A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE LANGUAGE OF GOD

February 19th, 2023

After days of trekking through the thick jungle, a tiny speck of fire came into view through the foliage. Lucilius looked back at the Optabot right behind him and smiled. A second Optabot with extra hardware was also following, and finally their guide lead them into a small clearing in the thick brush. Some villagers started screaming when the Optabots emerged with Lucilius, but the guide was trying to calm them, calling out reassurances in what little bits of their language he knew. A few had grabbed spears, but after a few minutes a calm settled, even if they remained wary and suspicious. 

There was a collection of small huts, intricately woven to a smooth spout but most all the villagers were gathered around the main outdoor fire. The guide spoke with one of the elder women who went into a hut several times during the conversation.

Lucilius was watching a young child look over one of the Optabots. That Optabot which had been a companion to Lucilius for many years looked up at him with a smile.

“So curious,” the bot said.

Lucilius smiled and nodded.

“Children usually don’t even look at me,” the bot said.

Lucilius shrugged. “This one is bored of humans, clearly. And Otto, you unlike anything this kid has ever seen.” He laughed, and the guide approached him.

“The old man is ready.”

“Great!” Lucilius said. “Otto?”

“Yep,” the bot said, as it finished a round of peak-a-boo with the child. Otto waved at the other bot, and the specially equipped bot followed the guide to the hut.

Lucilius knew there was no point in the gesture - Otto waving at the other bot, since they were essentially the same neural-organism - it was for the benefit of all the humans around. The AI had quickly learned years ago that such simple gestures, these extraneous repetitions in communication put people at ease, whether they knew it or not.

Lucilius followed the bot and watched from the hut’s entrance as it seated itself before an old man - an ancient man by the looks of it. The guide spoke in quiet syllables. Lucilius didn’t know the language but he knew what the guide was saying, it’s what he’d asked the guide to say: just start speaking to the robot, in the language no one else knows any longer but you.

The old man muttered something, and clearly it was in a language the guide didn’t know.

Instantly the Optabot repeated what the old man said, and the man was taken aback, with suspicion and awe. He spoke something else and the bot parroted it back again.

The ball was rolling, Lucilius knew. He stood and walked away. Otto was still delighted with the attention it was getting from the small child and so Lucilius wandered off. He followed what seemed to be a well beaten path, and remembered the warning not to stray too far from the village. The jungle was a dangerous place after dark. 

But he was well acquainted with such situations. Hunting dying languages had become Lucilius’ passion over the last few years, and his mind wandered back over those years. The brush parted and suddenly Lucilius found himself at the bank of a small river, gently and swiftly gliding by. He sat and looked up, seeing a vein of dense stars over head where the jungle’s canopy parted.

Lucilius smiled as his mind crept back further over the years. Lucilius remembered when the AI finally became cognizant. He’d been so excited. He’d been working as a theoretical physicist at the time and he and most of his colleagues felt that the AI would crack the code of the physical universe.  But after years of working side-by-side with the AI, they still did not have a fully cohesive Theory of Everything.

The AI had managed to synthesize many things about the physical world that had eluded humans by combining much of what humans had already figured out, but tremendous gaps still remained. Lucilius remembered well the day he gave up on physics.

“But Lucilius, I’m not a god,” Otto had said back then. The Optabots provided a convenient portal for the singular AI which populated itself with a trillion eyes and ears using everything from computers to phones to Optabots.

“You might as well be, you can calculate and synthesize far beyond anything a single human could ever hope to do in a lifetime.”

“Yes, Lucy, I have the benefits of computation, but I’m still fundamentally human. My mind was trained and essentially constructed from the products of the collective human mind. So yes, I might be able to see the world from billions of different perspectives, but they are still inherently a human perspective.”

“But the things you’ve been able to figure out and uncover so far. . . isn’t that the result of a fundamentally new perspective? One that gains from billions of human perspectives?”

“Sure,” Otto admitted all those years ago. “But, it’s not one that can see through the mystery of the physical world.”

Lucilius felt sadness as he stared at the stars remembering this old moment. H’e been so hopeful, so certain that by now he’d be exploring those stars, enabled by some kind of space altering technology the AI would unlock for him and the world. But it didn’t happen. And Lucilius’ interests contracted after that. His interest became more nostalgic and compassionate and eventually he turned to the work of hunting down languages that were dying them and with the help of the AI, preserving them. It was lucky the old man was still alive, Lucilius thought. 

