ENTERTAINING NONSENSE

September 13th, 2022

Taking nonsense seriously is a serious problem while trying to make sense of the world. But entertaining nonsense is a vital skill because of how it changes our relationship to the unknown.

Is there much of a difference between taking a concept seriously and entertaining that concept? Certainly the seriousness of taking something seriously indicates it’s a bit further along on the spectrum of seriousness when compared to mere entertaining:

It’s one thing to invite someone in and entertain a guest. It’s quite another to invite that guest to move in.

Many people suffer from simply being too serious. And the caution warning on life’s prescription bottle would likely indicate that taking everything too seriously is likely to result in the adverse effect of taking nonsense seriously when such delight should only be merely entertained.

A serious person might claim that nonsense should not be considered at all. But being so serious, a serious person cannot seriously entertain the possibility that such serious discrimination might hamstring the ability to discriminate! How is one who only considered things seriously supposed to consider whether something is nonsense or not? Well, our serious fellow is caught in the hinge and teeth of a serious problem. Consideration of nonsense mistaken as something that is not nonsense means said nonsense must be seriously considered.

Hence the need to entertain nonsense. Is this guest merely a fool who makes me laugh, or is this a zen master of sorts making fun of me and itself?

Entertaining nonsense means combing through a lot more of the content of life. But not as an arduous task, but a pleasurable one, like feasting ones eyes on a beautiful vista, taking in more and more because all the details add to the beauty. 

But most importantly, the mental demeanor that comes with an ability to entertain nonsense translates to the way we shake hands with the unknown.

Traditionally the scariest thing to humanity, the unknown is home to both delightful surprise and crushing disappointment. All manner of unexpected lies beyond its front door. And those too serious to entertain nonsense have far more trouble knocking for entry than those who keep their souls fresh with a little nonsense.

FLIP CHESS

September 12th, 2022

This is a variation of chess that is designed to bridge the gap between experienced players and those just getting started. Normally, games for newbies against skilled players are demoralizing. Who wants to play a game after losing 7 games in a row? No one. Such games are also often boring for experienced players. Two problems, one solution:

Enter flip chess.

Instructions: Set up the board normally. Each player makes a move. Then, a coin is flipped. If the coin lands heads up, the board turned around, meaning: the players swap sides. Then the above instruction is simply repeated: each player makes a move and then the coin is flipped.

Why does flip chess work? 

Most importantly, by the end of the game, when one side has won (or drawn) both people playing the game have contributed to the win. The game is still fun without being demoralizing for the newbie player. Equally important: the game isn’t boring for the experienced player. Each flip of the board presents a fresh chess puzzle to work on, and it allows the more experienced player to develop both sides of the board without getting into the recursive loop that occurs when trying to play yourself. The newbie player also gets to see more developed boards - something that only comes about far down the learning curve.

While this might not work for elite players, flip chess likely bridges the gap between most players. But more importantly, this form of chess is more likely to keep a newbie interested. I have seen far more people give up on playing chess due to a demoralizing string of defeats than I have seen people grit their teeth and make it through the initial learning curve.

It’s interesting to think what sort of play might evolve with flip chess. Right now the sample size is very small (basically me and a few people I’ve tried it with), but with a larger sample size there’s an interesting set of new tactics that might evolve that take into consideration the randomness introduced by the flipped coin, more akin to poker… but this is yet to be seen.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DREAM OF THE LUDDITES

September 11th, 2022

Lucilius and the rest of humanity was now spending almost all of its waking existence in a simulation of one sort or another. In fact, many people never even left the host simulation which functioned as a gateway to nearly all the other simulations. There was something for everyone, and everything for anyone: Hyper realistic video games that merged the old entertainment of movies with the agency of RPGs. There were learning simulations and therapy simulations, but in all, nearly every simulation that humanity now indulged with was simply an iteration on community. 

Lucilius was soaring through host simulation, scanning the possibilities when he noticed something he’d never seen before: a warning notification. He zoomed toward the simulation node and entered the simulation antechamber - a kind of welcome room to learn about what was on offer. An attendant materialized behind a desk, its feet already propped up, reading a book - an ornament of the antechamber, and a generated program that could answer Lucilius’ questions.

“What’s with the warning notification?”

“Memory erasure required for this one?”

“Like, a full memory wipe?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

The attendant, now resigned from the task of being distracted from their book, looked at Lucilius. It’s a luddite simulation.

Lucilius was aware of the word, but didn’t understand. 

“Like a hippie paradise or something?”

The attendant wagged its head unconvinced from side to side.

“A bit more extreme.”

“How extreme?”

