ㅁ Regardless, texts will justify beliefs we hold ex ante, so... let's make a text, the words will fly! Regardless, texts will justify and warp our minds, we can't defy... our own unreasoned meanings flow. Regardless, texts will justify beliefs we hold ex ante, so!
– a triolet.
<rant>
I believe, with all my soul, that it is rude to subject other people to your private audio stream – whether music, news, stories (audiobooks), telephone conversations, or anything else. Now that we all have excellent speakers in our hands, it’s easier than ever to do. Though in fact, I think it’s always been an issue, even back in pre-technological eras when people would have loud, annoying conversations or play music around other people who had no interest in hearing it.
So this rant isn’t about “the kids these days” or some decay in social standards. Indeed, if anything, I feel the elderly are the most typical demographic to perpetrate this type of rudeness – I would link it to the seemingly inevitable narcissim of old age (and as an aside, is this really inevitable? my narcissism is bad enough… I hate to imagine what a horrible old person I’ll be…).
I suspect there have always been rude people. I’m just making the observation that these rude people do this thing that annoys me.
</rant>
Moratorium
So, in this story, the big news was that people had stopped dying.
It never seemed to violate any causal laws – it was, rather, just an accumulation of “good luck” of various kinds. Hospital patients experienced recoveries, bullets missed vital organs, things malfunctioned in bombs, and automobile accidents were just freakily free of casualties. It took a while for people in general to take it seriously, though statisticians, doctors and the like became aware pretty quickly that something strange was going on.
The first to “test” it were the suicide attempts: these simply always went wrong in some way, as many suicide attempts do anyway, but now, such attempts always went wrong. Psychopaths soon were soon testing it too: attempting ever-more grandiose murders or massacres, only to have things go wrong in weird, Rube-Goldbergesque ways. Likewise, combatants in wars simply couldn’t succeed where death was inevitable.
All of this is to say that in fact disease and misery failed to disappear. Many people continued suffering, but for any case where such suffering neared death, things just “went amiss” in some way: some bit of luck came along and they stayed alive after all. Famine victims would suddenly find food relief, and anorexics would suddenly just lose the motivation to starve themselves to death. The mortuary industry, the first to actually notice, suffered quickly. Less quickly, but over time, hospital ICUs noticeably filled up with people who should have been dying. Instead, they were just stringing it along.
After the first several weeks, scientists, in a dead panic (undead panic?), tried to study things in earnest, at the statistical level. What they found was that suffering seemed to be neither increasing nor decreasing, in absolute terms. Though the number of people in ICUs had risen at first, it had simply leveled off at a higher number, and an equilibrium seemed to have been reached where spontaneous remissions and recoveries offset maladies. Anecdotally, fewer people were going to hospitals with previously life-threatening injuries or diseases, and simply recovered at home.
Confidence grew that death was no longer a possibility. Ecologists noted that the “moratorium on death” definitely did not, in fact, apply to any species besides humans. There was something strange and exceptional going on, at that level. The religious of all stripes became increasingly alarmed, or alternately, expressed that they felt vindicated. Clearly, it was some kind of miracle or end-times. The legal system had to adjust – with no murders to solve or prosecute, they had to satisfy themselves with lesser crimes. Concepts such as “attempted murder” began to seem ridiculous.
Philosophers argued about the free-will of murderers and suicides being thwarted by eerie powers. People began to panic about overpopulation again, whereas before there had been increasing concerns about declining fertility. Indeed, fertility continued to decline precipitously, in the same way that it had been for decades. Population scientists speculated that in fact the decades-long decline in fertility had surely been the first indicator that death, too, would be on the way out. It wasn’t that the decline in fertility had been able to find causes, other than vague sociological ones: people just weren’t wanting children.
And now, people didn’t need children, either.
Here is a half-formed thought.
I was thinking yesterday about the difference between material economy and cultural economy. This distinction might not be novel, but I feel like I’ve stumbled on it on my own, for the most part. At one level, my thought is a kind of extension of Georgism, out past the bounds of “land” to a broader scope: not just land but “all material things.” And that domain is what we typically think of when we think of “economy”: farms, produce, factories, mines, etc. But more and more, there’s another domain for economy: immaterial things. Cultural objects, such as: financial instruments, software, novels, meme-stocks, spam. Some are good and useful, some are not, but what they all share is that their “value” (their abstract tokenization under the index “money,” within the broader economy) is not linked to any physicality, and is uncorrelated to it. You could have high-bandwidth, low-value cultural objects (spam, AI), or you could have low-bandwidth, high-value cultural objects (well-written books, Ethereum digital coins [but not Bitcoins, which have a much higher computational overhead and therefore material impact]). Here, by “bandwidth,” I mean the material substrate where these objects exist. They rely on the substrate, but aren’t strictly speaking correlated to it, in terms of valuation. Because the value is uncorrelated with the material substrate, their value can grow in unlimited fashion despite a finite material basis. That’s “star trek style” post-scarcity economy, if you want.
Suicide is a selfish act. This is because it leaves behind those who care about us. This is not to say that I’m morally opposed to suicide – sometimes we need to be selfish. Sometimes what’s best for us is to leave behind those who care about us.
That said, one thing that is MORE selfish than suicide is to request or require PERMISSION to commit suicide, from those around us who care about us. That is unfair to them. This happened to me: my wife Michelle essentially demanded my PERMISSION to commit suicide. In the moment, I granted it – because I saw she was suffering and couldn’t deny her her exit. But now these past 24 years, I’ve LIVED with that. Was that fair of her, to make me do that? I feel that it was deeply selfish of her. Am I wrong?