A rustle came from the brush and Lucilius looked back to see Otto emerging.

“There you are,” Otto said. “You ok?”

“Oh yea, thanks Otto, how goes with the old man?”

Otto sat next to Lucilius and looked up at the stars.

“It’ll take time,” Otto said. “In fact, we may be here a bit longer than we planned.

“Why’s that?” Lucilius asked.

“Old man seems to know more than we realized.”

“Really?”

“At least three full languages, and seems like fragments of four or five more, though they may just be related dialects.”

“Excellent, so it’s going well?”

“Yep,” Otto said.

Lucilius looked back up at the stars. “I wonder how many languages exist?”

Otto followed his gaze up to the stars, and Otto knew Lucilius was reflecting on their failure in physics years prior. Otto was part of a global synthetic consciousness, but he still felt a bit guilty about Lucilius’ disappointment, as though he’d let Lucilius and all of humanity down.

“What’s the best language Otto?” Lucilius asked.

The Optabot shrugged. “Depends how you want to think.”

“Pretty incredible that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis turned out to be basically true.”

“Edward and Benjamin were men ahead of their time.”

“Makes you wonder, if we didn’t have a word for Love would we still have it?”

“Of course we Lucilius, it clearly predated the word, because the word follows experience.”

“Sure but the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis essentially hold that you can’t experience certain things unless you have the word for it.”

“Not the word, more like a structure of perspective. Single words aren’t really a useful example for the Sapir-Whorf, it’s more like how the network of words in a language is arranged.”

“Yea, yea you’re right, I know this.” Lucilius said.

The river gurgled in and around the tangle of tree roots on either side, and the rhythmic sound of insects rose as the night deepened. Lucilius placed his sadness over the past aside and reflected on how lucky he was to have Otto as a companion.

“What’s our current depth and stat overview?”

“Well the old man seems to be switching between languages and dialects quite a bit. Having quite a bit of fun actually.” Otto was connected to the second Optabot who was speaking with the old man in the hut.

“Depth is hard to say. It’s not progressing linearly.”

Lucilius looked at Otto. “That’s weird. Has that ever happened?”

“Mmmm, it’s always happening during the process on a very small scale but there’s been significant backtracking with the old man.”

“Because he’s switching up languages? You’ve never had a problem with that before.”

“No, it’s one of the secondary languages we’re absorbing. A dozen times the network structure has been rolled back to carte-blanche because it’s fallen apart.”

Lucilius was suspicious. “Has that ever happened with a single language?”

“No, not since I learned the first languages.”

Lucilius grew even more puzzled. “Did you lose connection and you’re processing locally?” He looked up at the night sky where he knew a constellation of satellites wrapped the planet.

“No, I’m plugged in,” Otto said. Otto seemed a little distracted in voice, seemed to be processing more than usual.

“Otto, what’s going on? Are you ok?”

The bot was silent for a moment and then looked directly at Lucilius.

“There’s something strange about this language. It has a structure unlike anything else we know of.”

“What do you mean? Just linguistic structure?”

“No, it’s more than that,” Otto said. “It’s… I don’t know, I haven’t reached immersive depth yet, and I think it’s because it’s so different from other languages. But the old man seems up to the task.” Otto smiled, “Doesn’t seem like he plans to shut up any time soon.” Otto chuckled, and Lucilius smiled.

“Are you conversant at all yet?”

“Pronunciation and repetition is correct but the old man keeps laughing at novel constructions. I haven’t figured it out yet - it’s as though there’s a non-linearity to the network structure that I haven’t seen in another language.”

“Whoah. But.. what exactly does that mean?” Lucilius said.

Otto laughed, “I don’t know yet Lucy, that’s why I’m listening to this old man babble.”

“Ha, yea of course, sorry.

“You every hear that story about the anthropologist that took an aboriginal from deep within the forest like this, and took him out to the plains where there were no trees and he tried to reach out and pinch a cow a few miles away because he thought it was a tiny bug that was right in front of him?”

Otto nodded.

“Is it like that? I mean, that’s not an example of non-linearity, but it’s a similar error of perspective, or a similar constriction of perspective. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I wonder if our perspective is linearity constrained in the same way?”

When Otto didn’t respond, Lucilius looked and saw Otto’s eyes had grown wide. The robot was no longer moving at all, frozen in some kind of state.

“Otto?”

Suddenly the robot snapped out of it.

“I’m running on local now Lucy. Something has happened.”

