What would it change?

I read this today on Ganzeer’s blog.

Random thought: The whole simulation theory that seems to be increasingly trendy these days actually isn't at all at odds with any of the traditional religious beliefs of old, the ones that imagined god as an anthropomorphized king on a throne in the clouds. Because simulation theory by definition implies the entire universe being created by someone somewhere

I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing, because I’ve been talking about it with a few people.

When I say “this kind of thing,” I mean big questions like

• Does God exist?
• Is the universe a simulation?
• Do we have free will or do we live in a deterministic universe we experience in a way that allows us to feel like/believe we have free will?

I’ve noticed that in the conversations I’ve had about these questions, some people have really strong opinions which they will argue for fervently. They will get really worked up.

I tend to enjoy the conversations, but I don’t get worked up, because I keep thinking to myself that, for me, the answer does not change anything.

• If God exists, what would I do differently? Nothing.
• If God does exist, what would I do differently? Nothing.
• If God exists in a way that human beings can and never will understand, would I do anything differently? Nope
• If the universe is or is not a simulation, would it change how I live my life? I don’t think it would.
• If free will is an illusion, would it change how I live my life? Again, I don’t think it would. (Though after watching the show Devs, which I learned about when a friend talked about it in one of these free-wheeling conversations about all this stuff, I’m not as sure about this one.)

As I reflect on all this stuff right now, as I write these words, I wonder if I’m being a little too sure of myself. I don’t know the answers to these questions. They are mysteries, and I think that’s why they are cool and fun to think about or talk about. But maybe if I could know the answers to these questions, if they stopped being mysterious, it would have some massive effect on who and what I am. If I did know the existence status of God, or that I was/wasn’t in a simulation, or that free will was/wasn’t an illusion, all sorts of stuff about how I live my life would change.

I don’t know.

I guess I like not knowing.

Not knowing is fun.

The national mantra

From John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog

“Fuck you, make me” is, to me, the founding principle of this nation. That was our message to King George III, a tyrant descending into madness...

Then from another post

This is how you handle a bully: “Fuck you, make me.”

Yeah.

I’ve got a ton of stuff I want to get done today. I’m off to a good start… Hoping to maintain momentum. Here are a few things on the pile of stuff I want to get to at some point (I don’t think I’ll be able to get to it all).

• Work on the next episode of Artificial Analysis
• Work on the essay that I’ve been trying to finish on conditioned arising and psychoanalysis
• Catch up on the back-end business-related paperwork stuff that I’ve let build up
• Get a good walk in at some point

Tried working on an essay that I’ve been working on for longer than I expected. I could not get into the right mindset and sustain my focus in the way I needed to. Random thoughts about all sorts of other things kept getting in the way. I’m going to trust my unconscious and assume that today just isn’t the day to write this thing.

When the day has a certain vibe, the best thing to do is listen to Joe Frank’s voice.

From On Writing, Content, and Art, by Manu:

This is clearly writing and, therefore, I am a writer. But in that case, we’re probably all writers. We all text and send emails and post online. Are we all writers? What makes a writer a writer? The medium? The length? The meaning? The time spent?

Fun to think about those questions, eh?

From Warren Ellis’s newsletter Orbital Oppositions:

Feeling good, doing what you like and taking pleasure in things isn’t a luxury. […] here’s the takeaway: live your life like it’s worth living. You’ll feel better. Wear your favourite clothes. Cate Winter, a wiser woman than I will ever be a man, once said to me; don’t save things for that perfect time, because that time will never come and what you’re saving will either go bad or never be used at all, so enjoy them now.

Yeah.

From Midnight Radio: A Toarchlight Shining at the Bastards by James Reeves.

Where he writes about this amazing brass pirate lamp his grandfather owned.

For decades, this brass pirate lamp stood on a workbench in my grandfather’s basement that smelled of spider poison and Saginaw Bay.

That, whoever is reading this, is one hell if a sentence! I wish I wrote sentences that good.

Anyway, James talks about how when his grandfather was moved into a retirement home.

To help residents locate their rooms, the nursing staff encouraged each patient to place a memento on a shelf next to each door. Plastic flowers, birthday cards, family snapshots, and woodland figurines lined the halls because it’s easier to remember a picture of your grandchild than room 27B.

That got me thinking about memory, and our relationship to memory. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as of late. Don’t know why.

Via Warren Ellis’s blog:

Very quickly filling up a notebook with bad ideas. Which is the only way I know of to get at the better ideas.

Yeah.

Over on the Disquiet blog, Marc Weidenbaum will post 30 seconds of an interesting sound he encounters just going about his day. (This one is of buzz saws.)

Today, I was walking to the park with one of my kids, and I noticed this small thumping sound, which turned out to be acorns from the oak trees dropping to the ground. I liked the sound and recorded 1:00 min of it. There are is also the sound of lawn mower and birds in the background.

I think this is a small tree growing up through a hole where some rebar is coming through a parking brick.

I thought this was pretty.

I wonder if it will last, or if someone in the future will cut it down or pull it out.

Via Tetragrammaton:

[Bern] Porter spent much of his ninety-three years on the far margins of American life, an irascible iconoclast who insisted that art was something to be found, lived, and distributed without ever asking for permission.

Yeah.

I’m watching the TV miniseries Devs on Hulu. It’s super good.

Great soundtrack! Very interesting ideas. Compelling story.

Just found the site Write That Blog. Lots of fun, interesting stuff here. Too bad I don’t have more time to read it all!

