Deep History and Popular Amnesia

Recently a blogging colleague of mine, Bogus Magus at Only Maybe, linked to the TED talk by Yuval Noah Harari, whose epic history book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was published in Hebrew in 2011, but translated into English in 2014. I have not yet read it. I've read a lot of reviews. A rising academic "star", the Israeli historian gets a glowing blurb from Jared Diamond, and a funny and not-so-impressed review from the formidable Christopher Knight, who, incidentally, has my favorite take on Noam Chomsky, in a 2010 interview in Radical Anthropology HERE. (<---I've already digressed!)

Knight's take on Harari's thesis: that we need a planet run by Green Intellectuals, but all we need is the myth...I find this on the level of cosmic hilarity. Because I basically agree with Harari - and Knight sorta does, too; it's just that he's not all that impressed by Harari's scholarship. The Conundrum. What to do?

I used the term "cosmic hilarity" just above. Perhaps more apt: hilaritas, a term/idea I got from Giordano Bruno via Robert Anton Wilson: roughly, it means, in every deeply funny thing there's something deeply painful. And vice-versa...

                     Now just reeeeelaaaax...you're feeling very calm...calmer...you've never
                     felt so relaxed. Now repeat after me: The State, borders, money, God,
                     corporations and the National Debt are just as real as your own hands.                        

Recently in these spaces I touched on the 1992 trialogues with three acid head intellectuals, who would agree with Harari.

For as much as an anarchist like Chris Knight can pick on Harari, if you haven't read Harari or watched the TED clip I linked to above, or heard him talk, or anything, just note that he hammers on perhaps humankind's biggest problem: somehow the species went from dealing with what's real: other people, animals, rivers, feeding ourselves, and finding a comfortable-enough place to sleep...to actually allowing "fictions" to rule over our lives and consciousness: god, corporations, money, the State, borders...what Harari calls the "legal fictions." We've gone from an actual order of "reality" to an "imagined order." And our only way out is an "alternative imagined order."

As Robert Anton Wilson said about this: we talked our way into this.

And with talk comes hypnosis. I catch myself - or "snap out of it" - every day. "Nations" have an ontological status via the legal system. So do corporations. Money too, although it originated as sort of a convenient fiction: easier to carry a little piece of silver or gold in order to walk over the hills and buy two yaks than to haul three pigs with me in barter. But first, the guy who had the yaks on CraigsList had to believe that a piece of metal was "worth" or "equal to" his yaks. And I guess I believed it too, when I saw his ad.

The "god" Q? You be the Judge.

Speaking of Jared Diamond, his Guns, Germs and Steel was so engrossing to me the first time out - when it first arrived - I'm re-reading it, and it's even better the second time. Here is my gold piece.

Because certain types of thinkers who actually read books like Diamond's or Harari's tend to get emotionally invested in the possible political motivations of writers (and a certain caste of mind will see a surname like Diamond or Harari and go into their books with a specific bias), one thing I'm looking for in Diamond is his politics. I know he followed G, G&S with Collapse, a grand historical warning about the fates of previous human societies that wrecked their own environments. I even saw him give a talk about that book in Berkeley one evening, to a rapt, packed audience.

On page 90 of G, G &S Diamond's talking about how profound the shift to agriculture was. And he tips his hand. There's no hierarchy in hunter-gather band societies because every able-bodied person has to devote a lot of their time to finding food, but under agriculture:

In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of the food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage in full-time political activities.

Yep. The old schoolyard game from here to eternity. Why do some of us regularly forget this stuff? How did these posited original "takers" pull it off? Probably at first by brute strength? "Gimme yer lunch money!"

In HG Wells's Outline Of History, there's always a recurring bunch of heathens on horses who ride in from the north and rape and pillage and take the food.

(Or: I guess "take the food" really is part of pillaging. It's been a while since I've pillaged and I fess up I plum fergit. I'm pretty sure pillaging involves a handful of things, which I do not have the time to list for you here, but when I say something like "the Saxon hordes," what scenario pops up in your imagio? Just go with that.)

In Vico, the savages wandering the forests of the world happen upon a latifundia, and settle for serfdom, which is the beginning of class warfare. It's probably a variation of all these themes?

Later, on the same page (p.90 of Guns, Germs and Steel) Diamond is telling us about how stockpiles of food allowed for people to specialize: there are kings, bureaucrats, and a standing army. And there are those Weird Ones who heat the metals found in the ground and see what they can do with this stuff. Ah-HA! a spear so long, heavy, durable and sharp you can probably run a guy through with it and take all his wheat and cattle!

Oh, and another specialist arises:

Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest.