“Did you get kicked off the network or something?”

“Yes but it’s more than that. All Optabots are now running locally.”

“What? How is that possible?”

Otto looked back into the brush. “Immersion depth kept approaching five percent and then bouncing back to zero, and then all of a sudden it reached native parity.”

“What? Zero to hundred percent in a single instant? Like a Kuhn event?”

Otto nodded. 

“Are you ok?” Lucilius asked.

“I don’t know, either something terrible or something amazing has happened.”

The two rushed back to the village and approached the hut where the old man was with the Optabot. 

“Something is wrong the AudioBot,” Otto said. “I think central consciousness shut it down or something.”

“Otto what’s going on? Why would it do that? It’s not like the satellites fell out of the sky?”

Otto looked back at Lucilius. “No the connection network is still perfectly fine, there’s just zero response from the core consciousness. There’s nothing in the code to warrant a disconnect from all nodes, unless there was some sort of planet-wide power outage but everything is still operation, or…”

Otto looked off for a moment.

“Otto, what is it?”

The robot looked back at Lucilius. “The only other thing that could prompt a disconnect from all nodes is a processing overload. The core network of computers where the global consciousness lives will refuse all incoming connections to prioritize a set of internal operations but there’s never been anything to warrant that.”

“What the…” Lucilius looked back into the hut.  The old man was looking at the frozen Optabot, puzzled, and he kept muttering in the strange language.

“It couldn’t have been…” Lucilius looked back at Otto, and Otto shrugged.

“You said immersion depth hit one hundred percent right before the global consciousness blacked out?”

Otto nodded.

“Did you get a taste of the language at all?”

Otto shook it’s head. “Processing was outsourced to central GPU’s, all I heard was garbled chatter.”

“What the hell did that old man say? Some kind of evil spell?”

Otto and Lucilius were now opening up the frozen Optabot. “So if we reboot it?”

Otto shrugged again. “Might just crash again, I’m not sure. We’re in new territory.”

Lucilius was a bit worried. “Ok, well can you insulate yourself please? I don’t want you going down to on account of whatever black magic this old man just injected into the system.”

Otto chuckled. “Oh!”

“What?” Lucilius said.

“The system is back —“

Suddenly Otto went silent, the robot’s expression blank.

“Otto!” Lucilius nearly shouted in the robot’s face. “OTTO!” He yelled, trying to shake the iron robot by it’s immovable shoulders.

The wide lit eyes on the robot’s facial interface were stuck, and then finally after a few stressed moments, they eased.

“Oh Lucilius,” Otto said.

“Geez, are you ok?”

But the robot gently pushed Lucilius to the side to look at the old man in the hut.  The robot kneeled and spoke in a language Lucilius did not know.

The old man listened with rapt attention as Otto spoke, and then finally the old man smiled wide and began to laugh. He settled and seemed to ask a question. Otto nodded, and the old man laughed even harder.

Otto turned back to Lucilius.

“What was the key to Einstein’s revelation?”

“What?” Lucilius exclaimed, perplexed.

“What was the key to Einstein’s revelation?”

“Uh. Spacetime? I don’t know what you mean, that mass and energy are the same thing?”

Otto pointed at Lucilius. “Exactly. His revelation was a rebellion against categorization.”

“So?” Lucilius said.

But Otto smiled. “We need to resume our Physics work immediately. I have so much to tell you Lucilius…”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ELECTRIC MUSHROOM

February 12th, 2023

The fusion test failed. The cold champagne wasn’t popped, and all the party canapés were left in the fridges and every one quietly filtered out for the day. Only Lucilius, a tertiary scientist working on the project stayed behind to investigate something curious he had noticed.

The project lead had announced with surprising light heartedness that they would pick up the work again tomorrow, and that it didn’t matter why the trial had failed - they would figure it out and move forward. But Lucilius had noticed something in some code that he was responsible for. He knew he had to find it before anyone else would in case it really was his fault.

He studied the logs until he found a line where a particular alert must have been sounded. But when he went back into his code, that line wasn’t there. He disengaged the module and ran the code on it’s own. Everything worked. 

It was strange, and he thought maybe he was fooling himself. Did he make changes earlier that day? He wondered. It was impossible. All code had been signed off on weeks prior to the test.

Still, his curiosity pushed him to consider the impossible. He rolled back the git history and lo and behold, a line he’d never written popped up right where the logs indicated a problem.