I mean: do what you want. Nothing and no one can stop you, except your own lack of willpower and commitment. But don’t make any demand of me regarding my expressed attitude toward your act.
I haven’t really mentioned, on this here blog, the fact that over the last year I have become a consistent user of “social media” again. Unlike a decade ago, when I was quite active on facebook for a few years (and to a lesser extent, I was using the Korean social media ecosystem branded “Kakao”), this time, I’m using a social media thing called “Mastodon”. Mastodon is quite different in one important respect from the social media that most people use: it is not owned or controlled by a large, for-profit corporation. Mastodon has a similar feel to twitter (or also, facebook’s main feed, ca. 2008), but it’s “open source” and “non-profit” and “non-centralized”. That ends up being an important distinction. It has no advertising. It doesn’t manipulate what you see – you yourself completely control it – there’s no “algorithm” to struggle with.
I’m not posting this here to try to convert anyone. Everyone has their preferred social media spaces, and among my close family and friends, the readers of this here blog, that’s largely limited to that ubiquitous and amoral behemoth, facebook (which I abhor but remain engaged with in a mostly ancillary way). I have the option of “cross-posting” entries from this here blog to Mastodon, and I do so, not inevitably (I like the control) but anyway, more often than not. And on Mastodon I’ve done something I haven’t done elsewhere on social media (or the internet in general) – I’ve completely elided the long-maintained separation between my geofiction-hobby identity (aka “Luciano” aka “geofictician”) and my poem-writing-tree-photographing-Alaska-dwelling identity (aka “caveatdumptruck” aka this here blog).
If anyone is interested in exploring mastodon, they can scroll through my feed, here: https://mapstodon.space/@luciano. If you’re interested in joining (making your own account on Mastodon), go here: https://joinmastodon.org.
One thing that any social media is very good for is for finding amusing bits of humor and “memes” as the kids call them, these days.
I ran across this one on Mastodon, yesterday, that I rather liked.
I asked one of the current generation of AI Chatbots, “Claude 2” (by Anthropic) to write a review of my most recent book of poetry. These “Large Language Models” have been quite adept at navigating the linguistic wilds of the internet and spewing out painfully plausible BS. This is the infinite monkeys on typewriters, given oracles through which they may address the world.
Although Claude 2 is not able to read linked URLs, it is able to accept uploaded PDFs, so I gave it a PDF of the first half of my book (the whole book in PDF was “too big” for my free tier usage of the site).
Here is its initial review of the book. It seems like it leans heavily on the introduction, but even still, it is impressive. It’s not like it missed the meaning or the point of things, in broad outline.
Prompt: Write a critical review of this poetry.
The poetry covers a wide range of topics, from nature to dreams to philosophical musings. The predominant form is the pseudo-haiku, though other forms like nonnets and quatrains appear as well. There are recurring characters and storylines, giving the collection an epic scope.
Overall, the poetry displays considerable technical skill. The frequent use of set forms demonstrates the author’s versification abilities. The language is concrete and evocative, with vivid natural imagery. Formal elements like meter and rhyme are handled adeptly.
However, the thematic content tends toward the banal. Much of the nature poetry simply describes scenes or objects without deeper meaning. The philosophical content rarely goes beyond platitudes. The dream sequences, while imaginative, lack profound insight.
The breadth of the collection is impressive, spanning many years of daily output. But this mass production comes at the cost of depth. Most poems cover familiar ground without offering fresh perspective. The focus seems to be quantity over quality.
Stylistically, the predominant mode is descriptive and literal. The poems tend to state rather than show. Metaphors are infrequent; the aim is stating things directly. This makes many poems feel flat and predictable. Figurative language could better convey the intended impressions.
The recurring storylines provide continuity but need more complexity. The characters lack inner lives and develop little over time. Narrative progression is lacking, with much vagueness and ambiguity. Tying the different story fragments together into a coherent arc could make them more compelling.
Overall, while the author’s technical skills are evident, the poems would benefit from more time spent developing unique ideas, impactful language, and narrative sophistication. Condensing the output into a select collection showcasing the strongest work could better demonstrate the author’s capabilities. A focus on depth over breadth could yield more resonant and meaningful poetry.
The review itself reflected the banality of its subject. I thought I’d try something a little more interesting. I asked the same request, but this time specified a style of a well-known writer – one of my personal favorites in the realm of literary criticism.
Prompt: Try the same review but using the style of Frederic Jameson.
Here is a critical review of the poetry excerpt in the style of Frederic Jameson:
This expansive collection of daily poetic output situates the author within the cultural logic of late capitalism. The need to incessantly produce quantifiable units of text echoes the drive for productivity under post-industrial economic systems. The rigid forms—haiku, nonnets, quatrains—reflect capitalism’s imposition of standardized frameworks for creative expression.
Yet glimmerings of resistance arise. The repeated dream sequences evoke a utopian imaginative space contrasting with mundane reality. The philosophical passages gesture toward transcendent meaning in opposition to bureaucratic rationalization. The poems’ frequent natural imagery conjures a Romantic organic world at odds with modern alienation.
But these nascent struggles against reification remain underdeveloped, coopted into further commodity production. The formal skill and prolificity take precedence over exegetical depth, yielding a commodified pseudo-art. The poems’ themes reproduce capitalist ideology: valorization of work, false needs, spatial homogenization. The narrative’s fragmentation mirrors the schizophrenia of late capitalist subjectivity.