It’s very humid today. I’ve spent a lot of time today trying to play schedule Tetris for when my kids are back in school. The result is, I can’t fit in everything. Trying to let go of some stuff that I give time to is difficult for me…

I’m writing this post in iA Writer, which remains one of my favorite things to use for writing and thinking.

I’m going to try to post this to my micro.blog.

Hoping it works.

“Dad, don’t know what a Nelson class ship is?” Asked my kid.

“I known Nelson is a kid in the Simpsons.” I replied.

The kid thinks for a moment, then says, “so you don’t know.”

This is a test post from Obsidian.

From Chris Arnade’s Substack:

Culture has two components, thin and thick. Thin culture is the surface stuff—fashion, food, music. Thick culture is deeper: What is the Good? What makes life worth living? What should we aspire to become?"

Yeah.

Looking back at what I’ve posted and podcasted about recently, I see a theme of me now looking back on the young me and seeing him as rather judgmental. What’s interesting about this is that I now see myself then as judgmental, which is a judgment.

What should I make of catching myself judging a younger version of myself for being judgmental?

When I think about it right now, I see a fundamental difference. The way I remember it, the young me was very sure of his judgments. Additionally, the young me felt rather righteous and self-important.

I still judge (obviously). I can’t get divorced from making judgments all the time about everything.

However, I hope I’m much more prone to questioning my judgments and less quick to trust them. I also hope I don’t take myself as seriously as I did in my younger years, because it seems to me that taking oneself seriously breeds feelings of self-righteousness and self-importance, which in turn lead to impulsive, often regretful actions.

Yesterday, I saw someone wearing a baggy black sweater and distressed jeans. This put my brain gremlins to work. They pulled several files into my consciousness.

The files contained many memories of being with friends at a small café and/or at Denny’s in the mid-1990s. In these memories, it was winter, and indoor spaces were filled with cigarette smoke. (This was when people could still smoke indoors.) Lots of people were dressed in a style that was similar to the person I had just seen. This was the height of the grunge era, and many people dressed in baggy sweaters, flannel shirts, jeans, and well-worn footwear to show how aligned they were with the fashion zeitgeist of the time.

The memory fades, and I start to think about it.

I notice a few things:

I notice that at this point in my life, when I look back to the 1990s, I see a lot of struggle. I was struggling. Many of the other people around me were struggling as well. We were young and had not established ourselves professionally or economically. We were living our lives in a space between our families of origin and the families we would create, a liminal zone where friendships and community serve as a kind of family structure, even though there are no ties of marriage or genetics binding people together. We didn’t know much about ourselves or the world we lived in. (At the time, many of the people I hung out with and I would not have admitted to this. We were prone to presenting ourselves as people who did know who and what we were because we were authentic and had yet to be corrupted by an accumulation of experiences that would beat us down and blunt our young jagged edges.)

As I savored these associations, a new thought came to me: I was struggling, and those around me were struggling, but we were struggling together. That shared struggle is something I long for as I look back on it.

Past me who lives in my perks up.

“You think struggle is desirable? You think my struggle is quaint? Fuck you!” The version of past me that lives in my head says to me now. Past me, the one who lives in my head, wants to punch me now in the face. Hard.

“Hold up,” I say to past me. “I know… well… I remember how hard this feels for you. I don’t miss that feeling. You probably won’t believe me because you feel so alone, isolated, and misunderstood, but many people around you are going through their own version of this. You hang out with them often. Even though you can’t see it when you’re going through the struggle, there is a collective aspect to this, along with the singular aspect that is yours alone.”

Past me makes an obscene gesture. He wants none of what I’m saying.

Every day, there is so much stuff (books, podcasts, long-form articles and blog posts, films, audiobooks, comics, music, games, tv shows, etc.) I want to spend time absorbing. Every. Day.

But time and my attention are not unlimited. Both are finite.

So I’ve got to make choices about what gets the time and attention I don’t need to invest in work or parenting… I’m going to assume you (whoever you are) are experiencing your own version of this, and that you, too, are frustrated by it. This post is my attempt to express solidarity with you.

From The Journal 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau.

Oct. 22 [1837] “What are you doing now?” he asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.

I propose that this become the standard first blog post, rather than “Hello world!”

I read the post On Dreams and Goals on Manu’s blog this morning. That post is an example of the internet at its best. If you’re reading this, please click the link and read what he wrote. It’s not long, and it is very, very cool.

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P.S.

This is an old post from a prior blog, which I’m currently migrating over to From78.

Writing on disquiet, Marc Weidenbaum says,

The key thing is that blogging is not about final drafts. Blogging is as much a public notepad as social media is at its best (to be clear, most of social media is social media at its worst). It’s not a magazine; it’s a journal.

Earlier in the same post, Marc also had this to say about an RSS feed being a key part of a blog because RSS gives the reader a different experience than going to the blog-as-a-website.

A certain breed of email newsletter counts [as a kind of blog], as well, when the issues double as URL-specific posts, and — and this is key — there is an RSS feed to access them. I remain convinced that an RSS feed is an essential component of a blog — that, alternately, to require people to repeatedly visit your website of their own volition, and in the process for them to recall precisely where they left off reading the last time they were there, is simply too much to ask of a reader. It was too much to ask in the late 1990s, and in our cellphone-mediated, notification-riddled present, it is all the more so. RSS brings the writing to the reader, and in some ways isn’t that distinct from email.

I’ve been thinking back to what early blogging and podcasting were like lately. Reading Marc’s post reinforced something that had crossed my mind: a return to an older style of blogging (and podcasting?) could be a good idea. Certainly something to try.

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P.S.

This is a re-post of an old post from a prior blog. I’m slowly migrating those posts over to From78.