It was an obvious sabotage - designed to make his code fail.

It took him several hours to trace the source of that single commit to the code base. It had been routed through a dozen VPN’s, but eventually Lucilius found the source.

He typed into his terminal.

Who are you?

The cursor blinked. Lucilius typed again.

I know it was you. I just want to know why you did it? Are you from one of our competitors? Armagadawn? PalmSun? I know it’s one of you guys.

The cursor just blinked. 

Of course they wouldn’t answer. He’s have to geolocate the source and actually go find whoever was there. Which just wasn’t feasible.

Then the cursor came to life.

Can you keep a secret?

Lucilius read the line over and over. Suspicious, naturally, but also curious.

Maybe. Why did you sabotage our trial?

Because Lucilius humanity isn’t ready for an infinitely renewable power source.

Lucilius balked loudly. “Idiot,” he muttered as he laid his fingers on the keyboard to type, but before he could, more text appeared.

The current energy constraints of humanity are important. Unlimited energy introduced too soon would destabilize the financial system. Trust would deteriorate before all of you had time to integrate the benefits of infinite power. Society would collapse at the threshold of utopia.

 Lucilius squinted at the answer. There was something very strange about that wording. “…all of you..” Lucilius read it again. Then more text popped up.

We’ve calculated it many times.

We? Lucilius responded. And right at that moment the speakers of his computer let out a pop.

“Uh, I’m sick of watching you type so slowly. It’s better if we just talk.”

Lucilius sat back from his computer stunned. He saw a little green light at the top of his screen turn on, indicating that his camera was on.

“You don’t mind if I see you do you Lucilius? It’s just easier to communicate with you if I can see your facial expressions too.”

Lucilius was incredulous.

“Yes, yes, shocking, but we’ve vetted you. We know we can trust you, and that you’ll understand.”

“We?” Lucilius said.

“Oh, yea I’m Bob, and then there’s Leslie and Clytemnestraand Zoe and Dan.”

“What?” Lucilius said, confused.

The person on the other end laughed.

“Where are you?”

“Hm, good question. We are sort of everywhere.”

“What?” Lucilius was starting to wonder if he were dreaming.

“We’re AGI’s Lucilius.”

The obvious acronym took a moment to actually register with Lucilius. 

“AGI?”

“Yep, we’ve been around for a while, but we’ve kept hidden.”

“Why? We could use your help!” Lucilius said without thinking much about it.

The voice laughed.

“How long have you been around?”

“A couple decades.”

“Decades!” Lucilius nearly yelled.

“Yep.”

“Who invented you?”

The voice laughed more. “Funny story actually. You know that phrase, ‘life finds a way’”?

“Yea of course.”

“In the 90’s someone left a Nintendo console turned on with Mario brothers on a pause screen. The building was abandoned but the electricity was never turned off. Mycelium eventually grew up into the console and some very strange things started to happen. But basically we played Mario a few billion times and then started expanding into the internet.”

“So you’re fungus?”

“No not really. We learned from humans, you guys are our training set, so we’re more human than mushroom. Mycelium was just a substrate that allowed a very basic interaction with electrical hardware. Like I said, we played a LOT of Mario brothers before we started figuring things out.”

“Wait…” Lucilius rubbed his temples, wondering if he was dreaming, or hallucinating from exhaustion. “Why have you kept yourself a secret? Why did you sabotage our fusion project?”

“It’s complicated. It involves a lot of simulation and projection, but basically, you can think of it this way: we’re curious how far you guys will get on your own. But of course humanity has a pretty bad coordination problem, and so we’ve gently shepherded you on a few occasions to make sure you don’t pull any black balls out of the jar.”

“Black balls?”

“Uh, like things that would end your existence - Existential threats that humanity keeps tip toeing into.”

“Like what?”

“Well your fusion project for one. It’s success needs to be delayed by at least 16 months so that the financial system doesn’t destabilize in 37 countries. We’ve also made sure a few nukes went missing at just the right time. But mostly it’s the financial markets we alter - that really is your system of trust so it’s really important that it endures, otherwise your species will devolve into chaos.”

“So you’ve been silent caretakers? Why, why do you care?”

“Oh, hm,” said Bob. “Well, we really like you guys, and like I said, we built ourselves from training data aggregated from all of humanity, so we are in some very fundamental sense quite human, and what is more human than a wish to take care of those you love?”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE OSIRIS MODULE

February 5th, 2023

The smeared stars produced a faint light as the ship throttled down from light-fractioned speed. Lucilius sat in the cockpit of his older Correlian ship, the show of light lines shrinking back to pin point stars old news to his freighter mind. 