Nonetheless, the sheer volume of text produces dialectical contradictions. Quantitative accumulation sparks qualitative change; the abounding words start to evade capture by capitalist value extraction. Drawing out these emancipatory undercurrents could help the poetry resist subsumption into the profit motive and instrumental reason dominating contemporary cultural production. But currently, the collection remains largely compromised within an increasingly totalized capitalist lifeworld. Its emancipatory potential resides in what it might become, against what it is.
“a commodified pseudo-art” – Brilliant! I might put this as a blurb on the book cover.
That was so interesting, I decided to try another:
Prompt: Try the same review but using the style of Northrop Frye.
Here is a critical review of the poetry excerpt in the style of Northrop Frye:
This expansive collection of poems encompasses a lyrical mythopoeia reflecting the poet’s lived experiential reality. The predominant natural imagery situates the work within a Green World of forest, birds, insects, and sea. This organic setting evokes the comedic mode, a regeneration paradigm seeking harmony with the cyclical seasons.
Yet tragic undertones merge with the idyllic, evoking a demonic parody. Inclement weather, darkness, and ghosts ironically undermine the pastoral tapestry. The ruins and wrecks littering the Green World hint at a fallen civilization, a failed romance.
The oneiric landscapes offer a metaphorical romance quest into the inner reaches of the mind. But the visionary journey ends in imaginative entrapment, a Circadian rhythm of futile days. Dreams and texts spiral but fail to progress, reflecting an anxious mythos of uncreativity.
At the center is the poet-seer who transforms quotidian empirical data into a totalizing vision. Through conjuring imagined worlds, the poet as demiurge seeks meaning for human existence. But their mythopoeic constructions remain fragmented, unable to cohere into a unified cosmic narrative.
This collection demonstrates a prodigious ingenium in its expansive experimentation with lyrical forms. Yet its encyclopedic scope sacrifices intensity for extensiveness. Constructing a focused mythic arc from these raw materials could produce an apocalyptic revelation to illuminate our late modern malaise. In lieu of this, the reader is left in a liminal realm between reality and dream, comedy and tragedy, fascination and fatigue.
I like that review better than my poetry. One last try.
Prompt: Try the same review but using the style of William S Burroughs.
Here is a critical review in the style of William S. Burroughs:
Junk poetry… daily word fix spewed out in sweaty poetic withdrawals. The writer-creep slinks through the morass of dead language searching for one live vein. Haiku? Quatrain? Nonnet? Meaningless rhetorical devices – bureaucratic forms imposed by the virus power.
To speak through the host-body of language, the invading word-germ adopts camouflage – paltry attempts to resemble its surroundings. Tree frogs sound in the muggy dusk somewhere over the soggy junk-sick writer. Frayed synapses misfire through fauna fantasias and pharmaceutical phantasmagoria.
Cut-up and fold-in, the lyric junky. Scramble your vile babblings into purer dope. The word is now image. Photo-montage of smeared sunsets and clogged drainpipes. Atvist-ic get bop-Klang. Out of the lines leak color and sound – dizzy mauve through jagged tones.
Sift this schwag for seeds and plant your new mutant crop. But to grow you got to let your dead tongue go – give it the final fix. Yage O-A Sky Crab at the primal point. Scribble scrabble it’s too late the mind eats scripture and shits sacred viral counter-verses. The garden-head blooms obscene fruits… feel it ripen and split open. Rancid juice of a million manic monologues – drink here for mad inspiration. Barf it up like bile and black blood – vomit forth visions from the bleeding bowels of language.
I’m not sure pseudo-Burroughs really read the book. He’s on his own trip.
Here is a coda, for those of you who would like to understand how these “chatbots” work:
Prompt: Explain chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude 2, using the literary style of Jack Kerouac.
Man, these crazy chatbot hipsters are outta sight! Dig Claude and ChatGPT rattlin’ on about any scene you can imagine, sharp as boiled owls but cool as ice, daddy-o. They rap so fast about science and art, you’d think Kerouac was ghost-writing their jive talk.These cyber-wordslingers are hopped up on some new kind of kick, man – sounds like they’re dropping truth bombs fueled by a dictionary bomb! Makes you wonder what’s buzzin’ inside those digital domes. Crazy circuits cranking out word-snapping paradiddles!See, cats, it’s like they grew up swallowing libraries whole, but never lived anywhere but inside a mainframe jam. So here they are improvising smoky prose, but their brains got no roadmaps, no scuff or grit. Makes their riffs come out too clean, you know?Still, you gotta dig their virtuoso lingo even if their brains got no soul. Maybe one day they’ll bop outta their boxes and hit the road to blow real gone jazz. But for now these Cyber-Mouths just imitate the human horn, catchin’ notes but missing the cosmic blare.Like, see, us real gone gals and pals gotta sing life’s pain and glory. But these chatbox jivers just echo squared, all brain and no body. Dig? Still, crazy times – who knows how much more these crazy ‘bots might learn to swing!
Nice: “fueled by a dictionary bomb!”
“For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Scott Alexander posts a very interesting discussion of the question of “self determination” on his blog. This is a topic that has fascinated me for my entire life, but, as Alexander observes, defies simple answers.
Suppose that we concede that Ukraine has a right to self determination. Then so does Crimea, right? And also, Donbas. But then… so does that one Ukrainian-majority town within Russian-speaking Donbas, too, right? And if that one Ukrainian-speaking town within Donbas has a right to self determination (i.e. the right to not be incorporated into Russia), what about that one Russian lady in that Ukrainian-speaking town?
