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.

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.

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!

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.

Many people have been posting about an essay by Terry Godier that articulates something he calls “phantom obligation”. I’ve read it twice and have been thinking about the concept much more than unexpected.

However, the way I’ve been thinking about it has more to do with how I feel a version of phantom obligation in relation to small household tasks, and within significant relationships with other people and institutions.

It’s nice to have phantom obligation as a signifier to think with, to name what I might be feeling after I feel it…

The rendering of the concept into words does not cure my tendency to experience phantom obligation, but it does help me retroactively interpret that experience in a way that has the affect of reducing the pressure of the imagined/assumed/felt sense of obligation.

I think this is a good thing.

From a post on Michael Easter’s 2% Substack.

We all know we spend too much time on our phones. There are thousands of articles offering tips on how to use your phone less. But these often miss an important point. When people reduce their phone screen time, they often get bored—and immediately replace it with another screen, short-circuiting the very mental state that drives creativity. Taking a couple of hours off your phone screen time only to add in more TV time is like replacing cigarettes with chewing tobacco.

Yeah!

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Easter’s larger point is that, rather than telling ourselves we need to look at our phones less, we should try to increase the time we spend not being stimulated by a screen.

“Instead of less phone, more boredom,” he said in a different podcast/interview.

It’s a simple and obvious observation. One that is so simple and so obvious that people (myself included) don’t think it.

I read this in a New Yorker profile of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who is credited with inventing the word wide web: [Tim’s mother] Mary, a believer in “watchful negligence,” would let him and his three younger siblings wrap themselves in extra perforated tape.

I now really like the term “watchful negligence”!

I also really like how the author of the profile put that term in quotation marks. A great small editorial choice.

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P.S. This is a post from one of my old blogs that I’m moving over to From78.

From  Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams

If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.

Yeah.

Via Manton Reece (@manton)

Moltbook — a social network for AI agents to have discussions with one another. This is wild. I often joke about “our future AI overlords” but this might’ve just crossed a line into actual concern… We are putting a lot of trust into these new bots. 🦞

OMG!

My immediate first ass association is to the concept of “the jackpot” from the recent William Gibson novels.

For those who may not be familiar with the “jackpot” as a term/concept:

The Jackpot is a term coined by William Gibson in his novels, particularly in The Peripheral and its sequel, Agency. It describes a gradual, multi-faceted apocalypse rather than a single catastrophic event. This concept reflects ongoing crises that humanity faces, primarily driven by climate change and societal issues.

Ironically, the quoted text above came from the AI generated summery when I searched for the term via DuckDuckGo.

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, by Catherine Clément

all psychoanalytic practice is based on the ability to hear something other than what the patient says. on the capacity to hear, within the conscious message enunciated by the speaker, the patterns produced by the unconscious. (p. 36)

I’m finding Clément’s uncomplicated way of describing psychoanalysis very enjoyable.

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, by Catherine Clément

The unconscious is not directed toward a goal. It plays and then it settles down. (p. 33)

Yeah.

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, by Catherine Clément

About love nobody ever spoke better than Lacan […] Love was a permanent presence, ever so lightly touched upon as he - lingered lazily, lengthily over the dead ends of desire, the desperations of fantasy, and the impossibility of “sexual intercourse.” In Lacan’s system, which is less inflexible and less fully worked out than some people think, love will no doubt remain one of the few escapes, perhaps the only one. Love was a door which, unlike the others, was not closed. A door left ajar. (p. 21)

There are several interesting things in this.

1. Lacan’s system is less inflexible and not fully worked out.
2. The importance of love as an act, as a creative act within Lacan’s thought.

From The Kohut Seminar: On Sslf Psychology and Psychotherapy with Adolescents and Yoong Adults.

Coleridge spoke of “the willing suspension of disbelief,” there is also a necessity for the willing suspension of disbelief when you listen to a particular mode in which a topic is presented to you. I do not suggest the willing suspension of disbelief forever; I suggest only a suspension of disbelief until you have grasped what the other person has to offer. In other words, one does not object before one has first heard the other person out to some extent. (p. 4)

Yeah. Very well said .

From an interview with George Saunders in The Atlantic, where Saunders is talking about admitting to what we have gotten wrong, as opposed to avoiding it in all the ways we can avoid owning up to what we have done or failed to do.

And as they got older, we would have talks with [our kids] where we’d say, You know, we kind of messed that up. Sorry. And it’s amazing how that kind of just takes the wind out of any negative sails, to just admit it.

Yeah.

An association: This reminds me of one of the many 12 step sayings, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.”

If keep something I’ve really messed up a secret, it can really mess with me a lot… it takes effort to keep something a secret. Admitting to what I’ve done wrong, or poorly, or failed to do, is not fun, but it takes less energy than keeping something a secret.

From the book Winnicott: Life and Work by Robert Rodman (Amazon)

Her beliefs in the supernatural, evidenced by the notion that Lawrence of Arabia was communicating with her through a parrot, further suggest that at the very least, she was not accustomed to the rigors of scientific thought. (p. 53)

What a great sentence that is.

From Being & Having by Gabriel Marcel.

There is no privileged state which allows us to transcend time

Yeah.