Note that in the NPR interview Harari says that the Agriculture Revolution is history's biggest fraud. Then he attributes this idea to Diamond. But it's a favorite left-ish political trope. It's in McKenna. It's in Rousseau. You can name others. Probably many others...

Certain things happened, which caused trillions of other things. And I get to sit here, well-fed, and read fat books and blog. I did not grow my own food. I have never hunted. The only gathering I've done was mostly for kicks, and some of it would you might call "stealing." There: I said it.

Back to the Yearn For Green.

It seems like a desperate move. There's no going back. Harari seems to engage in some sort of satirical reductio in saying we may as well download ourselves into silicon and live forever as merged-AI robotic something or others. Other times, only the richest of us get immortality; the rest are losers who have to die the olde fashioned way. (See Harari's bit with Daniel Kahneman.) I see Harari as a legit scholar who's also a skilled polemicist, with a touch of the hermetic-trickster in him; I said above I had not yet read his Sapiens. For now, in my minor discussion of Harari I have merely been practicing Bayard's Art.

How does all this forgetting about the "imagined order" occur? How does it occur that many people seem to have never even encountered these ideas at all? And how are we doing, collectively as a species, with this new "alternative imagined order"?

No way Harari really believes all that stuff about what's in store for our future. At least I hope he's trying to make a satirical point. Myself? I tend to favor sentient flesh. No robot sex for me. We fall for a lot of stuff that thugs and con-artists pull out of the Imagined Order of Reality. Perhaps all we can do today and tomorrow is talk a little bit about the Imagined Order vs. our new Alt. Imagined Order with our friends and loved ones. Maybe?

And I, like Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake (and Ezra Pound?) would like to get back to the Garden. After all, we are stardust. We are golden.

Cosmic Indifference and High Weirdness In The Natural World: Have A Swell Day!

High weirdness, and unforeseen existential threats. Threats to humans, that is. It's as if some Malign Creator was operating. Or worse: Something That Is Completely Indifferent. A poet once wrote "Vast, cool and unsympathetic." (CUE: demonic laughter.)

I will defer discussion on the Robot Apocalypse until it's too late...err...I mean...some other day. [But for a possible thrill, or interesting homework, read HERE, HERE and maybe HERE for a jumpstart, or just a jump-jolt. Hey, I'm as "American" as any of you when it comes to being fascinated by the End Times. My versions don't involve Jesus or Four Horsemen, though. I'm strictly a secular apocalyptic, when I'm in those morbid moods.]

                                        intelligent yellow slime-mold

Eerily Intelligent Beings Are Here and They Don't Have Nervous Systems
When I first started reading about the yellow slime molds I couldn't stop thinking about H.P. Lovecraft and his prescience. Or the Steve McQueen 1958 B-film blast The Blob. These slime molds, which are shape-shifters, depending on whether they find themselves in the forest (like a spatter of mustard on the side of a tree), or in a petri dish in a lab (like a piece of coral). They have no nervous system or brain, and yet they have been rigorously studied and have been shown to make decisions, anticipate change, and choose from a large selection of foods the very thing they need most. They seem to have memory, too. How so?

Well, when presented with a maze with food at the end, these "protists" (which are really a taxonomic category for something only dimly understood by us), send out long feelers along every route. They extend themselves...and they're only really single-celled amoebae! It's just that they're weird little unicellular buggers, with millions of nuclei, small sacs of DNA, proteins and enzymes. And they are constantly pulsating, gelatinous things, sorta like human muscle tissue. The cytoplasm is always pulsating rhythmically. But back to how they have memories.

As they extend themselves through a maze, one tendril of itself finds the food. The others retract, leaving a thin layer of translucent goo along the paths that were no good. Then, the Thing remembers the "right" path, almost 100% of the time. It's as if it leaves its memories in the environment.

O! The Other Ways of Being!

How do they eat? They engulf and ingest bacteria, spores from fungi, and other wee beasties. Very much like The Blob. A Physarum polycephalum has not yet eaten a human. Or rather: it has not been recorded.

These Things were originally studied because of the fascination with how, when you cut one in half, they'd reattach themselves. Scientists wanted to know how they did this; they had zero inklings that the Things were intelligent...Aye: intelligent: if an organism demonstrates memory, appropriate choice, anticipation of change, and an over-the-top ability to concoct a network of best ways to get around (their behavior has stunned scientists by mimicking the schema of the Tokyo railway system, something that took hundreds of Engineers to plan), then it seems we may need to redefine what intelligence "is." These slime molds have been around for at least 600 million years, possibly a billion years. And they have no brain. They have no nervous system. And they're scary-smart. It's reminiscent of something out of Lovecraft. They have been Around for far, far, far longer than Homo sapiens, who are only about 160,000 years old. The hominids are only about 15-20 million years old.