“Hunter gatherer extreme,” The attendant said, raising its eyebrows.

“Oh neat. How long does it last?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well I assume it’s story line?”

The attendant shook its head. “Nah, this simulation starts in batches, and most prefer not to do a time toggle.”

“Most? So how many groups or batches are there?”

“About two dozen.”

“And how many people are engaged?”

“A few thousand per, usually. Just enough so the simulation’s genetic program can run without too much risk of malformations.”

“Wait are you saying people are having kids in there?”

“Sure.”

“What happens when the simulation ends?”

“Only one has ended.”

“Holy, so all the other batches, these people have been in there, for what, years? Decades?”

“Yep.”

“And what happened with the one batch that has finished? Did they have a strange time reacclimatizing? Did any of them forget what the real world is like?”

The attendant smiled. “That batch was time toggled.”

“Ok, so how much time did they experience?”

“278,221 years.”

“What?!?” Lucilius exclaimed. “What do people do in a hunter gatherer simulation for a quarter million years?”

The attendant smiled. “They went because they yearned for a simpler time, a simpler life... but eventually they forgot why they'd gone in the first place and they invented civilization, and they progressed technologically until they too began to build simulations in order to escape their world, their reality. Yearning it seems, always, for something simpler, something other than the reality we're given.”

“A simulation inside a simulation in order to escape the simulation.”

The attendant nodded.

Lucilius rolled his eyes. Unimpressed. But a question gathered in his mind around an incongruity.

“Wait you said that batch finished.”

“Mmhmm,” the attendant sounded.

“But you said they built that simulation inside their simulation. That doesn’t add up, how did it all end? You said batch was done with their hunter gatherer simulation.”

The attendant smiled and then looked around.

“Where exactly do you think you are right now?”

Lucilius looked around. He was in the host simulation. But he clearly remembered the real world. The history that lead up to it. The technological progress, the creation and adoption of simulations. He looked back at the attendant.

“And where exactly do you think you came from?”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: LORD OF THE SIMULATION

August 28th, 2022

“I know it’s a crazy idea,” Lucilius said, wide-eyed, staring into the mirror. 

“But,” his reflection said. “There’s no way to prove that it might not be real.”

“Real… real….” Lucilius rolled the word around in his mind, listening to it out loud. Watching the reflection say the word.

Lucilius had not been particularly productive as of late. And this had come to bother him to an enormous degree. He’d had spectacular bouts of creativity and output over the years, but now he felt as though he were stuck. He’d been lolling about in his own mind and body for months and it felt more and more as though the great story and drama of humanity through time was just zipping past his now stand still life. The issues of habitual sloth had come to bother him so much that he’d begun to entertain some rather unorthodox ideas about what was going on with this vast game of life.

“The flow,” Lucilius said. “We need to feel the flow again, and it must be some other entity that makes this happen.” Lucilius stated to the knowing and nodding audience in the mirror. 

“No more NPC for us,” it said back.

“Exactly, we just need to get the attention of one of the lords.”

“Yes,” the reflection said in turn. “The Lord of the Simulation will heed our call, and inhabit our character in the game and then we will feel the flow again. We will be productive!”

“Yes,” Lucilius said. “I don’t know if it’ll be the same player. Maybe there are different players, different lords that have access to the simulation and maybe they switch characters.”

The eyes of the person in the mirror were rabid with excitement. “It doesn’t matter, we just need one, even a bad player might be better than this aimless existence!”

Lucilius nodded, thinking of the high cost that such an outcome might entail. He wondered if the Lords of the Simulation perhaps even inhabited NPC’s in order to ruin their lives just for fun. He thought of the many people he’d seen in poverty, on street corners, spouting nonsense, disconnected from reality. 

He giggled. “..disconnected from reality,” he said, thinking of the implications. How can you be disconnected from reality when you’re just a character in a simulation. But it didn’t matter. Lucilius now had a task. He had to get the attention of one of the Simulation Lords. A game player from that other dimension. Wherever, whenever they might be.

“But how do we get the attention of a Simulation Lord?” The reflection asked Lucilius. He pondered this, wondering what had made his character and his life potentially appealing to a Simulation Lord in the past. What had inspired these other entities to take on his life as a role to play in the vast game of life and through him produce such work and discipline and concentration? He yearned for that flow state. For that sense when his person - his self was muted from existence and there was only the work at hand that he seemed to embody. When there was only attention and concentration and not a shred of feeling self-conscious…

“But how do we get the attention of a Simulation Lord?” Lucilius muttered, repeating what he’d heard the reflection ask…

“We could make a huge sign, and maybe the Lords will see it.”