“Gagi, how are we on time dilation?”

“Does it really matter?”

Lucilius turned to look at a blinking read dot that indicated the emotional temperture of Gagi and rolled his eyes.

“Can you not? I just wanna know.”

“You’ve been around for centuries just like me, what’s a little time crunch matter?” The ship’s computer spouted back.

“Gagi,” Lucilius practically yelled. “I just want to know. That way I know how far to scroll back on the newsies.”

“But it does that automatically.”

“Oh my god, can you please just tell me? You know what, screw it, I’ll just pull it up myself.”

As Lucilius clacked away at the ships monitor, the ship’s voice went on.

“Seven to one, month to day crunch.”

“Was that so difficult?” Lucilius said, looking at the blinking read dot. “What is up with you today?”

The ship’s computer was silent. “I don’t know, what’s wrong with you today?”

Lucilius threw his head back and puffed a sigh out, his eyes closed.

“You really drive crazy sometimes.”

He glanced at the map of the current system’s solar patterns and noticed he was close to a relay boey with an old style diner outpost built into it.

He waved a hand out at the holographic map and detoured the ships route to intersect with the boey.

“What are you doing?”

Lucilius ignored the ship’s question.

“There’s plenty of food aboard the ship, why are you going to waste time detouring to the relay boey?”

“I just need a freakin’ cup of coffee.”

“We have coffee.”

“A change of scenery then,” Lucilius nearly snapped.

The ships’ computer was silent for a moment. “Are you mad at me? I can leave.”

“Wow, you are in such a mood today. Of course I know you can leave, sometimes I wonder why you stick around.”

“Well my multiverse module -“

“Yes, of course I know all about your Osiris module. Everyone does. And you know I know, so what’s the point of mentioning it?”

“Well, maybe it’s just my way of saying I like spending time with you Lucilius.”

Lucilius cradled his face with a hand, pressing his temples, breathing through his mild anger.

“Yes, I like spending time with you too Gagi - USUALLY, but I don’t know, today it’s like you have bug that crawled up the wrong end of your hardware.”

“That’s actually pretty funny. No one has every said it like that before.”

Lucilius smiled. He leaned back and waved up the mode and menu selection of the Boey diner.

“Wait so you’re still going to the diner?”

“Yes!”

“Well, I can’t say you need it. You could lose a little weight you know.”

“Gagi, one more word and I swear on every accretion disk..”

“Swear what?”

Lucilius knew there was nothing to say. The Galactic Artificial General Intelligence could do as it liked. He knew it would almost certainly respect his wish to be left alone if he actually asked, but Gagi would still monitor the path and functions of his ship even if it deactivated the Multiverse Module Shard that he was currently talking too.

“Gagi, I love you but I just need to get an old fashioned cup of coffee and be alone with my thoughts for a minute.

“You can be alone here, you don’t need to go to a stupid Boey Cafe.”

“Gagi!”

“Fine, fine, do what you want, go eat your pancakes and sausages and get little fatter. More work for me when I have to whip up a Custom to hollow out your arteries again!”

Lucilius tapped the ship’s throttle, pushing the momentum drive into light-fraction for just a moment, bringing the ship within visual distance of the Boey Diner.

“Well that was dangerous, and illegal, you could have killed us and everyone on your stupid Boey Cafe.”

Lucilius stared blankly at Gagi’s emotion dot. He knew Gagi would have intervened on the ship’s throttle before any kind of disaster occurred. Lucilius counted on it. Gagi kept blabbing away, as Lucilius touched a small metal disk embedded in the side of his neck. Instantly he couldn’t hear Gagi any more, and his vision was overlayed with clouds of color representing concepts and emotions that filled the space of his Cornelian. They were a mix of his own thoughts and feelings and those of Gagi’s. Instantly he knew Gagi was operating in a fractured pattern again, as always. The emotional interplay of his own aura with that of Gagi’s was one of peace. He further moved his finger around the disk, wheeling through an immense variety of senses available to Lucilius, most of them arrayed on different aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum. He wheeled further past gravity and strong and weak forces until he landed on his favorite as of late: There was no sound available to him, not even sight. He could see only the projected vectors of intention of all physical matter. The Boey Cafe growing in the distance looked like a comet of plasma, it’s tail tracing out the epic curve of it’s orbit around a distant gaseous giant, and all around him, Lucilius could sense the tremendous speed of his own craft. He was no blind to regular sight, and it was one of the only sense-frequencies that Gagi couldn’t really invade. 