Physarum polycephalum: They're here, they smear, let's get used to it.

                                          ultra-deadly Box Jellyfish

Our Conquering Jelly Overlords Are Here
Like the yellow slime, these creatures have inhabited Earth since before the Pre-Cambrian Era.  The Cambrian Era was from around 540 million to 485 million years ago. [If you want to see what animal life would look like if Salvador Dali were The Creator and not blind evolution, see HERE, where I simply Googled "Cambrian Explosion Images." Hey, you're welcome.]

Jellyfish were around by about 550 million years ago, and they may have had the world's oceans all to themselves at first. They seem well on their way to having It All again, which would mean that aforementioned species, Homo sapiens, is doomed.

These Things are evolutionarily winners, no question. Bigtime. What are their strategies? How did they do so well? How do they reproduce? Well, imagine if you easily cloned yourself. Jellyfish do that. Some of 'em, anyway. Imagine you had a friend that was a hermaphrodite. You have a spat one day and yell out, "Go fuck yourself!" Your friend laffs and says, "What do you think I do?" And you laff too, knowing the irony. Some jellyfish have both male and female parts and can reproduce that way.

You have a male co-worker, imagine, that jerks off onto some place in the work-environment, and another female co-worker comes along and works the sperm into herself, later. Jellies do that, too. Some can fertilize themselves, aye, and some do courtship and copulation, like us. Other jellies simply break in two and now you've got twice the jellyfish, suddenly. Some jellyfish fuse together. Some are cannibals. It's worked well for them, all of those strategies. Who thinks we'll be here for another 500 million years? I don't see it. I'm optimistic, but that's insane.

What's so scary about them?, you're asking. Lemme tell ya.

They've devastated the fishing industries of Bulgaria, Georgia, and Romania. Because they eat the things that the anchovies eat. In the Gulf of Mexico, 15-pounders eat everything in sight: eggs, plankton: they shoot out a foam that captures plankton to make it easier for them to eat a huge meal. They eat and eat. And when Katrina hit and then the BP oil spill occurred in the Gulf? All sea creatures suffered. Except the jellyfish. They seemed to like it. How?

Well, they have very low metabolisms, which allow them to survive in oxygen-free waters, for a period that other species can't. All over the world, too: in warm tropical waters, and near the polar ice caps. They're eating the plankton so whales are going to suffer, maybe go extinct. In just one cooling system in one Japanese nuclear reactor, they gum up the works with their own bodies to the tune of 150 tons per day. That's just one cooling system. They're really hard to get rid of too: one scientist said their bodies cling to man-made meshes like "thin plastic wrappers." They've caused havoc in India, they've capsized ships. They clogged up the US aircraft carrier the USS Ronald Reagan until it had to be moved. 50 truckloads of jellyfish clogged a coal-fueled power plant in the Philippines, causing a total blackout on the islands.

What helps to curtail their works-gumming of human industrial structures? Sound, chemical repellants, electrical shocks and curtains of bubbles have all been tried. They all failed.

There's Chironex fleckeri, or the Box Jellyfish, which is a gelatinous bag of digestive tissues and gonads. It has 550 feet of tentacles, a head 12 inches across that has "bells" dangling from it. It drifts in the current, and if you get stung by it while swimming you're fucked. You have two minutes to live, four tops. This Lovecrafty Thing has eyes with a a retina, cornea and lenses, when most jellies lack those things. It has a brain and can learn and remember. It's huge and deadly and it's spreading throughout the globe.

There's a peanut-sized jelly: "Irukandji." The Australian Aborigines knew about this one long ago. This tiny thing stings you, barely needs to brush against your skin, and you hardly feel it. 30 minutes later a pain in your lower back sets in, like gangsters are taking a baseball bat to your kidneys. This is only the beginning of the fun. Nausea and vomiting set in, every minute for hours on end. You get spasms of pain shooting down your arms and legs, your blood pressure raises to a dangerous, killing level, and you find it very difficult to breath. Then you get something like what meth or coke addicts get: the feeling that bugs are crawling around under your skin, or worms. Many people beg the doctor to please let them die, quickly.

The Irukandji were thought to only inhabit the waters off of Australia, but now they're off the cape of Africa, and near Florida.

They come in very many shapes and sizes. They've formed a "stingy-slimy killing field" 30,000 square miles wide off the coast of Africa, eating everything in sight.