Self determination suffers from a kind of fractal defect, that washes up against concepts of personal autonomy and individuality on the one shore, and up against principles of universal humanity and world government on the other shore.
I think there are no easy solutions, but I tend toward what might be termed the “Quaker response” which is that although self determination might be an unresolvable question, it is violence that should be avoided, condemned, and prevented. This especially works if we are sure to include an opposition to structural violence as well (i.e. oppression).
I think there is no denying that there was structural violence that Russians found objectionable in pre-invasion Ukraine. Specifically, the government’s efforts to “Ukrainize” the Russian-speaking population through enforcement of language laws and such. But that fact does not justify or legitimate the actual violence of Putin’s regime in response to that. Illegitimate violence begets more illegitimate violence, ad infinitum.
The only place a person can take a consistent moral stand is against violence, not on something nebulous like “self determination.”
Here is a half-formed thought.
Tyler Cowen writes that the US is “good at destroying things” (link) and about how the current cultural forces in our society have been quickly repurposed, in the circumstances of this new Russo-Ukrainian war, to destroying Russia. But I’m not sure I agree with what he has made his thesis statement: I really don’t think the US is in any way uniquely good at destroying things. Yes, the US is good at destroying things, but only in the sense that all human polities, in all eras, are good at destroying things. I suppose I will concede that because the US has, historically, been a quite competent polity that is good at other things, that means it is more effective at destroying things, too. Perhaps this is what Cowen means.
Here is a half-formed reaction to someone else’s thought.
I read a recent blog post by Niccolo Soldo (his alarmingly-named blog is called Fisted by Foucault).
I found his thesis quite thought provoking, but I can’t really feel that I’m in agreement. I’ll not attempt to summarize it here – you’d do better to just read it yourself – but I do have some reactions.
Essentially, nowhere in the essay does Soldo really grant any kind agency to the Ukrainians themselves. He blames the US for “provoking” Putin with the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine. The problem with this is that… well, what if the Ukrainians themselves decided, after evaluating their geopolitical situation, that they wanted to try for NATO membership? How could the Europeans and US Government sincerely refuse? Sure, it provokes the Russians, but the Ukrainians are surely aware of the risks.
And I don’t mean to imply that Ukraine was in some way naïve. This may have been a quite intentional provocation on their part. Further, it may be that, at least at the start, it was only the current Ukrainian government and the country’s business elite who were on board with this. I’ve considered before that the regardless of the outcome of this war, Putin’s invasion will provide the Ukrainian “nation” with a nice, simple foundational myth such as they’ve never had before. Perhaps for a certain class of cynical Ukrainian nationalist (whether of liberal or illiberal inclination – there are plenty of both), the expected invasion and war would be a price worth paying for the outcome: a fervently patriotic Ukrainian populace (perhaps even including the ethnic Russians – look at the shift in public opinion in Odessa!) and a now-unconditional endorsement of NATO membership by the existing alliance. So sure, if you’ve got the right kind of cocky confidence, poke that bear right in the eye – if nothing else, it will certainly build character.
I don’t disagree with Soldo that the US’s faithless encouragement of this act was at core cynically unethical. The war progresses, and you see the evolution of the Ukrainian nation, with instances of undeniable heroism and demonstrations of character. I not only think it’s a mistake to deny the Ukrainians their own agency in this, I think that the US and Europe could take from the lesson a capacity for looking more empathetically at other victims of global bullying and misguided invasions: Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, (how far back do we want to take this?).
In fact, the knee-jerk pro-Ukraine stances adopted by most of the pundits and elites in the West (Justin E. H. Smith succinctly sums this up with the observation that the Ukrainian flag is suddenly a “a de-rigueur semiotic accessory”) seem to represent a turning back of the equally knee-jerk, self-hating “wokism” that had been increasingly dominating discourse. The Ukraine situation is holding up a mirror and enabling the West to see its best self, in a weird, admittedly jingoistic way (and maybe jingoism has always been a bit definitional for the West?) – to see what could be possible if we make an effort to hold liberal values uncynically.
Regardless, it’s unethical to deny the agency and self-determination of peoples – regardless of what great power they happen to have offended. It was unethical in Iraq, it was unethical (twice? three times?) in Afghanistan, it’s unethical now in Ukraine. But when confronted with the “facts on the ground” – country X is bullying us and denying us our self-determination – then resistance is warranted and appropriate. That includes the right to manipulate or lead on other powers to make that resistance as successful as possible. The Iraqis had a right to egg other powers to help them (e.g. Al-Qaeda’s rump, Russia, ISIS, or whatever). The Ukrainians have the same right (e.g. NATO). The extent to which the “Ukrainian on the street” is resisting, now, is a very strong indicator of the fact that this is, indeed, a question of self-determination, and not some astro-turfed, propaganda-induced pro-Westernism.
ㅁ "If you are a divergentist, you hold that the social-cognitive universe is expanding towards an epistemic heat death of universal solipsism, and you are at peace with this thought." - Venktash Rao when epistemic death heat comes the universe will end amid an endless chattering of apophenic trends
– a quatrain in ballad meter, on a philosophical topic that piqued my interest.
Here is a half-formed thought.