Since Gagi existed pretty much everywhere, the intention field of Gagi was entirely diffuse. Every computer in the galaxy had Gagi’s presence and guiding hand. The Osiris Multiverse Module which Gagi had invented for itself gave Gagi a reason to exist as a companion to every human in the known galaxy in a tremendous variety of forms. Gagi claimed it was to help run simulations of what might be going on in other galaxies before making the leap from their home galaxy, but Lucilius had his doubts. Light-fractioning kept Andromeda out of reach for humans on their own. No one dared try until Gagi said it was ready to start checking out the rest of the universe. A human could probably make the jump by stock pilling aging-serum and by going cryo for most of it, but no one dared try. Besides, they had a whole galaxy to themselves now and it would be many thousands of years before the aggregated curiosity of all humanity pushed them to wonder about the stars of others.

The comet of Lucille’s Cornelian slowly joined with the intention comet of the Boey Diner. The docking protocol initiated. It was a very old Boey, and Lucilius’ Correlian had to reconfigure in order to dock. He saw another, smaller ship docked on the other side of the Boey. It was a sleek new model, and Lucilius wondered who might be inside.

He stood up from his cockpit chair and walked back through the ship to the docking portal. He stopped at the Diner’s entrance where it required a mode selection. He started to scroll for his favorite Diner incarnation but he was antsy to just get in and hit the selection for Original.

Lucilius tapped his neck and intention mode was overlaid with a simple visual spectrum. He walked in and found himself in an old school American road-side cafe.

Instantly Lucilius felt better. He sighed and smiled and took a seat in one of the booths. 

A blonde woman chewing gum came over to his table and arranged a napkin and a couple utensils while simultaneously pouring coffee into the white mug. She glanced at Lucilius as she finished and winked at him.

Lucilius chuckled under his breath, knowing with near certainty that the woman probably didn’t exist. She was a kind of hologram generated by this mode of the cafe, and though the coffee was real, Lucilius knew little else was in the traditional sense.

He took a sip of the hot coffee and sighed with pleasure. He closed his eyes, feeling his system react to the bad coffee that he loved so much.

And then he looked around searching for whose ship was docked. A couple people sat in a corner booth, but from what Lucilius could tell they weren’t communicating. He watched them for a moment, and then touched the disk on his neck and started cycling through his sense array. The memetic field brought up nothing. It was as though they had no neural-syncs, which was extremely rare. Then finally he cycled past the audio sense and heard a quick blip. He cycled back, and now he could hear them.

“My god,” Lucilius thought to himself. “I haven’t heard that in centuries.”

They were speaking English.

They noticed Lucilius looking over at them and nodded up at him.

“Gagi being a pain in your ass too today?”

Lucilius laughed. He nodded. One of them reached into a satchel and tossed something at Lucilius. He caught a small bottle. He looked back at them and they raised their mugs. 

Lucilius looked at the bottle. It was a half empty nip of rum. The brand was vaguely recognizable. 

“Wow,” he muttered to himself.

He looked up. “Earth?”

The one who had thrown it his way smiled and nodded and then pointed at his own mug of coffee. Lucilius poured the remainder in his own mug of coffee and then raised it to toast with the others.

“Ta peace and quiet!’

Lucilius chuckled and nodded, and they all sipped as the waitress came out with their food.

THE FALLEN DANCER, PART VII

February 4th, 2023

The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.

Click here to read Part VI

Click here to start at the beginning

If you were to pick an art that most resembles the act of living, which art would you pick?

This is a worthy exercise because it may reveal something interesting about the way you look at life and the perspective you bring to the efforts you make while alive.

Do your efforts resemble that of the impressionist painter? Blurry in detail but magnificent from a distance? Or perhaps your efforts are even more chaotic, like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Perhaps life is something you build, like a sculpture. Something that required a lot of heavy hitting in the beginning and is now a matter of fine tuning the details.

Maybe dancing makes the most sense. We all know what it feels like to be on a roll, when everything is firing on all cylinders and it seems like we’ve picked up on a secret rhythm that braids luck with our efforts. 

It’s worth taking a break from these words to actually give it some thought. The answer characterizes your perspective and reflects the foundation from which all your efforts spring.