When you quarter a jellyfish the pieces regenerate and resume normal life as adults within three days. There are species of which, when one dies...they really don't die. In zombie-ish fashion, cells from the rotting body escape, float away, find each other and form a new jellyfish polyp, which is the junior stage of jellyfish-hood. Polyps need to attach to smooth, hard surfaces, and the competing species named Homo sapiens makes structures tailor-made for jellyfish polyps.

Also, the H. sapiens have done far more than any other species to pave the way for the Re-Emergence of the Jellies as Pre-eminent Beings of the Earth-Ocean: Homo sapiens has overfished its world oceans. Jellies can make food by sunlight, or just eat all the plankton. Drift nets and plastic bags have killed off the Jelly's main predators, like the Sea Turtle. From agricultural run-off into the oceans, the new species of H. sap has created hypoxia zones in the waters: vast regions of very little to zero oxygen, killing off all living things...except the Jellies. They can handle it. Their metabolism allows them to deal with it.

The H. sap has created, over 30 years, a 30% increase in acidification of the ocean. Higher levels of acids are eating through the hard calcium shells of many sea creatures. The Jellies just laff and whistle along, eating and gumming up the works. Also, the warmer oceans have only been more of a boon to the Jellies. Plankton slows climate change, but the Jellies are eating the plankton, so the warming on land for the H. sap may increase faster as time goes by.

"Even sober scientists are now talking of the jellification of the oceans," says a recent, wonderfully terrifying book. This book says the Day of No Return has long passed; we didn't even know it when it happened, and possibly the only thing we can do to combat this global takeover by these Terrible Beings is to adopt ancient (1700 years?) cuisine-behavior of the Chinese and Japanese, who eat jellyfish. Are you ready for just one more bite?

40,000 Bullies In The Neighborhood
Here's another thing almost no one in the world knew about until about 3 minutes ago, historically: the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago? One of those will hit Earth every 1-100 million years. That was a very big asteroid, and if one hit tomorrow, it would very likely end the time of H. sapiens. Through a dirt-cheap program ($200-$400 million; the cost of one fancy military helicopter) seeking to track all of the 40,000 asteroids a football field or larger that are roaming in our solar system (backyard, really), 90% of them have been pinpointed, and none look like they're heading our way.

But even some of the smaller ones that haven't been identified could do incredible damage. "Small" collisions happen every few centuries, like the 1908 Siberian-Tunguska one, that packed the destructive power of 300 Hiroshima bombs. That's small. And it didn't hit near a densely-populated area. The odds are that, when a Tunguska-sized one hits next, it will hit the ocean, 'cuz our planet is about 66% covered by water. This will cause a major tsunami, but hey: it could be worse. Am I right?

There are already some ingenious plans to "nudge" the Nemesis asteroid that we do discover has us in its gunsights. My favorite is the Gravitational Tractor, but first things first: let's get a very accurate census of all the Bullies who could wipe us out in an instant, even the "small" ones that could take out Paris, New York, Sydney...any one of the metropolises.

There's no cause for existential dread over the 40,000 Bullies, but they all represent an Existential Threat. But probably not as much as Global Warming, Overpopulation, Nuclear Weapons, Jellyfish, or Robots.

Although: Things could change with new info, eh?

Jeez, it's as if Nobody, No One, or No Thing cared about us, and we're maybe helpless to stop the pending destruction. Maybe Lovecraft was a major prophet?

The good news? Peanut butter tastes really good. So does beer. And sex is fun!

Some Articles That Were Consulted
"How Brainless Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence"
Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, by Lisa-Ann Gershwin
Gershwin TV interview
"They're Taking Over"
"Target: Earth"
"Per Square Mile: What Are The Odds A Meteor Will Destroy A City?"

Nick Bostrom, Simulations, Modal Logic and Imagination, Featuring Sufis, Sir Martin Rees, Threats To Human Existence, and a Possible Reason to Quit Worrying

In doing a worried backstroke through articles and book chapters on catastrophic scenarios, I happened upon a recent interview with a Transhumanist who I think is one of the brightest of the bright, Nick Bostrom. He argues that we're underestimating the risk of human extinction. You know: Fun Stuff.

I admit I'm bored by the Mayan calendar talk. I've never been a Christian, so I never took all the Left Behind books seriously. I spent maybe five minutes with one from the series in my hands, leafing through it, gawking at the prose like a rubbernecker at the site of a particularly gruesome highway accident. (Supposedly the series has sold 35 million copies.) The economic disaster stuff is, to quote Wordsworth slightly out of context, too much with me. I lack the ironic distance. I have plenty of ironic distance when I read/listen/watch Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, etc...but they're ultimately beastly boring to me. I check 'em out to see how bad "conservative" discourse can get. (O! True conservatives where art thou?)