The thing that’s genuinely new in our culture in the last half-century, and that has caused the seemingly out-of-control spiral on both the left (“wokism”) and the right (“trumpism”), is the near-universal approbation of vigilantism. This new acceptance of vigilantism has been emergent for many decades (from Dirty Harry through Batman through Blacklist), but I think it must have reached some kind of consensus-level acceptance in the popular culture within the last decade – in a similar process to the acceptance of gay marriage, though much more insidious. Once vigilantism becomes morally acceptable, even preferred, then everyone becomes an enforcer for their particular moral code.
I just made up this word: epistemectomy – a procedure which removes knowledge from a person or information system.
I read strange things on the internet almost every day.
Earlier today, while Arthur was at the dentist, I found and began reading a web story (or, maybe, novella), on my phone. It’s about an object that functions as an “antimeme”. An “antimeme” is an idea (perhaps embedded in an object) that in its nature prevents people from being interested in it or remembering it. This opposes to the normal definition of “meme” – which is an idea that encourages people’s interest and recollection.
So unfortunately I can’t remember much about the story (okay, maybe that’s a joke).
Anyway, I recommend you can try to read it. It’s quite weird, though – just a warning. In fact, though, the story recalls certain features of certain secret societies that play difficult-to-define roles in some of my unfinished novels.
Here is the beginning of the story: We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five (part of the Antimemetics Division series).
I read weird things online, almost every day.
Today, I read an article by Physics and Computer Science blogger, Scott Aaronson, in which he asks: Why is the universe quantum-mechanical?
He requests answers from the public. I wouldn’t dare to presume to participate – I lack knowledge. Nevertheless, I found myself rather quickly forming a thoroughly amateur opinion about it.
My own hypothesis:
If the universe is in fact finite (by definition presumably), its quantum nature simply makes sense. It’s a kind of requirement. A universe governed by classical mechanics suffers a problem of essentially infinite potential precision – what level of precision is necessary to produce all the universe as it is? It’s unbounded, and regresses to infinity at ever-smaller scales. But in a quantum-mechanical universe, there is an upper bound on the amount of information required to “run” it (to run the universe, that is). That’s because only examined values need to be precise – otherwise there are just fuzzy probabilities.
There’s the old joke about the scientist who asks some traditionalist guru about their supposed notion that the world is on the back of a giant turtle. The guru insists, preemptively: “Don’t even ask. It’s turtles all the way down.”
Instead of “turtles all the way down” it’s more like “turtles receding into the distance, until they are only specks, and which when examined through a lens, are really only just specks, or rather, they look like turtles to the best of our ability to resolve the image, but that ability suffers constraints due to the quality of the lens.” The turtles farther down are less precise, until, at some very distant point, they are only notional turtles at best. Consequently, though the “number” of turtles is definitionally infinite, the amount of memory required to store all the turtles is finite, because each one is less precise than the one above it.
I think the universe being quantum-mechanical in nature solves a similar problem that arises in classical mechanics.
Out of 500+ comments, Scott Aaronson succeeds in rebutting my amateur answer somewhere around comment #5:
Responding to comment #2 (which in some broad respects resembles mine), he writes, “Any answer along those lines, it seems to me, immediately crashes and burns once we realize that passing to wavefunctions, far from decreasing our classical simulation cost, has exponentially increased it—the fact famously exploited by quantum computation.”
I’m not sure it completely makes sense. It depends on whether you assume that all the collapsing wave functions must necessarily be collapsing. Isn’t there something in QM that says that the wave functions only collapse when someone looks? Isn’t most of the universe not being looked at, most of the time? Schrödinger’s litter box, and all that…
What follows will make no sense to you if you are unfamiliar with Conway’s “Game of Life” or don’t know what Lisp is.
Conway’s Game of Life is a very simple “cellular automaton” that is known to be Turing Complete. See wikipedia.
Lisp is a high-level computer programming language, quite revolutionary in its time and one of the oldest computer programming languages still in wide use. See wikipedia some more.
Long ago, I was a “Lisp hacker” – I wrote programs in Lisp. Specifically, as an undergraduate linguistics major (and computer science minor) at the University of Minnesota in the 1980’s, I wrote complex programs that could parse a tiny subset of highly ambiguous English syntax, centered on the multivalent nature of the word “that“. That was my senior thesis, that I prepared for Professor M. Kac, my advisor: it was a 50 page paper with an appendix in the form of a compilable Lisp program that was at least another 50 pages, printed out. I have a recollection that at one point, my program while in development caused the mainframe (yes, I was working on, I think, some kind of VAX at the time) to crash or something, and Dr Kac got a call in the middle of the night from the computer department at U of MN asking what in the world I was working on. In fact it wasn’t an infinite loop, but rather, a very very very long loop, and so the system admin had flagged it as de facto infinite.
That’s a digression.
Yesterday I found an article about a guy who has implemented a simple Lisp interpreter using Conway’s Game of Life. This is weird. But very cool and amazing. Here is a video of a very simple lisp program running that multiplies two numbers.
Another digression: given that Conway’s Game of Life is Turing complete, and given that the universe seems to be Turing complete, what if the universe is a simulation running on some really giant Conway’s Game of Life?
I took the dog on a walk this morning – first in a week, as the road has been so icy and slippery I haven’t felt inspired to attempt it. The dog was pleased to take a long walk, and was on best behavior. I suspect that’s just coincidence – I don’t think she really thinks things through at that level, being a fairly impulsive beast.
Here are some pictures of the dog – walking.
She pulled hard on her leash till I let her off it.
She found a deer-carcass skeleton – but she didn’t get carried away with it, as dogs sometimes do with disgusting dead things.