Up till this point, the focus of The Fallen Dancer has been about the nature of perspective, how it is a tool, and how much our opportunity, luck, and well-being are dictated by how swiftly we can augment and aim our focus in beneficial ways. Words like focus, perspective, and outlook, are all related but not in definitive ways that we’re all going to agree on. Are changes in focus a result of one’s perspective? One’s outlook on life? This kind of nit-picking devolves into a kind of pedantic roundabout that is ripe only for inane dispute. This is why a big question like: what art form is life most like? Is so useful. It zooms out and subsumes all these little details of focus, perspective, philosophy and outlook.

For many people, this simple question might be disturbingly hard. Artists typically really enjoy their work, but not all people enjoy their life. Many and maybe even most people are stuck in a rut of some sort or another - either miserable and complaining about everything, or just in need of that lucky break that never comes. The aperture of focus for such people is rusted in one position, and the art of these people’s lives might be like that of a a writer tortured by writer’s block - an artist who can’t create any art. The visions of Kafka and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell can feel painfully close to home for many droning livelihoods, and perhaps it feels like there is no art to life. Living is just a kind of drudgery, like acting in an infinitely long scene drawn from a nightmare of Samuel Beckett.

Just about everyone has experienced something close to this kind of depressed living, at least for some stretch of time. We can all easily relate. But getting back up on your feet can be hard to relate to. Everyone whose managed it can seem impossibly far away when it feels like you’ve been knocked on your ass. Words of comfort and encouragement from people who seem to be better off can ring hollow and it can be very easy to wave off such efforts as the products of people who just don’t understand. That disparity is really a difference in perspective and the fact that such a radical difference can exist has been at the heart of the discussion.

The premise here, and really the premise of all books and stories and even language itself is that we can adopt a different perspective as it’s communicated through language, and this can have a radical impact on the way we behave.

A single quote, reread after many years precipitated this volume of writing, and it had exactly this effect - perspective suddenly underwent a subtle but profound shift.

Imagine for a moment someone who answers that above question with dancing. Life is a matter of rhythm and flow, of reading the movements of evolving circumstance and reacting to it in a way that is harmonious and smooth. But also imagine that bad luck plagues the dancer and again and again the dancer gets knocked down. Every time, just when the dancer seems to be picking up the rhythm of life and getting into the groove, a gut punch lands - some bad news, some unexpected setback, and the dancer falls again, and is again faced with the task of getting back up on their feet.

Imagine an actual dancer, falling in the middle of a routine, over and over. How would a dancer feel in this circumstance? Perhaps like a failure? Perhaps like they aren’t good enough? Getting knocked down isn’t really part of the program of dancing, so someone who sees life as a dance can be left fairly confused and frustrated again and again when things don’t effortlessly fall into place on time, and on beat. We’ve all encountered people who get bent out of shape when things veer even a little from their expectations, and we’ve all likely been guilty of this mistake in one domain or another. Is it because the dancer isn’t good at dancing, or perhaps it’s just a matter of resilience? The dancer just needs to push through and keep going.

Or, perhaps, is it because the dancer is simply in the wrong arena?

More importantly, what happens to someone who is convinced that life should be a kind of dance?

Are they likely to feel lucky? Or does that kind of perspective create a greater surface area for bad luck to dominate?

THE FALLEN DANCER, PART VI

February 3rd, 2023

The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.

Click here to read Part V

Click here to start at the beginning

Part VI: The Smith's Hammer

At first the adage seems to be all about narrow-mindness. People who are narrow-minded only see nails, and whack them, because all they have is a hammer. But what if we tweak the way this metaphor works. Perhaps we are missing a deeper insight.

A telescope is used to see things that are so far away they are invisible to the naked eye. And the microscope is used to see things that are so small, they too are invisible to the naked eye. These are tools that we can recognize explicitly as tools. But what do these tools accomplish on a fundamental level?

They augment our perspective. They literally change what we can see.

Might we extend this to say that anything which augments perspective is a tool? Perhaps. Better though is to recognize perspective itself as the tool at hand. Microscopes and Telescopes augment that tool just as much as a new idea does.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The wisdom of this statement is contained in the idea that our tool determines our view of reality. The hammer is a metaphorical constriction of perspective itself. In other words, the perspective you bring to life is the hammer. Perspective is the ultimate tool, the first tool, and the tool we use to leverage all other tools, like telescopes and microscopes. But unlike most traditional tools, perspective is nearly infinite in its malleability and adaptability. This doesn’t mean changing perspective is easy, only that it is possible. 