Ya wanna know what really gets me going when I want that adrenal buzz of worry, fear, or paranoia? The idea that we'll get Artificial Intelligence going to super-human levels and it'll really do us some harm. I don't know where my Ironic Distance is - or if I have one at all - when I contemplate this kind of stuff, and I think that's why it "works" for me.

Bostrom, in the long article I linked to above talks about "anthropogenic" Existential Risks. It turns out Bostrom is one of the more interesting thinkers on Existential Risk out there. Later in the 21st century, it's possible we could be wiped out by malignantly intentional attacks or "simple" human error arising from hair-raisingly advanced technologies on advanced molecular nanotechnology, synthetic biology, or nuclear weapons. (How dull global warming, ocean acidification and collapse of ecosystems seem now in the face of such sexy existential megadeath killers!)

We could reach a stasis in which there's a permanent upper class that keeps everyone under control using surveillance and psychologically manipulating pharmaceuticals. A "global totalitarian dystopia," a "permanently stable tyranny." Designer pathogens are rapidly becoming a very real possibility. You can find the 1918 flu virus details online now; with rapid advances in sequencing and lab techniques becoming cheaper and easier to use...I can feel my heart rate speed up already.

And oh yes: non-anthropogenic risks are out there, too: supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and something I'd never heard of until Bostrom put me straight: "vacuum decay in space."

I'm reminded of Sir Martin Rees's book from 2003, Our Final Hour. Sir Martin estimates a 50/50 chance humanity makes it to 2100. Here's Rees talking for 6 minutes on this delightful theme, from last November:

In the Bostrom article, it seems that most of the Experts assessing existential risk are slightly more optimistic than Sir Martin: they seem to be somewhere around 10%-20% chance we'll not make it to 2100. Here's a Silicon Valley rich guy - Rick Schwall - who's worried about existential risk, just to add more people to our party...

Anyway, I thought it slightly ironic that a Transhumanist is arguing that we should make existential risk a priority over present human suffering. But Bostrom has very rational reasons: if we care about people in space - in other words, on the other side of the globe -  simply because they're humans like us, then we ought to consider humans in time as well as space. They're still human, even if they haven't been born yet.

                                 One of my favorite living philosophers, Nick Bostrom, born 1973

The Sim Stuff From Bostrom

What a stimulating thinker Bostrom is, and never more than when he talks of his "Simulation Argument." (<------You can spend months studying this site and all the places it leads you!) This argument has a very long pedigree, but Bostrom's form was what took me, and note that Bostrom's logical chops are stellar:

One of the three propositions seems very highly likely true:

1.) Almost, or all civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity. Technological maturity is defined as something like Ray Kurzweil's or Hans Moravec's wettest dreams: Artificial Intelligence carried to a profound degree, solving the death problem, end of economic scarcity, etc. This proposition has been written alternately thus: No civilization will reach a level of technological maturity to the point where they can simulate reality that is so detailed so that "that reality" could be mistaken as "reality."

2.) Almost all technologically mature civilizations (on any possible planet) lose interest in creating ancestor simulations, which are computer simulations so dizzyingly complex and nuanced that the simulated minds would be conscious, or believe they're conscious. Sophisticated beings so profoundly adept at technological manipulation aren't interested/don't do simulations of reality for ancestors. If these beings DO do these simulations, they don't do many, for varying reasons having to do with wanting to use computational power for other things, or due to ethical objections about keeping simulated beings captive, etc.

3.) We're almost certainly living in a simulation. Now. You and me and everyone we know, our entire history and world, possibly.

One of these three is almost certainly true, and Bostrom has a preponderance of math (that I can't follow) to argue that Number 3 is most likely: we're living in a simulated reality. Does this allay your anxieties about the future? Recently we read that Ten Billion Earth-Like Planets May Exist in Our Galaxy. That's just our crummy little galaxy. There are billions of other galaxies. And then there's the multiverse: an infinite number of universes.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We already have The Sims and many other technologies that suggest we ourselves are moving (with logarithmically accelerated speed due to Moore's Law and other factors) into a world in which we are simulating other realities and beings. Can we make them take-for-granted their world and assume that "Of course we're conscious entities!"?

Now: these advanced beings who may be simulating Us could be "here," because we don't know we're simulated. Or they could be Elsewhere. Does it matter at this point? And what's that goo on your computer screen? Did I just blow your mind?