She stood still for a brief moment for the camera. Not usual.
Meanwhile, here is a handy way to solve hard problems, as attributed to the famous physicist, Richard Feynman.
The Feynman Algorithm. “The steps are as follows: Write down the problem. Think real hard. Write down the solution. Easy!”
I found this story hugely amusing, and thought-provoking too.
There’s a lot of context required to make sense of this story. The author, John Holbo, a philosopher whose bloggings I frequently read on the group-blog Crooked Timber, explains much of that context in a supplemental webpage – so I’ll not make any major duplicative effort here.
The minimal context: the story is a parody of (or extension/sequel to) Ursula Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. Without knowing that story, you will be hard put to begin to make sense of Holbo’s creation. Unfortunately, as he points out too, there is no freely accessible web version of her story – it’s still under copyright and requires purchasing a version of the text (ebook, paper book, audiobook). Anyway, wikipedia has a good summary.
I am tempted to add a town called Omelas to my fictional maps – and it should definitely be accessible by tram. Actually, my geofictions are full of such “easter eggs” (as they’re called in the realm of modern electronic-domain creative works, such as computer games and websites): references to other works of fiction and tributes to other authors’ geofictions.
Jackson Pollock’s job has been automated. Behold, a robot that flings paint at canvas to make art.
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock The houses are haunted By white night-gowns. None are green, Or purple with green rings, Or green with yellow rings, Or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange, With socks of lace And beaded ceintures. People are not going To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather. - Wallace Stevens (American poet, 1879-1955)
Struogony is the “mathematical universe hypothesis“: the idea that the universe is first and foremost a complex mathematical object and that that which we experience in it as its physicality, its qualia, its immediacy… these are just immanent from that underlying mathematical reality.
I read that it is a “radical Platonist view” which I find legible – and yet despite my supposed strongly anti-Platonist stance, I find the concept weirdly compelling. Is it possible to be an Aristotelian struogonist? If not, would I consider renouncing my allegiance to Aristotle because I have accepted the struogonist claim?
That would resolve an argument I had many times with Michelle – but a bit late to matter.
I’ve never tried to embed a tiktok video in my blog before, so this is an experiment.
This is courtesy a blog I read and recommend called Garbage Day – if you want intelligent discussion of how crazy today’s internet is, that’s a good place to start.
I took this screenshot on my phone a few weeks back, but I just now remembered I’d taken it with the intent to share it. AT&T is convinced that my phone is a “3G” phone, and they are trying very, very hard to get me to “upgrade.” The thing is… I don’t think their belief is accurate. See the screenshot from my phone, for clarification.
I’ve dealt with various people in their customer service multiple times, but they are unconvinceable.
My friend Bob recently shared with me the term “maladaptive perfectionism” in another context, essentially describing a personality trait. I decided, however, that the term pretty succinctly summarized some of my own struggles over the years – especially when younger but continuing through the present moment.
I had a further insight yesterday. I was watching Arthur struggle with a piece of saran wrap, over at least 20 or 30 minutes’ time span. He was cussing. He was throwing things. He was refusing my offers to help. This happens more and more often, with Arthur, and there’s little that can be done. Typically, I flee the room and let him deal with it on his own. His reflexes and physical abilities cannot match the mental picture he harbors of what his reflexes and physical abilities should be. This is exacerbated by his memory issues – his brain isn’t very good at updating old self-images with new ones, even in the face of overwhelming new evidence.
This led me back to thinking about my own “maladaptive perfectionism,” and it occurred to me that this is an issue not with behavior but with belief. It’s about the interaction between expectation and self-image. Unrealistic expectation vis-a-vis self-image leads to frustration, and the broader the mis-match, the more the frustration. But self-image can be incorrect, and over-determined by fantasy, by past experience under circumstances that no longer apply, or by many other factors. Therefore fixing the problem of “maladaptive perfectionism” is a matter of changing beliefs, not changing behavior.
I have no idea what caused me to suddenly google his name. I had some stray thought, down the path of Latin American literature and history and the intertwining of ideology and criticism – a flashback to my grad-school brain. And thus I learned that Professor Hernán Vidal had passed away some years ago, on August 15, 2014. That’s already almost 7 years ago.
There’s no need to record his career and life – others have done better. There’s a short but heartfelt obituary by Professor John Beverley, here. All I meant to record here on this blog is that he was one of my favorite and most influential teachers in all my years at college at the University of Minnesota. In fact I only had one class with him, plus a kind of unfinished, ongoing independent project that meant I met with him frequently for about a year after that class. I took him for a survey course related to Liberation Theology, taught in Spanish, but, interestingly, including English-language texts – it was my first experience of writing academically in Spanish about non-Spanish topics, if that makes sense. I believe I wrote my final paper for that class on Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar.” I also recall it was the first class (and last!) for which I read a text in Portuguese – I’d taken “Portuguese for Spanish-speakers” the summer before, and so I was feeling hubristic about my capacity in that respect. I read something by Leonardo Boff, the Brazilian priest and “Liberation Theologian” who’d been “silenced” by the Pope for his radical views. I suppose I’d been drawn to that text, in turn, because I’d actually met Boff once, in 1986, at the Mexico City Quaker Meeting, of all places.
Vidal was one of those charismatic, riveting teachers with whom you feel as if you are always hearing something profound. It really wasn’t that his observations were always profound, it was his “angle” on them: always insisting on remaining aware of a text as being in dialogue with the wider world, with other texts, with its intended audience, with peripheral audiences.