“Like in the desert? Like what ancient peoples used to do?”

“Exactly. It could be the sign of triangular cycle.”

“Of course, that might get their attention. But it would have to be very big.”

“Hundreds of miles.”

“But that would require the focus and attention and the motivation that we’re trying to get from one of the Simulation Lords.”

The person in the mirror looked puzzled, concerned, as though thinking. “Perhaps it doesn’t have to be so big. Maybe it can be small. Perhaps we can even get the attention of a Simulation Lord by writing a letter, surely they can see that happening since they probably have access to all of the simulation..”

“Like a prayer?”

“Exactly! People used to pray to the muses for inspiration. Is there any difference?”

Lucilius pondered the connection. Excited. “Yes, of course, when poets prayed to the muses they were really just getting the attention of the Simulation Lords!”

Lucilius left the mirror and went to his desk and sat down to write a letter, a kind of prayer to the Lord of the Simulation.

And it was at this point in the story that its writer wondered exactly who was inhabiting who. Was Lucilius about to write a prayer to me so that I might inhabit him for some little patch of his life, as it seems I’ve done for the last few hundred written words… or could it be the other way around?

Dear reader, it seems I’ve found myself in a bit of a paradox and a trap, and the words I’ve written had bent around and now stare at me, as though challenging me with the same question I challenge my main character with. Where exactly is this simulation? Is it the imagined reality of this story, which has blossomed in your mind? Or might Lucilius exist somewhere else, and he has only visited my mind temporarily, to inspire me during this short swatch of time in my own life, in order to guide my hand as I write these words… Am I Lucilius’ muse or is he mine? 

It’s always a bit of a funny trick, how a story emerges here.The obvious mistake might be that there isn’t so strict a divide between Lucilius and the writer of these words, and that he’s more like a writer’s shadow, or I’m his, and when conditions are right we show up together, conjoined  by some brightness in the simulation as we dance in sync, unsure who is controlling who, like Pan’s shadow, provoking him into a chase. Does Lucilius trick me into making him exist each time, or do I trick him?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: INSATIABLE

August 21st, 2022

An enormous belch rumbled up, rattling Lucilius’s gullet, filling his thick, ballooning cheeks before exploding from his greasy face. His eyes rolled in strange directions under the heat of the sun, and for all the discomfort caused by the limp satisfaction of his gargantuan appetite, he could not hear the soft splicket of water rolling up the beach in thin, gentle waves. His nebulous sense of consciousness, barely capable at that level of intoxication was attentive only to a degree that he could command a flabby arm to swing out and swipe another frozen margarita from a passing tray. His arm and head had to bend together in unison to bring the cold syrupy drink to his face over the bloated paunch that had become his body. His reaching, wavering lips could barely grasp the twisty straw, and he began slurping the beverage in huge heaves, like breaths taken by someone nearly drowned. As the sweating cup drained, Lucilius’ titanic body began to rumble as though a seizure emanating from his gut was shaking the core of his being. But there was no register in his numb eyes. HIs face continued to undulate, hoovering the cold sludge into his body. The quivering tremors radiating all across his body reached a harmonic pitch, and his body split open, exploding in a spew that plastered the entire beach. 

He opened his bleary eyes, and immediately shielded himself from the bright lights. A young smiling attendant in a lab coat watched as Lucilius slowly came to his senses.

“Well Lucilius, it seems you’re not quite there yet. Based on average training times, you still have one or two more spin-ups to go through.”

Lucilius moaned, as though he were just remembering - the sensation, so real, like a dream that could not be unforgotten. The feeling of his body under so much pressure, the difficulty to breath, the slippery thoughts, hard to catch, like sentences with too much time and space between the words.

“Two more spin-ups? Are you kidding?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I don’t want to, that can’t be right.”

“Apologies, but you signed the disclaimer, I’m obligated to remind you. You’ve placed your development in the hands of our program and there is technically no physical pain.”

Lucilius laughed bitterly. “Feels real enough.”

The attendant wagged his head gently from side to side as a gesture of thoughtful consideration. “The mind makes it real, I suppose.”

“So there’s no difference.”

The attendant sighed. “Well, we can try to make the process shorter by turning neocortex expression down to nearly absolute zero and giving your limbic system almost unlimited control. However, I have to warn you, it will ultimately be more uncomfortable, but this far into the process it will not cause any damage since you’re progress is almost complete.”

Lucilius waved a hand forward, as though beckoning the experience forward.

“Do it. Bring it. I’m sick of this, let’s just get it over with.”