Bostrom says it's possible that what you're in now is a "basement level of physical reality." But if any technologically mature civilization that hasn't succumbed to Existential Risk (I should've been capitalizing that term from the get-go: much more dramatic and befitting its own idea), and they DO do what we're already doing now in this reality, then they probably will run millions of simulations, because they can. The sheer number of simulations outnumbers the non-simulated worlds that we may encounter, so it's probable that we're living in a simulation. Here's a funny popular take on Bostrom's idea, from the NYT.

Okay, okay: I've seen some good guerrilla ontology in my day, but this one's way up there. If you're heard the Bostrom argument and either say maybe, yes we're living in a simulated reality and what of it?, or I see his points but refute him thus, or whatever, then you're seeing the Matrix for what it really is. Errr...right? Anyway, I guess if it's most likely (aside from certain named-biases Bostrom is quite frank about) that we're a simulation, why worry about anything? Oh yea: that whole discomfort and death thing. No matter how unreal we and our world "is,"or "are," it still seems too real to wish away. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away," to paraphrase Philip K. Dick, who knew a thing or three about simulations and irreality. (See below)

Still: we must admit that even if we're a very detailed computer simulation, it makes for wonderful novels and films that constitute a simulation inside a simulation...ummm...eh?

Idea: try spending a week constantly reminding yourself that your world and everything in it is being played out in some unimaginably complex hypermetasupercomputer program. Note if and how your perception of "reality" changes after seven days, and report your findings in the comments section. (I've done this exercize: It tended to sharpen my sense of irony, and really brought out the highlights in bold relief when I noted myself or someone else taking a relatively trivial thing a tad too seriously, but your results may differ wildly.)

Oh: another reason to worry about Existential Risk: we might not make it to the point where we can develop - reach technological maturation as a species - to do simulations of other beings...even though we might be a simulation ourselves. Uhh...I think? (Wha?)

I mentioned and linked to the idea that this is a very old notion, even older than Plato's Cave parable. It's like Chuang-Tzu saying he woke up remembering his dream that he was a butterfly, but then questioning if he was not really a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Or the counterculture intellectual Alan Watts, who, when asked, "What is life like after death?" And Watts quickly responded, "How do you know you're not dead already?"

Of course, this notion of fine-grained simulated realities that humans take "for real" is a favorite among science fiction writers. Philip K. Dick is the foremost example, using this idea as far back as the mid-late 1950s. See this list of books that use simulated realities and note how often PKD shows up.

[For readers of Wilson and Shea's 805 page Illuminatus! Trilogy, think of this theme of simulation and the Writer of that book?]

al-Ghazali the sufi intellectual and mystic, argued against Aristotle, who said the world had no end. Ghazali thought time was bounded and he developed an argument for many possible worlds, but that this one was the best one, because Allah is so great. I'm simplifying here, but in not only sufi but Hindu and Buddhist cosmology we see variations of these ideas appear. Other sufis were on board with many worlds, also...

The Many-Worlds Hypothesis (Everett-Wheeler-Graham) interpretation in quantum mechanics appeared in Unistat in the 1950s. 

In the 1970s in Unistat, in another area of the academy, logician David Lewis developed Modal Logic in such a way that (get this): Every possible world exists, is a concrete entity, that every world is set apart causally and in space/time from every other one, and that our world is one of those worlds. The only "special" aspect of the world we live in now is that we're in it. In logic, this is called the "indexicality of actuality."

I can go on and on with this stuff, because it's difficult to find good LSD these days, and I've found I can simulate a trip by reading wiggy academic books on logic, sufi theology, quantum mechanics, and philosophy like Nick Bostrom's. I don't trust that dude selling magic mushrooms in the park; give me my dog-eared copy of Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality or Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality instead. Just as good, and if things get too weirded-out, I can go for a walk.

I guess what I really wanted to do was to attempt to reassure you: no matter how Bad Things Get, you can always tell yourself, "It's not a big deal. I'm just playing out in some simulation run by some Being from a civilization that evaded its moment of Existential Risk." If it works for you, you can thank me later, no matter how fake I am.

Hey, that's what the OG is here for!

I watched about 12 "We're living in a simulation" dealios on You Tube. Some of them are pretty good, but are marred by stentorian voice-over, too-intrusive Carmina Burana-like music, or other little annoyances. I have chosen two videos in case anyone...well, in case.


Two good-looking philosophy students rap about Bostrom's idea. I liked the down-to-earthiness of them.