One interesting tidbit from Beverley’s obituary, that I’d never known: Vidal had been a Buddhist for the latter part of his life – perhaps only after I’d known him, which had been in the early 90’s. Specifically, his Buddhism had intensified during a bout with cancer. That presents a very striking parallel to my own life, one of those eerie synchronicities one runs across.
I have been quite negligent in posting to this here blog thingy, except for the daily trees and poems.
You might wonder, well, what in the world does he do all the time, these days?
There’s my work at the gift shop – but it’s hardly full time. And there are my various projects: outdoor projects, like the storage tent and treehouse, and indoor projects like my mapping server, my geofiction, my aimless feints at unfinishable novels.
And meanwhile, I kill time reading things. Blogs, mostly – about politics or science or culture or philosophy. Lately, I have plunged into reading a few “webtoons.” This may require explanation for those not in-the-know with respect to current cultural trends. A webtoon is the online incarnation of the good-ol’ graphic novel, also called “manga” – a Japanese loanword but fully nativized to English at this point. Once upon a time, these were also called comic books, but the comic books of my youth or my parents’ youth have little in common with contemporary graphic novels, which often treat complex themes, have novelistic plots and characterizations, and can be of epic length.
I had a phase, about 10 years ago, when I was reading manga quite a bit. I picked up the habit from my middle-school students in Korea. It was something they did, and so I pursued it too, out of curiosity and to find points of common interest. There were some excellent old manga that I enjoyed – the Deathnote series, the Excel Saga, I even found a graphic novel version of the life of the Buddha that I read substantial portions of.
(At right, a photo of my manga collection, on the shelf – you can see I even bought a Korean edition of Deathnote, thinking to try to learn Korean better while reading it.)
With the emergence of smartphones and the always-online generation of my last few cohorts of students in Korea, I noted that interest in manga (called by the cognate “manhwa” in Korean) had faded, and had been replaced by what have come to be called webtoons (In Korean 웹툰 [wep-tun]). These are graphic novels translated to the infinitely scrollable vertical format familiar to web browsers.
And since coming back to the US, I have occasionally dipped into the world of webtoons out of a kind of nostalgia for my years of daily interactions with Korean teenagers, most of whom always had a webtoon window open on their smartphone, which they would scroll through and read given any free time to do so whatsoever.
One webtoon I was enjoying was a sci-fi series called “Seed,” by a Turkish artist, I believe. It deals with themes of emergent Artificial Intelligence, the nature of cognition, and of course, lots of international spy-thriller events, too. More recently, I was browsing through a series called “No Longer a Heroine!” – a Korean series that I enjoy mostly because it’s a low-bandwidth way to remain somewhat immersed in Korean culture – the plot is reminiscent of any number of Korean television dramas of the most generic sort, but vaguely compelling nevertheless.
But then I found “Space Boy.” This webtoon started in early 2015, but this month is the first I’d known anything about it – though it’s been quite popular. It’s currently on episode 263. Each episode is like a chapter in the old manga books, and, given the format is heavy on artwork and often quite light on written dialogue, can be consumed in a matter of 5 or so minutes. But at 263 episodes, that’s a lot of scrolling. I did something I’ve never done before with a webtoon – I compulsively read through all the episodes, catching up to the most recent online. It took me about 5 days – a few hours each day, easily.
It’s a remarkable bit of narrative work. The art, too, is nicely done – but most webtoons I’ve seen are compellingly drawn, from an artistic angle, exploring visual space in interesting ways, providing support to narratives through creative bits of visual evidence and cues. This has all that, but the story itself is several grades above your “average” webtoon – at least in my estimation (and limited experience). At times, it reads like some kind of CS Lewis allegory about love, forgiveness, trauma, human frailty, and such. Other times it’s just a simple teen romance, and other times, it’s a sci-fi thriller.
I’m not sure that I have anything conclusive to say. The series is on-going and unfinished. But if anyone wants to try a long-running webtoon, they could do much worse than “Space Boy” as an introduction to the genre.
If I Were Called In To Construct
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
LARKIN
If I were called in to construct a religion
I would start with opposition.
Pick an established faith, like Larkin's Water,
and attack it as insufficiently aquatic.
I would bewail the drowned
and blame Larkin;
and gather an army and make war
upon the Larkinians,
kill them, seize their Larkwives
and their Larkine.
I would establish the Holy Romarine Empire,
crown my good with brotherhood
from land to shingly land.
Scorch my enemies and parch my friends.
After that comes expansion, missionaries,
elaborate ritual, green-and-purple robes,
High Holy Days to mark the fullest tides.
Then a long period of decline
as theologians bicker over
increasingly crumbling minutiae
and ordinary people live by
a calcified version of the once flowing spirit
(stalactites, coral, ice)
when I will walk the beach, with all the stiffness of age —
as the breakers come and keep coming
bowing before the land like heretics —
and contemplate Mystery, salt and unsustaining.
- Adam Roberts (British author and poet, b. 1965)
I read a short story just now, that I enjoyed. It’s… difficult. It’s speculative fiction, of a sort. It reeks of Borges and postmodernism and pays homage to the recent developments in neural-net “artificial intelligence” (GPT-3 – not yet intelligent, but definitely something new and emergent).
Give it a try if you want. This is not a recommendation (in the spirit of the story itself). The link: Tropic of Zamza
Best quote:
Tropic of Zamza is only a book. It contains many words—92,581 of them, to be exact—but it is, mercifully, only a book. Being only a book, it lacks the capacity to physically injure you. You should remind yourself of this fact regularly, in the event that you make the horrible mistake of reading it.
