

Many people have imaginative aspirations that this is how things should be, and some probably believe that this actually is how things are.  But people are generally so far removed from the animal world that the full consequences of such a belief are never witnessed.

When a hungry wolf comes across our overly-idealistic deer, our deer would either have to compromise it’s ideals quickly, or it would have it’s cherished belief forcibly falsified by the jaws of that hungry wolf.

The protective aura of our modern environment has an upside and a downside in this instance.  The upside is that we don’t need threat of death to weed out bad ideas – we are capable of updating our beliefs without dying.  The downside is that death is very efficient at weeding out bad ideas and bad ideas are slower to leave our minds and lives of practice.  Natural selection has engineered skittish and suspicious deer that assume something looking like a wolf is never in the mood to be friendly.  Modern society has removed the wolf and in so doing allows us to imagine –falsely- things like wolves being friendly to deer.

As with many other things in our modern environment, our progress depends on the creation of an artificial hardship.  In this case, we must go against the intuitive grain and use the intellect to challenge that warm fuzzy feeling we have when we think of our cherished idea, theory or belief. 

Ruthlessly attempting to falsify our beliefs is the only way we merge the substance of our imagination and the brick and mortar consequences of reality.

Pause, and meditate for a moment on what this means in terms of what it means to be alive.  Are we really living with our head in the clouds?  Preoccupied with some sort of imaginary idea of how the world works?  Are we not missing out on the real stuff of life in this situation? 

The difficult and perhaps painful act of aggressively trying to falsify our beliefs inevitably brings us closer to reality, and ultimately enables us to live a more authentic life.

Unfortunately, for many people, one touch of this falsification process swings the pendulum too far, and dreamy optimists become unrealistically pessimistic and simultaneously claim to be cold-hard realists. 

But the cynical pessimist is not much different than the dreamy optimist.  Both are governed by an emotional attachment to some idea of the world.

Only the one who can continue tinkering and testing reality with new and updated ideas has that emotional pendulum properly calibrated – that is: vibrating in the center.

For such an individual, optimism exists on a much longer timeline, and the setbacks that could cause emotional upset in the daily grind are of little matter.  Such setbacks, and falsifications – inevitably, are rungs on a ladder towards a better understanding.  And such setback can even become positive emotional fuel.  The instance of falsification is proof that updating is occurring, that the imagination’s overlap with reality is increasing, even if it feels as though the absolute bounds of what is possible are shrinking.

It’s not the absolute size of the imagination that matters, but its range of flexibility while acting within the physical laws of reality.

Finally, note that updating our idea of the world only occurs through falsification.  If our idea succeeds, then no updating has really occurred.  What we thought was possible turned out to be possible.  In such a case, our idea of reality hasn’t actually improved.  It’s simply been used to make something happen.

This episode references Episode 498: Artificial Hardship