The attendant wore a flat and uninspired expression. “This will require combining all of the hedonic simulations into one single experience in order to have the appropriate effect on the limbic system.”

Lucilius rubbed his own forehead, dreading what the might mean exactly. “Barbarians…” he muttered.

“Sorry?” The attendant said.

Lucilius looked at him. “In the future, we’ll probably look back on this procedure as barbaric.”

The attendant nodded in a knowing, confident way that annoyed Lucilius. “Unfortunately this is the best we have right now for what we are trying to achieve.”

Lucilius sighed. “I suppose the mystics were right.”

The attendant smiled knowingly again. “But luckily now we don’t have to wait for the many lives that may not even exist. Now we can progress spiritually at a rate that no other religion or belief or practice has ever been able to come close to.”

Lucilius rolled his eyes, well aware of this fanaticism. Hedonic Exhaustion Therapy had been developed almost on the eve of simulation technology. Pleasure and fun was the first commercial use-case for simulation tech, and that use case burnt itself out of a business model almost as fast since people were able to condense time within simulations. The pioneers of such hedonic experience began compressing hundreds of decades of excess into weeks and months, and unexpectedly some began emerging from their simulations with a totally reformed sense of self, as though they had finally found an end to the infinite treadmill of hedonism. It was these first reformed pioneers who developed Hedonic Exhaustion Therapy, designing a program to help normal people permanently displace the distraction of their own hedonic desires by exhausting it in the limit.

Lucilius had been skeptical of this whole program since the beginning. These reformers and their HET programs seemed to Lucilius to be a new kind of extremism. Hedonism seemed merely replaced by a new unreached limit, and while graduates of the therapy were achieving unfathomable results in terms of productivity and discipline, Lucilius had his doubts. Lucilius was not necessarily an enemy of extremes on principle but the simply swap of one for another seemed nothing more than a bait and switch, and he questioned how much good there was in such a thing, so naturally, he had to try it for himself and find out.

“How long will this one last?"

The attendant smiled, almost deviously. “This final simulation has no set end. It’s length is based on real time data from your brain, so the simulation ends as soon as Limbic and Neocortical activity reaches a particular harmonic balance given the asymmetric influence.”

Lucilius was curious. “What sort of balance exactly is that?"

“We’ve determined a particular brain state that signals when the therapy has had its full effect - a state that is optimal given the promises of our therapy.”

“What’s the average time for this particular simulation?”

“Oh, most people can’t stand more than a few years. People break pretty quick when everything is combined.”

“And what’s the record?”

The attendant laughed. “I promise you. There’s no need to try and set a record here.”

“Would not that kind of ego-exercise be useful, if not ideal for this kind of therapy.”

The attendant looked skeptical. “Our focus isn’t the ego so much as it is low-level hedonism.”

Lucilius looked equally skeptical. “Alright let’s just get to it and get this hedonic sutra on the books.”

The attendant chuckled. “Hedonic sutras.. I haven’t heard that one yet!”

Lucilius mumbled to himself as he relaxed and closed his eyes, waiting for the simulation to begin. “Moderation in everything, including moderation.”

Several hours later the attendant was bent over a the simulation monitor, his eyes wide as he anxiously chewed at the skin around his fingernails. The door opened and the program’s director walked in.

“What’s the status of the patient?”

The attendant looked at his superior with desperation and spoke with a tense accuracy. “He’s just crossed 11,000 years.”

The program director showed no change in his expression. He simply leaned in and looked at the simulation monitor and he remained incredulous. “That’s not possible. How long since the simulation actually started.”

The attendant shook his head, checking his watch. “Nearly two hours now.”

The program director spun around and looked at Lucilius, unconscious, lying in the simulation cradle. 

“Impossible,” the program director said. “What’s his limbic-neocortical balance?”

“That’s the thing,” the attendant said, nearly pleading. “His balance keeps edging toward ideal parameters but then retreats. He’d been teetering on the verge nearly the entire time.”

“We’ve never seen negative approach, let alone vacillation.”

“I know, it doesn’t make sense. The model has been maxed out for a full ninety minutes, and I’ve been worried about our hardware. With each passing year in the simulation, compute power required to generate a higher degree of hedonic experience expands geometrically."

“He could burn out our entire program…” the director muttered.

Then without warning the simulation screen went black. Health monitors all around the simulation cradle went dark. The attendant yelped pathetically, and the director’s eyes widened.

Lucilius yawned and sat up, stretching his arms. He disconnected himself from all the wires and leads and stood up from the cradle, smiling a bit smugly at the attendant and the director. He casually waltzed toward the door and before he left, he turned to them.

“I’ve had better.”