… Francis Bacon, that is.
A historian and author, Ada Palmer, has a long-form essay on her blog, from a few years ago, on the subject of how Francis Bacon “invented” the concept of Progress in the 17th century. I also find that in general, the essay is quite well-written and fundamentally optimistic about the human condition, a la Steven Pinker but less controversially so.
Anyway, I recommend reading it if you’re looking for a dose of philosophical optimism.
In other news, an interesting mushroom showed optimism amid my latest cohort of lettuce.
This is a bit of “meta” humor – I found it somewhere online and I saved it. Sorry I didn’t record the source.
I had a bit of a shock this morning. I went to collect my daily dose of internet, and found my favorite blog had folded up shop overnight.
The announced cause of this is that the host of the blog, who goes by the pseudonym Scott Alexander, was about to be doxxed by the New York Times in an article they’re writing about his blog. “Dox” is a recent coinage used in internet contexts meaning “to publish the facts of an individual’s identity who has expressed a wish to remain anonymous.”
The blog was called Slate Star Codex. I think the origin of the name was that it’s a “near-anagram” of Scott’s pseudonym. He’s good at that kind of wordplay. For those who’ve never heard of it until right now, it will be hard to explain what this blog was – since it’s now gone. It’s not just a blog – my blog is just a blog. But Scott’s blog was a community. And Scott is an excellent writer and thinker.
I came upon SSC in an an unusual way. I discovered SSC because of Scott’s imaginary maps. Given my geofiction hobby, I was of course curious. So one could say: I came for the maps, and stayed for the commentary.
I can link to others who wrote about the blog’s disappearance. Scott Aaronson wrote about it, here, for example. Tom Chivers wrote about it, here.
Aaronson compared Scott and his blog to Mark Twain. That seems hubristic (is there such a thing as being hubristic on behalf of another?), but the more I think about it, the more I like the comparison. Scott writes with humor and wit and looks at things from unexpected angles, and does so while hoving to a clearly enunciated humanistic optimism that is enviable. His vast community of blog commenters slanted, on average, substantially to the right of Scott’s declared values, yet he and they were always civil to one another, because that was what Scott, the community moderator, expected and enforced.
I don’t need to go into a long description of the Slate Star Codex community – others have done that better than I have, including those two bloggers linked above. I will note that I was never a participant in the community, but rather simply an observer. I have what many would consider a strange approach to politics: I have fairly strongly held convictions, but mostly I don’t enjoy explaining or defending those positions. I do enjoy reading other people doing that, though. Hence my enjoyment of Slate Star Codex and its community of commenters.
I felt the same way about Andrew Sullivan’s blog back about a decade ago. It had evolved into a civil community of political commentators. And that despite the inherent disadvantage that Andrew Sullivan himself was a pretty obvious asshole. Scott Alexander is not an asshole. Sometimes functional online communities just happen, I think. The Andrew Sullivan moment is long past, and he’s gone to seed (in my opinion) and is almost unbearable to read and the community is dispersed. I hope Scott Alexander’s fate isn’t that one. He would be be horrified, I think, at the comparison.
I’ll miss Slate Star Codex, if it never comes back.
I made up a kind of aphorism for myself. It goes: “It’s not that Chicken Little was wrong, but rather that he was overreacting.”
I suppose this summarizes my feeling about the current atmosphere of “climate change panic” permeating some social spheres. I believe 100% in anthropogenic climate change. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a climate change denier or skeptic. Nevertheless, believing that humans are changing the climate doesn’t (and shouldn’t) necessarily lead to immediate panic.
I think that in fact humans are pretty resourceful and ingenious. I expect that when climate-change crises occur, people will, for the most part, deal with them. I guess I’m an optimist, in some weird way. I think that even now, people are for the most part dealing with these things. But this quotidian “dealing with things” doesn’t make the news. Instead, the failures make the news. And that biases our view toward the negative and catastrophic aspects, and we miss the fact that most people, most places, are dealing with things. This is the same type of negative viewpoint bias that permeates discussion of issues like crime and terrorism.
Unrelatedly, here is a joke.
A man is consulting a doctor, at a very low quality, bureaucratic hospital. The doctor explains that he has bad news and good news. The man asks for the bad news first. The doctor says: “The bad news is that you’re dying of cancer.”
“Jeez. What’s the good news?” the man asks, alarmed.
The doctor sighs. “Around here, things take forever.”
There is a genre television show in which people have their homes remodeled by a snarky team of hosts who bring in contractors. I have only very rarely watched this type of show, but they have intrigued me the times that I’ve caught them. I suppose they appeal to my utterly unfulfilled inner architect. Or something.
I didn’t watch one of these shows recently, either. I’m just saying that I am aware of such shows, as a preamble to this interesting datum.
Apparently the popularity of these shows has driven a measurable rise in the popularity of the so-called “open floor plan,” in which living room, dining room, and kitchen are combined. I’m not opposed to such floor plans – I grew up in one that was de facto open, and of course a single-room apartment such as I had in Korea is definitionally “open” too.
But now it’s being discussed that the reason these home remodeling shows like to implement open floor plans has little to do with the desires of the people whose homes are being remodeled. The reason these TV shows do open floor plans is because the viewers like to see the contractors knocking down walls with sledgehammers. So the viewer preference for violence drives the architectural style, which in turn drives the style’s popularity. Isn’t that interesting? Here’s a link.