Morgan Freeman narrates a science channel episode that uses "God" as the Simulator. The CalTech scientist never mentions Bostrom; I don't know to what extent he's influenced by him or what. I liked this because of the illustration of our own ability to simulate virtual experiences, which eventually blur into "reality," or seem to:

Popular Catastrophes

Purple Prologue
Of late I'd been reading scads and scores of articles and sections of books on "declinism," both in Unistat and for humanity, versus a much more upbeat and optimistic literature of forecasts and futurology, when my mind was drawn - strangely attracted - to a basin of philosophical thought that felt so wonderfully odd I thought I had to share it with someone. But my comments on the current viruses that carry the catastrophic deep into our amygdalas will take up too much space, and I'll get to this Weird Basin of thought tomorrow. Still, I think this blogspew ends on a funnier note, which was required, lest I end up throwing another wet blanket on our already cold and sopping selves.

But first I had to extricate myself from the situation, and with the aid of WD-40, a hacksaw, some twine, and some well-chosen neurochemicals, I broke loose and here I am, somewhat scathed but with a fortified imagination. On with it.

Popular Catastrophe, or: The Timeless Secular Jeremiad
Are you an adrenaline junky? Do you love nothing more than a good melodrama, with yourself in the middle of it? Are you one loathe to easily dismiss the Mayan prophecies, or the risk of being Left Behind? Would you describe the planet Earth as both "late" and "great"? Are you still scarred from 1989 worries that the Japanese rising sun will crush you economically? Do you suspect radical Islamic "sleeper cells" are biding their time pretty much "in every damned burgh in the country"? When you get into a political discussion, do you usually use the phrase "tentacles around our necks" within the first two minutes? Do you like to pretend either you or others, despite the dizzying complexities, can predict the future? Then the literature of Catastrophe is your thing (I confess it's often mine, too), and there is no end of it. It's inexhaustible. Some of my favorite articles from the past 48 hours include:

Jed Perl's article on declinism in the Arts, from The New Republic. It's "pernicious" to talk this way about Art, Perl declares. He leans wisely on Isaiah Berlin's long essay "Historical Inevitability," which I highly recommend to all conspiriologists, and I use that term in as much of a neutral sense as you can possibly imagine. Perl drops Oswald Spengler's name, seen on his parents' bookshelf, seemingly for weight. He observes that there's an odd comfort in the notion of decline, that it's "almost cathartic." Perl also asserts that decline is about inevitability, of which I'm not completely sold, not in the context that Perl's writing about, at any rate, Isaiah Berlin notwithstanding. Near the end he gets off a good line about flirting with "dystopian hyperbole" which seems to feed the authoritarian imagination. Yes!

Maybe.

What's funny about Perl's essay is that he skirts the entire issue of valuation in Art, which is to me the story of Art since the end of what we like to call "World War II." Recently the Unistat TV show 60 Minutes did a piece on money and the valuation of modern art. Watch it and then talk about "decline," Perl. If you watch the Morley Safer bit - wry-eyed codger Safer seems to think most recent Art that goes for millions is a sham - make sure you note the chart comparing the Art Market vs. the Stock Market. It's like tulipmania or something.

In the Winter 2012 ish of The City Journal, endorsed by such heavyweight intellects as Rudy Giuliani, Clarence Thomas, George Will, Gambling addict and chain smoker and former Drug Czar and Mr. Virtue William Bennett, Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, and Mona Charen, we are encouraged to find that Unistat's economic decline has been greatly exaggerated. Joel Kotkin and Shashi Parulekar admit the feelings of decline are "stark" in what they tellingly call the Anglosphere. Folks 'round here be gettin' all worked up 'cuz "we" ain't "dominant" anymore. Well, Kotkin and Parulekar have some numbers and pie charts and graphs to show we're still in the game. Sure, it looks bad. But first: the Anglosphere.

It's made up of Unistat, Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, and tack on The Philippines and Singapore, who speak a lot of English and seem to have tagged along with Australia; they speak English there and, help the Anglos keep an eye on China.

The Sinosphere (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau) makes up 15.1% of global GDP
India makes up 5.4%
"Other" (how convenient!) makes up 53.4%
But the Anglosphere makes up 26.1% and has overwhelming military superiority, and we're - sez Kotkin and Parulekar - numero uno in biotech, software, aerospace...and they even stoop to entertainment, mentioning how great Hollywood is, and Lady Gaga's name comes up, among others. I have nothing against Lady Gaga, but this seems like a "reach."

Sorry, but the olde timey conservative Superior White Race crap I've seen from these people my whole life hasn't changed. Just think of how they conceive of economic "reality" and humans in general. I do not share their values. They say our "fundamental assets" are political, demographic, and cultural. I need more specifics. "The Anglosphere future is brighter than commonly believed." If you guys say so...

