Metaphysics, the Self, the gods, some stories

keywords: metaphysics, Huxley, genes, emergence, chaos theory, religion, gods, simulation theory, the universe, the self, Being, Kant, Camus, Heidegger, Descartes, explanations, science

Science is (and maybe just “humans are”) in the business of providing explanations for the seen by invoking the unseen, but it does a terrible job at explaining the sensation of “the self.” 

One of the most peculiar and astonishing things about existence is that we are something rather than nothing. This feeling strikes some more clearly when looking at the stars, or staring in the mirror, wondering “why am I this one?” But other times it might grab you at the strangest moment, in the middle of a conversation with friends, or looking at your hands in the shower. It is the mystery of Being (see: Heidegger) that haunts us and blesses us at all times, and which lies beneath the horizon of all understanding. It is also completely wrapped up in the mystery of the “self,” namely, why should I get to exist at all? I understand that from this brain of a billion neuro-processes, after chaos theory takes hold there emerges a higher subjective experience known as “consciousness” that seemingly hovers around that body, independent from its causal basis. A separate tier of existence, past the infinite opaque horizon, so to speak (‘constructive emergence’)***. But still, why do I specifically get to have THIS consciousness, in THIS body, at this time? What did I do to deserve to exist? Are there souls in limbo that pay money for the chance to inhabit a consciousness in our universe? Perhaps a lottery? How many don’t get to exist? Is there possibly just one soul that inhabits every consciousness, being born again as a new human at a random time period every time death ends its current body? When you really try to confront the absurdity of why we are something rather than nothing, it makes sense that this universe is some sort of creation, or simulation. 

From where this creation comes, does not necessarily have any traits, values, or beliefs that we can recognize. Our minds are only capable of understanding phenomena inside this universe, with our flesh brains, bound by things like cause-and-effect, space, and time for both operation and understanding. So almost by definition, we cannot truly grasp what is outside this universe, or what caused it. The terms themselves, ‘outside’ and ‘cause’ are again part of the boundaries of this universe, so they might not apply to what is beyond it (Kant makes this argument for his proposal of agnosticism over theism when he destroys Descartes…the most rational stance with respect to atheism vs theism is simply that ‘we cannot know’). How supremely boring would it be, if the afterlife (as in some of the Abrahamic religions) contained sensations and values familiar to this world? To find out that this is all there was, that causality and space and time weren’t just specific to this world but to all realities, and that the gods actually cared about whether we followed our secular values, which are somewhat driven by the contingent animal instincts we are born with. It would make way more sense if the reality outside of this one was something radically incomprehensible relative to this universe, and the tools we have for understanding it (space/time/causality).

In addition to constructive emergence***, subtractive emergence is an appealing way to explain consciousness.  That whatever this other reality (or non-reality) is, it is somehow blocking my universality, or ‘mind at large,’ which leads to this quaint, inexplicable sensation of ‘self’ inside a specific body without any other explanation/information. Huxley himself noted that the mind-at-large is some sort of omnipresent/omniscient awareness, and the point of the nervous system is to filter down your mind-at-large to a specific body and locality, for survival purposes. If you were able to perceive your complete mind at large, you would never strive to preserve your body. It is for your own good to filter it down.  What appeals to me about this idea is it starts to capture the surreal-ness of existence discussed above. And it runs opposite to constructive emergence. It treats the nervous system as subtractive rather than generative of experience. But it serves the same purpose, and captures the same mood. 

It is this mood—of astonishment at the absurdity of the self, of why there is something rather than nothing—that motivates the story concepts below. 

*** (constructive emergence) These concepts—how the mystery of Being lies BENEATH this opaque, seemingly infinite horizon of understanding, and how consciousness emerges from the chaos of neuro-processes as a separate tier of existence, warrant a bit of explanation, and are tied into each other. To get more familiar with this, we will pivot to the pilot-wave explanation of quantum mechanics (specifically the double-split experiment which shows that the electron behaves as both a wave and particle, and sort of changes its story based on how you measure it). The current Copenhagen interpretation kind of sucks because it states that an electron is both a wave and a particle, and that by measuring it, it ‘becomes’ one or the other. It does not identify the point of mystery, and simply ASSERTS something completely absurd and untenable. Pilot-wave and chaos theory do a much better job in my opinion—it starts very deterministic and tenable, and then with chaos theory we identify a sort of infinite and opaque horizon BEYOND which the weird behavior of the electron emerges. Similar to consciousness, and probably Being. Basically, think of the electron as a pebble hopping along in a pond. We are deterministic, simple, and clear at this point. Each time it hops, it creates ripples, and those ripples will influence its future trajectory. It’s future trajectory also creates more ripples which interact with the previous ripples, causing this feedback loop that gets very complex very fast. After enough hops—and this is where chaos theory comes in—it becomes MATHEMATICALLY intractable to know exactly where the electron/pebble will be anymore, because of the insane amount of recursive influence that is going on between the hops and ripples. Now, we are no longer simple and clear, things have gotten intractable. This electron/pebble emerges on the other side of this point as “not having a specific position,” but more a probability of positions, from a mathematical perspective. It contains properties of a particle—because it is one—but also waves, because of all the ripples. And based on how we look at it, it can be either. Isn’t this beautiful? We don’t just STATE that it’s a superposition of particle and wave, of various states. We start with a clear situation that gets muddled and intractable after a while, and the electron EMERGES past that point as a trippy superposition. In between these points (clear vs trippy) is the “infinite, opaque horizon.” And I think it’s instructive to consider that consciousness, Being, the self, the emergebnce of life from matter, and other inexplicable mysteries of experience also emerge past the infinite opaque horizon in a similar way. It allows room for things like “having free will in a deterministic universe.” The universe is deterministic, but YOU emerge on the other side of that infinite opaque horizon, and have free will. There’s even a mathematical proof somewhere that asserts that even accepting a deterministic universe, there is no way one could completely predict the outcomes of the universe from within this universe, due to the complexity. Potentially you could from “outside” this universe, whatever that could mean. And here we’ve come full circle to the absurdity of the self and its implication of some greater metaphysical reality. 

Stories: “It makes way more sense that way”

Story 1—The universe makes more sense backwards

You must have heard that “hydrogen is a colorless gas that, given enough time, becomes aware of itself.” Trippy, right? Its a clever quote which captures the mind-boggling nature of life and consciousness, that life merely emerged from matter, because “rules.” First of all you have atoms that physically interact based on specific rules. If you shine light (provide energy) on these atoms, specifically carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, they will jiggle with each other and eventually pair up to create amino acids. These amino acids, with more energy, will jiggle to make proteins, and this jiggling dance of proteins and atoms and amino acids in the presence of water and light starts to traverse our patented “infinite and opaque horizon.” On the other side of this horizon you have the creation of this thing called the “cell wall,” where some proteins/organelles literally wall themselves off from others and say “we are separate from the rest, we are an automata, a unique agency!!” Once you have cells, you have life. It’s insanely absurd to think about, even as you have all the pieces in front of you. The rules of physics already existed, and just HAPPENED to be so that MY BEING came out of these atoms + rules? Fat chance. It makes way more sense to think that some greater being STARTED with life, this gorgeous self-replicating construct, and started deconstructing it into cells, proteins etc, and naming the rules of physics as they did this deconstruction. Once they got all the way to the end—bare atoms/energy and laws of physics—they decided to press the “rewind” button. Our universe, as we know and experience it, is that rewind. And we’ve now passed the point of cells, the point that was already designed beforehand, and crazy undesigned things have now emerged from that rewind, things like HUMANS and CONSCIOUSNESS. THATS why it’s so absurd. THATS why none of this makes any sense. No one knows what lies ahead, not even the gods. We’ve passed the infinite opaque horizon.  A good question after this story is written might be: Why did some dude make this universe and play it backwards? Well, that warrants a second story.

Story 2—We are the TIME-DEATH universe here to make genes

I think—and this is completely wrong because I’m personifying gods with my own values and beliefs—there could be gods somewhere who are using this universe as a way to get something they want. And I think that thing is genes. In the same way one cannot predict the final state of three bodies orbiting each other, but must simulate them, we are a simulation to get the gods something that they were unable to get analytically. They wanted some kind of algorithm that would be very valuable, that would serve as the optimal formulation of what I can only describe as “survival.” But they couldn’t solve it mathematically. So they created a universe with two major concepts—TIME and LIFE/DEATH. There would be beings in this universe (organisms) that experienced something called death, which would be the demise of the beings. But the beings could also reproduce new offspring and keep dying over and over again, and in each iteration they would refine their mini-codes (genes) in response to death. These iterations are called TIME, and the self-reproducing ability of the beings is what we know as LIFE. Once the simulation had life, death, and time, the gods had everything they needed to run it. The beings would eventually start refining genes over and over again, making them better, more elegant, and perfectly attuned to this thing called survival each time they died. Our universe is that simulation. It makes way more sense to me that our universe is that simulation than saying that this just “appeared” from a “bang” (thanks science). At the end of TIME, the gods will pluck the best genes from this universe and move on.

In conclusion, genes are not here to enhance us, we are here to refine them. It makes way more sense that way.

Story 3—The gods were bored watching the gene simulation, and decided to INHABIT it.

Now the gods, watching this simulation from above, outside of time and space, were bored as heck. And they thought of something interesting—wouldn’t it be cool if we inhabited this TIME-DEATH universe for a bit? We could just sort of hover over the brains of the beings, experiencing their emotions and physicalities, and they wouldn’t know what the hell was going on, they would just call it “consciousness” and be unable to explain it (Descartes noted that he knew God existed because consciousness had some strange element of perfection in it that could only be from God). The rules are that we cannot have any knowledge of the fact that we are timeless gods, that gets filtered out by the nervous system (Huxley!). This way, we’ll get to authentically experience time and death, and for once, NOT feel bored. We’ll also equip consciousness with this insatiable need for purpose and explanation, in a world without purpose or explanation. This would provide the necessary tension to attempt the impossible and transcend ourselves. We would be terrified of death, and would live poetic lives in a desperate attempt to rebel against the futility of it (Camus). We would create beautiful things like love, which could only emerge from a timeless god inhabiting an animal doomed toward death without any knowledge that it was a timeless god. Once we approached this terrible thing called death, and passed it, we would wake back up as the gods we were, exiting the simulation, while the other gods would be laughing at us for being “so scared of death lol I can’t believe you thought there was no explanation and everything just ended in void LOL!!”

I hope these stories help capture the insane, absurd nature of experiencing a “self” in this unexplained world. Maybe someone will write them. Then we can bury it in the ground and people in a few centuries will find it and start a religion or whatever. 

On Pet Appreciation, and a Potential Parallel with Supernatural/Extrasensory Phenomena

So 2 things 1. pet appreciation and 2. the gods

1. We ask: what makes us really appreciate pets, or animals in general? Like why do I ultimately appreciate a pet dog more than a pet fish? There are many ways to articulate it, and one way is ability to perceive me as a holistic, autonomous agent. If I have a dog and I pet him, throw a frisbee for him, put out food for him, he realizes all of those things are me/being done by me, the same larger animal. This gives me a special recognition that could be integral to human-animal relationships in general.

However, if I have a fish in a fishbowl, it merely perceives all of my actions as randomly happening in its environment. Fish food falls from the sky, a blurry face appears and moves around, all of the water disappears and then more comes in. With my hamster, I can poke him from one end, with one finger, and he will turn around and stare at it and sniff it. It's unclear whether he even relates this finger as belonging to me, or associates it with my face, or can even make out my face as a face, etc. He probably just thinks of it as "flying thing that pokes me with that specific scent." And then while he's staring at it, I can bring my OTHER finger to poke him from the other side, and he'll turn around, and now think there are 2 "flying things that poke me with that scent," but might totally think of them as separate agents. It seems like there are two factors which determine this inability to perceive me as a holistic being. 1. Size: because I am so much larger than he is, so I can make my fingers come in from opposite ends and he can't even see that they are connected to the same being, and 2) he doesn't have enough sensory + logical processing capabilities to recognize my face as a face and connect that all the things I'm doing are related to me/my face etc. (The self is synonymous to the face in that the eyes are the window to the soul)

2. And this segues into the next idea: the gods. The same way that a smaller, lower-level creature can't perceive my actions as mine, and sees them as a bunch of random, disconnected events, perhaps I can't perceive a higher, extrasensory being's actions as theirs, and just see them as a bunch of random disconnected events in my life. This might relate to certain feelings we have on things like synchronicities, collective consciousness, Murakami novels (where seemingly disconnected events are connected in a greater way), etc. Perhaps God was originally posited by the same analogy, while someone was observing an animal. Maybe a supernova in a distant galaxy and a comet coming for earth, or two oddly similar events at very different times in your life, are connected in origin: some super huge higher-dimensional dude trying to pet you.

Science Literature + Funding Pressure Encourages Divergence

We ask: why is the literature on charge-transfer (CT) mechanisms in organic systems such a shitshow? There are so many different terms for different types of potential mechanisms: tunneling, hopping, but then also superexchange, and resonant tunneling, and multi-step tunneling, coherent hopping, electron delocalization etc etc. Are there likely this many different mechanisms governing the charge transport in organic systems? The answer is definitely not, and a lot of these actually pick out the same fundamental mechanism but just use different terminology because their results were a little different when they ran the experiment.

You have many different groups under pressure from funding sources to publish. This puts a time crunch on things, and you should just get your results out one way or another.

But, you don't want to step on the toes of another published person in the field who might review your manuscript, so you use different terminology. you avoid really pitting your results against their framework, and just use different words, and that wont offend them.

As a result, there isn't a collective effort by the community to converge on a single unified explanation, but rather the opposite force to avoid each other as much as possible to just publish without problems. 

So the answer is: the social organization between researchers, journals, and funding sources.

Short term solution: write a review that goes over all the terms for different CT mechanisms, and what different major groups mean by them. And then you can distinguish (for example) superexchange vs superexchange', where the latter is how the XXX group uses the term which is completely different than the traditional technical meaning.

Long term solution: Rearrange the social dynamic of this deadly triangle. How would you do it?

The Earth's Will to Reproduce

Just quick dump of a thought here, but hopefully will have time to expand.

Q: If the earth is an organism, why hasn't it reproduced?

A: The earth first needs to reproduce by sending its seeds out into space to colonize it. This likely forms the basis of the human fascination with space, remarkable ability of humans to build tech to go into space and explore and proliferate, etc. We are the earth's seeds, and our desires, goals, fascinations, etc all proceed from the earth's will to reproduce.

Camus Absurdism vs Marx Leftism

Encountered the following challenge on an Absurdist forum:

do you not think reveling in absurdity and meaningless is a luxury you can afford if you dont have debt and work and struggle to get by every day?
if i stopped giving a fuck, which i wish i could do, i'd lose everything materialistic and financial. id be kicked out of my course.
"Schopenhauer was laughed at for praising suicide at a laden table [but he was technically right]"
He was maybe right but he still could afford the luxury of that being one of the only proper worries.
i cant imagine myself exactly being relaxed and happy and accepting about being homeless or out in the cold and the rain.

TLDR: If you can't avoid work/money/housing related anxiety, it's very difficult to be content in the absurdity and meaninglessness of it all, even if you're aware of it.

or maybe i'm just an idiot

Twofold Response:

1. This rings similar to the concept of a rollercoaster effect, where lower income brackets are statistically less likely to commit suicide because they are working toward something and have a direction of progress. Once you "make it to the top" and see that you have no more fulfillment than you did when you were climbing, you become depressed and have no where to go but the "steep drop" into oblivion.

Absurdism (I think) is supposed to help you see this steep drop before you begin climbing, so that you don't waste time "climbing the ladder of success" with expectations of fulfillment, only to confirm the meaninglessness that you knew was there all along.

2. Another point is that the concept of "not giving a fuck" in absurdism doesn't translate to "not caring about physical sustenance." It's more like "acknowledging that you are forced to care about physical sustenance as an animal organism even though you know it's all futile as a human being. And rather than ending it all, you decide to accept this and fall prey to your physiological needs because you don't give a fuck."

Donnie Darko: Holiness through Fatalism in a Post-Religious Era

Summary: I think one of the lesser-discussed messages behind Donnie Darko is: We can replace God with a romantic notion of universal fatalism.
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"Donnie wakes up in his bed laughing after dreaming some of the events within the TU. He then goes back to sleep seemingly content with life now. The experience has seemingly brought him closer to God and he is no longer afraid to die. The jet engine Donnie sent through the time portal now falls into his bedroom killing him."

Easily the best movie of all time.

The greatest thing about Donnie Darko is that it uses fatalism to add a holiness to existence in a post religious society. And it does this in so many ways, through the directing, and a masterfully crafted plot that exists on many layers, somehow still haunting the user with this holiness on each one. It evokes one with the eerie but infinite astonishment about the world that Heidegger characterizes as fundamental to Dasein. Like a fascination with your very existence in the world, as a self at this time and place for no apparent reason. In this case it is evoked by playing with the meaning of your story in the universe through manipulations with time and choice that can imbue a weird sense of destiny on everyday living. One must ask: why does Donnie die laughing?

the story exists on two levels

1.

i think from just watching it, without seeing the director's cut or anything, you see a guy who falls into a horrible series of events

and is questioning death and being alone, and having issues with that

and goes through a series of events and seems to understand something, or realize something

especially after the series of events is so pointedly terrible (like the universe is sending him a message), and occurring in this dreamlike sequence

and when he wakes up, back at the beginning of it all

he sacrifices himself so all those bad things dont happen to everyone

and he goes happily, feeling that there is some greater sort of timeline, a holier connection with the universe and his story as he had hoped for. the universe "spoke," so to speak.

and that evokes this notion that he is "closer to god so more okay with dying," which is something that every human ultimately wants. It's harder and more evasive to get in a post-religious era, and that's why Donnie Darko is mysterious and evasive itself at times. But it allows for that possibility using the story of your life in the place of the story of humanity, no greater deity needed...after all, he could have dreamt the whole thing. But it's this notion of fatalism that, through backward time travel from the end of your life, breaths meaning onto your present.

2.

the second layer is when u actually learn the philosophy of time book that this is based off of, and realize theres a structure and ruleset to everything thats happening

at the start they break into a tangent universe, and the universe is doomed

donnie is the chosen one, and his goal is to return the extra engine that dropped on top of his house

and everyone in that tangent universe is subconsciously guiding him to send that extra engine out of the universe so it can collapse safely, without forming a black hole. It's incredible how every single interaction in that movie is meant to lead Donnie to his destiny, it gives a powerful sense of purpose to every human interaction he has, one that the viewer feels even if he doesn't know about this deeper layer to the plot, probably from the incredible visual directing and acting.

 And it is from this beautiful perspective we can derive a sort of fatalistic maxim to live one's life in a post moral and religious society: we dont need god: just treat everyone in a way that they are subconsciously guiding you toward a fate to save the universe. This notion of a "meant timeline," and of a mysterious force leading the humans you interact with to guide you to your Great Task, ultimately death--but one in which you are happy to go, is a beautiful way to look at your life, and it's why Donnie laughs in his last moments--one must imagine Sisyphus happy. While it literally happens to Donnie, I really think this is just a metaphor for life--a tangent universe that you explore until you happily accept your fate. Follow the queues of your fellow humans--all interactions holy.

And as a follow-up, you could even interpret this without the force! The laugh works on so many levels, and even the most bare (which may make it the most powerful, existentially), where he basically realizes his fate as the Living Receiver and is brought into a feeling of holy communion with the universe (think Stranger from Camus), and even though he doesn't need to die--since the airplane wing has already been returned the primary universe is now restored and he can choose whether to go or not--he is okay with dying, because his role as the living receiver is even greater in death, and he sort of realizes that its all about choosing your story, and punctuating your fate on The Timeline, and laughs in those last moments.

The Correlation Between Philosophy and Politics

Part 1
One of Heideggers ideas is this idea of the Gay man. Where like the truly free man has recognized his condition and that he will never be fulfilled in this higher sense, and this gives him a radical freedom and unshakeable joy
Now, what the gay man does need not change, but it’s how he does it
He no longer expects a permanent fulfillment from his projects, he just does them for the sake of doing them
Now, it’s important to note here that the gay man does not drop his projects, because if he did it would be like admitting that he expected meaning out of them and got disappointed
He simply “sticks to things without getting stuck to them”
So I was thinking about how heidegger uses the specific term “projects” here
Camus has an almost identical formulation
Where he’s like should I kill myself or drink a cup of coffee
Aka once you confront the absurd, the futility of the world doesn’t actually direct you to kill yourself, it’s just one option among many
And in fact using that as an excuse to kill yourself would NOT indicate a confrontation w the absurd, since it implies that you were “disappointed” by the futility and therefore assign value to it
It’s the same point, but much more coldly and rawly stated, and he doesn’t use the term “projects”
It’s almost like Heideggers is more obviously a state brainwashing tactic
Where the goal is to convince disillusioned youths to not drop their projects but still gave value to their depression
But still give*
And you can make an argument that Sartre and Camus were doing this for the left, and H was doing it for the right
And on top of that, Sartre and Camus had complementary shortcomings
Camus was a poet of life who wished he had more pull w the academic community
Sartre had the whole community at his feet but always lamented not being able to use words with the right type of sincerity and passion (poetry)
Heidegger had both in one package, an analytically sound but still poetic-passionate view of man
I wonder if you can correlate this philosophical victory to the rise of the fascist right at that time...
Both of them were using existentialism to appeal to depressed youth, just for different sides.

I wonder if this is happening now with the victory of Sloterdijk…
That’s the first major point.


Part 2
The second part of this meditation: its interesting when you connect this to our other discussions on sort of, the role of certain philosophical concepts and propagation of them in grooming fascist tendencies to take over.
Wherein, we frame it as, certain types of thought, having to do with void, failure of liberalism, return to the tribe/myth, secrets of the unconscious, self-reliance, etc tend to fuel of rise of fascism in the country they are propagated
But in the existentialism case, the same concepts were being used to fuel both sides of the political spectrum!
So maybe this DOES imply a non-correlation between Phil concepts and their political consequences
It’s just how they’re marketed and who they’re marketed to that makes the difference

Part 3
Now, on first glance, you might think that this sort of allows us to hate on Heidegger for being a Nazi without burying his ideas; he just marketed great ideas for a bad cause (let's say intentionally or unintentionally for now, thats a different discussion). 

BUT, then you can argue "okay, doesn't that imply that heidegger's ideas, in his formulation, are still marketed towards bad things, and therefore his writings, as written, are bad?"
Which leads to the question: How do we distinguish his concepts from his framing of them?
Ironic, because this struggle between the framing of beings and the Being of them is an issue he really worked through.

It also leads to the question "can one just preach philosophy in a vacuum?"
is it always inherently directed at a political audience, with its own ideology, even if the author doesn't intend it?
Is philosophy a scalar or a vector?

If this leads you to think "well, the author has his intentions, but after he writes it, the book becomes its own new thing since hermeneutics and transcendent idealism etc etc." then I challenge you yet another time: this would imply that camus or sartres formulation of existentialism, having similar concepts to Being and Time but marketed to the more inclusive Left, is the "good" version of the text. But then, why is Being and Time the preferred version that's still used as the canon, by a mile? Clearly its content goes above and beyond its marketed political effect... and a second challenge on that, wouldn't this be like saying that the Bible was a better version of reality than Epicurious' much more accurate account of reality at the time, because the Bible placated the masses and led to less violence, aka had better political consequences?