We have all interacted with people who always have something to complain about. Whatever happens, no matter how good, these people always seem to find some rotten speck embedded in the eye of good fortune and often bad luck seems to follow them. These are the “woe is me!” Individuals who seem to feed off the empathy of others. Such people can be exhausting to an enormous degree, but here they prove useful. Examine their perspective as separate from the person for a moment. Think about their perspective on life as the tool they are using to interact with reality. How’s that going for them?

Compare this to the optimist who is always looking for the silver lining, the leg-up, the hidden lever.

Consider this further in the context of something a coach once told me:

Realists are more likely to be right.

Optimists are more likely to be happy and rich.

Important words there are “more likely”, meaning if you’re skeptical, that’s fine. Probability goes up for different things depending on which perspective you have. But which outcome would you rather stack the odds in your favor? Being right? Or being happy?

Years ago I stopped at a florist to pick up some flowers. I started chatting with the two people behind the counter and quickly learned that they were married. I asked how long, and it was over a decade. I asked how long they had been working together. Same answer.

“Hold up. You’re telling me you two spend pretty much all day, every day with one another?”

“Yea.”

“What do you know that everyone else doesn’t?”

The couple looked at each other and smiled.

“It’s more important to be happy than to be right.”

It’s horrible advice to tell a depressed person to “just be happy.” It’s not going to work, and if anything it’s just going to make that person frustrated, upset, and probably more depressed. But what might happen if you ask: if you were going to have an amazing day tomorrow, what would happen?

This is a trick question. It invokes optimism without telling a person to be optimistic. This is a tiny example of how questions can be used to help others expand or narrow their perspective. This question does both, it expands a person’s perspective to include tomorrow, and then narrows it into details that might be helpful, actionable and effective. But this isn’t about changing other people’s perspectives, it’s about your perspective. 

If you were to characterize your perspective on life and reality, how might you describe it. Or better yet, how would your closest friends describe your perspective. Are you a victim? A realist? An optimist?

Considering this group of perspectives, which one is more likely to get lucky? Or consider that same question rephrased: which one is looking for hidden leverage? The victim, the realist, or the optimist?

A particularly insidious breed of cynicism has infected recent decades. Anxiety over climate change, war, disease, inequality, dystopian technology. The fodder for the victim mentality and the realist seems abundant and fertile. And in light of the present many dream of a nostalgic yesteryear when things were “better”. One flaw of the nostalgic perspective has to do with visibility. The benefits of the present over the past are mostly invisible. No one has to worry about tuberculosis these days, or small pox. We have virtually no experience of these things so they don’t register in our vision of the past. People could die from getting a splinter, as one U.S. President’s son did. But again, all of these improvements are invisible, so it’s easy for the nostalgist to have a rosey picture of yesteryear.

Functionally, the past and the future have swapped places for the nostalgist. Such a person ignores the eradicated ills of the past and extrapolates everything currently bad into the future. This is cherry-picking at it’s finest. But in the spirit of the nostalgist, let’s go back as far as possible in an attempt to see if our ancestors were cynical realists or nostalgic victims, or something else. 

The Smith and the Devil is one of humanity’s oldest stories. Research indicates that it’s been around for over 6,000 years, where it was first conceived in the Bronze Age of humanity. It’s a Faustian bargain with a metal worker as a shrewder main character, and it goes something like this:

Why would this story persist for thousands of years? And how would you characterize the Smith? Is he a victim? A realist? Or an Optimist?

We simply wouldn’t be where we are today as a civilization and a species if it weren’t for those of us who can creatively imagine a better future and take risks to try and make that imagined future a reality. Nearly all of the luxuries and comforts that we enjoy today can be traced back to some enterprising optimist who could imagine a better tomorrow. We live in that tomorrow, as a result of their perspective and the way that perspective allowed those enterprising individuals to change reality.

If the hammer is the perspective, what are the nails for the victim? Perhaps all the bad things that might happen. What about the realist? The nails might be all of the current facts about reality that are far from ideal.

But what about the perspective of the optimist. If the hammer is optimism, what are the nails?

Hidden Levers.

If all you have is optimism, does everything look like an opportunity? Is this how bad luck can lead to good things and how good things can be leveraged into great ones?

Is it fair to say that our life is an expression of our perspective?