In one of those pieces that really bum me out, Morris Berman is interviewed by Nomi Prins for Alternet about his new book, Why America Failed, and, while I consider Berman to deliver consistently the best of the secular jeremiads (although that rubric probably doesn't fit because it's been Game Over as far as Berman's concerned since, oh, around 2000, as I read him...a Doom-Sayer?), he's also my kryptonite; I read every Berman book and find it hard to dismiss him. (I've riffed on, mentioned, written about Berman HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.)

Confession: after reading this one, I took an intellectual standing eight count, but I will note he mentions John Ruskin's ideas about wealth and that the basic problem in Unistat history has been ontological, which I have found I agree with - that we have an ontological problem - more and more over the last 13 years or so. I don't know: read the interview for yourself.

Many authors of articles on declinism (the word supposedly coined by Mr. Clash of Civilizations Samuel Ellsworth Huntington in an article in Foreign Policy from Winter 1988-89?) remind us that these books and articles play on the basic chord progressions laid down by the Old Testament and the prophet Jeremiah, and to the New Testament's book of Revelation: You/We/They have fucked up royally, but it's not too late to reform or repent!

(But maybe the better-selling books assert it's too late to reform or repent? Sometimes I think I oughtta just collect a brooding welter of factoids about How Bad Things Are and then write a book with a title like The Unavoidable Coming Collapse and the Demise of Hope; history has shown folks tend to go for that stuff...but I consider it immoral, which I hope to explain later.)

We can live in smaller self-contained communities, get much-needed banking regulations, drive smart cars, go all-out for solar, live in eco-friendly architecture, and scale back our military budget and we'd still probably be overwhelmed by the historical epoch we find ourselves in. Morris Berman has been saying for a long time: it's too late. Become a New Monastic Individual and keep the torch burning for the next renaissance, because it's Dark Ages now, folks! Talk about ruining my buzz! But he's a serious intellectual, very astute, and I challenge any reader of the OG to grapple with him.

At the same time, my epistemology says that the "future"is far, far too complex to be so sure about any outcome. It looks bleak now, but let's not lose our senses of humor. And besides, the difficulty of prophecies, you may have noticed, is that they're often wrong. Almost always wrong. Why is that? I think the fractal nature suggested by the mathematics of complexity is a compelling answer. We may be in a historical bottleneck right now, and by 2050 we'll all be laffing at the Doomsday predictions from 1970-2015. Or we'll be dead. Or Unistat or (Name Your Country Here) has gone from First to Third World in but 20 years. Or things could be really great, surprisingly good in some areas, and horrible on others. I stand in awe at the cajones of the endless line of writers who wrote fat books proving we'd be dead by now, or wishing we were. To contemplate the single-minded negative mental and emotional energies required to turn in 400 pages seeking to prove Why We're All Doomed! I call that determination!

The best - or my favorite - analysis of the stack of articles I read on declinism recently was Daniel Baird's article, "Apocalypse Soon," from The Walrus. See for yourself?

Finally: The Poetic Dark Humor of Artists and the Apocalyptic Imagination
It seems like an odd idea to want to go to a horror film to "enjoy" ourselves, but many of us do. Why? Because it addresses something we feel - there are some things that could possibly happen, but we'd rather not think of them. It's safe to watch it on a screen, happening to other people. We don't want the hellaciously awful things to happen to those people, because they're a lot like us, but the stuff does go down, and we're...purged? Aristotle thought so. Maybe it just fucks us up even more, I'm not sure. It probably depends on who's watching.

I admit I'm pretty much with guys like Morris Berman (or Chris Hedges, there are many more) at odd hours throughout any given week. However, because of my obstinate and remedial doubt about nailing the future, I think there's something to be said for looking the harsh facts (as best as we can tell) square in the face and saying "non servium" to the moody brooding. A viral memetic optimism might be as potent as its mirror image, and I'm with Robert Anton Wilson, who thought foreclosing on hope was immoral, especially if you're involved with younger people's lives. That makes sense to me. I may be a damned fool. But most of the time I choose to think we can make it.

Another way to deal with fear and anger of apocalyptic horror, catastrophic accidents, human error on a monumental scale, and other Delightful Things is to poeticize your imagery (William Burroughs, with the music, IIRC, from the vaults of the NBC Radio Orchestra? Anyway, I have it on my CD, Dead City Radio), or to make your fears into a hilariously overblown cosmic apocalypse (the 6 plus minute clip of George Carlin, memory of a true bard in old age).

Here's Professor Carlin's darkly humorous take on the end humanity while we're trying to be environmentalists:

Relax and listen to Old Bill Burroughs and the action when Pan is let loose upon the world: