Who, Me?

 Well, another birthday passed, a couple of moons, a big ol' patch of miscellaneous life, various disasters, miracles, high-points, low-points, and utterly grey-flannel days, and an overall plodding along the steepening drop-off curve toward the end.

All of it went by without notice by about anyone and I wish I could be a lot more surprised by that but I'm not, really. My life's generally barely managing to keep even me engaged, nevermind anyone else. Truth be told, if The Beneficiary hadn't called and asked what kind of cake I wanted (in one of those hilariously whacky "Who's On First" phone conversations that happen between us when one or the other has no idea what the other's talking about) I would near-certainly have forgotten it was my birthday in any event.

As that demonstrates, this sort of thing is more important to some than to others, except when it's not, apparently, and even when one doesn't give a shit about the day itself (I don't) the lack of notice by people who keep track of every other goddamn frog-fart level event in their universe kinda sets the mark for where I am in their mix, which would be more annoying except, as I said, it wasn't much of a surprise. After all, I DO know these people, most of whom are as predicable as sunrise. And, no, practically none of you know my birthday, so I'm not banging on about you, y'know. I do know other people. 

At any rate, it's just life.

Hah! Bitching about stuff I don't truly give a rat's ass about — that's new, never mind the backhanded complaint that I'm managing to wander around utterly unnoticed, which, without putting too fine a point on it, is the successful result of a lifelong project to achieve that specific end. 

Pfft. 

Next I'll be whining about how someone was mean to me at work and I got triggered and had to sit in the dark in my Safe Place all day… 

I am, in short, turning into a complete "girls blouse," as some of the old Usenet Brits would have it, and I pretty much hate it. I suspect this enhanced level of emotional response is vaguely related to the reason I haven't been around much lately, which is that I've been devoting myself to a couple of projects, one of which is fairly huge and the other fairly complex.

The fairly huge one is a bit of writing that I'm putzing around with which relies heavily on a protagonist's journey down the rabbit hole of figuring out (literally) who (or whether) he is, which is likely the source of some of my whiny-bitchy crap.  Slipping into his head for a few hours is fucking exhausting and climbing back out is slippery as mossy well-walls.  

It (the writing) will never see daylight as it was originally intended to just give me some practice at writing out of someone else's POV and, frankly, it sucks more than a Dyson hooker. Not the experience, which is somewhere between educational and interesting, but the actual writing. To be fair, it has improved a bit — from "ewww" to "ugh".  But I am learning, not least about how to not get sunk into a character so deeply that he leaves the page and walks around with you.

Huh.  Story idea…hang on, gotta note that before I forget it. OK, got it.

The other thing I'm doing is a more formalized project to get a handle on the heavily-intertwined concepts of "self" and "consciousness," which just fascinates the bejeezus out of me. (This informs the above noted writing, but is much less central to it than you might think — they really are only vaguely related.)

Philosopher David Chalmers called the puzzle of consciousness the "Hard Problem," and this is in fact the case. I've written about it now and again here and there.  As you may know, I'm a near-pure naturalistic/rational reductionist, and as a result I found myself stuck in the pretty straightforward and near-certain conclusion that:

(a) This is a deterministic universe; and, 

(b) Consciousness probably doesn't exist at all.

Now, to be honest, this is exactly the kind of logical nonsense and counting angels on the heads of pins crapola that causes most philosophical navel-gazing to get right up my ass.

But this isn't philosophy, not really — it's more the real-world product of the reductionist worldview represented by quantum field theory (right up my alley.) In fact, those conclusions are an inevitable consequence of how the universe almost certainly actually works at a very fundamental level. 
 
Look, the point is that consciousness cannot be described by physics, and there's no particular reason (or testable evidence of any kind) to believe that consciousness isn't a pure illusion, right along with physical particles and tables and chairs and other such claptrap.

In fact it's very likely (as in a high-sigma probability) that nothing in the universe is more than a manifestation of the interactions between quantum fields propagating through space-time. 

(More accurately, everything "exists" as an infinite superposition of all possible states of the universe — past, present and future. Time is, in fact, yet another illusion, created when the universe popped into existence as a fluctuation in the pre-universe quantum ground state. OK, fine, a little speculative, but the likelihood that time, entropy, and matter are illusory are much less so.)

But, you see, there's a real problem with that. Specifically, the fact that  I'm here.  "Cogito ergo sum," as Descartes would have it, because farting around with a dead language makes everything sound more profound.

The fact that I am conscious declares itself to me as fact, even if it is utterly unprovable to anyone else. 

But there are plenty of problems with that, too. There's no particular reason, for example, to believe any of you exist at all, even in a corporeal sense, never mind as such a fantastic concept as conscious beings. 

(I won't even get into the weirdness of a Boltzmann universe, which is actually fairly likely to be true, but would mean that I'm the only one who exists in my universe, and that for only a flash when all the particles and fields through pure chance arrange themselves in such a way to make me believe I exist, have a history, and observe any of this. If that's true, incidentally, I probably won't get to finish this.

Still here? Proves nothing, really…)

Ok, moving along….  In short, this field of study is a huge pain in the ass, a sloppy, slippery bucket of mismatched parts and mental gymnastics. And so, of course, it interests me…

Since at least one (and probably both) of the (a) and (b) conclusions above are very likely true and are also demonstrably false (at least as to my observations of my own existence) I've been immersing myself in various ways to approach the conflict which avoids the laziness of of "extra" (outside our universe) stuff or, if you prefer, "super-natural" explanations. 

The answer given by church, shamans, "spiritual" people, etc., is "we don't know, therefore supernatural," is a cheap cop-out, and while we're on the subject, any so-called atheist who believes he has a "spiritual" side is barking up a different side of the same tree as fundie Baal-worshipers who feed their kids to the fire to appease the gods. It's either a naturalistic universe or it's not, period.

In fact, the stuff we don't know is going to be natural and explainable when we DO know it, which we will if we just continue to study it instead of praying to it or waving crystals and positive vibes at it. 

As I say, all this is fascinating, but very likely well beyond my reach — I haven't got nearly enough math to get much further than a distant appreciation of the concepts.  I feel rather like Slartibartfast, who "had planned to spend his retirement learning to play the octaventral heebiephone; a pleasantly futile task, as he had the wrong number of mouths." (Hitchiker's Guide To The Universe — and if you didn't know that, we can't be friends anymore.)

At any rate, while stuck between what I observe to be certainly true and the inescapable conclusion that it's not, a couple of months ago, I ran across the concept of "Poetic Naturalism."

It's a long involved story that's far and away too complex to get into in a single blog post, but can be (very generally) summarized by its main proponent, the physicist, cosmologist, and philosopher, Sean Carroll:

Our fundamental ontology, the best way we have of talking about the world at the deepest level, is extremely sparse. But many concepts that are part of non-fundamental ways we have of talking about the world — useful ideas describing higher-level, macroscopic reality — deserve to be called “real.”

In short, "consciousness" and "morality" (as well as tables and chairs) are accurate ways of describing macro-level properties of sub-microscopic realities — they are emergent properties of the deterministic quantum substrate of the universe, and are, in fact, "real" ways of describing the universe. The chair does not exist at the quantum level (nor does anything else) — but at the macroscopic level the fact of the chair emerges as a way to apprehend that batch of the universe which is vastly more useful and convenient than describing it in terms of every single quantum interaction of its otherwise utterly unrelated components.

Just so, consciousness. At some macroscopic level of the description of the complexity of the quantum universe, consciousness (and morality, and All That Jazz) are emergent properties. 

So-called "emergent" properties of the universe are why we still use Newton's laws to send robots to Mars. While planning the Mars missions to the sub-microscopic quantum level may well be fractionally more accurate and descriptive of the deep physics of the fundamental nature of the task (and, incidentally, impossible to do due to its complexity,) Newton's approximations describe the universe at this macroscopic level well enough to accurately understand reality in a macroscopic sub-light world.

They can therefore be described as "real," which is to say they exist at that level of description.

Satellite GPS signals, on the other hand, must take Einsteinian-level detail into account, or your car's GPS will be wrong. At that more fundamental level (which could also be used as a fantastically complex way to describe the trip to Mars, by the way,) Newton's laws no longer are true in any sense, and therefore do not exist. At the most basic level (that we believe exists) there is nothing real except superposed quantum waves whose interactions we perceive as "particles."

Simple, eh?

Well, if you want more, get Sean Carroll's "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". I'm on my second read-through, making extensive notes and whatnot out of various secondary and tertiary sources. There are some areas in which he's wrong, or at least inconsistent, and certainly not everyone agrees with him, but it is mostly an astonishing book that's VERY accessible to the non-cosmologist/physicist/philosopher. 

Recommend: Boffo Stuff, Five Stars, Big Thumbs Up.

In the meantime, I've moved on to morality and the concepts of good and evil — in a deterministic universe, how can these possibly apply to anything?  Is there a universal standard of good and evil, moral and immoral? (Hint: No.) Fascinating.

But I thought I'd drop a line here for everyone, to let anyone who's interested know that I haven't wandered off too far or died or anything.  

(Wow — cool question — if I dropped in my tracks tomorrow, how long would it be before any online people noticed I'd wandered off for good?  That's not macabre, by the way.  I'm sitting here grinning and taking bets with myself, 'cause it struck me as funny…)

Oh, I almost forgot. I'm doing NaNoWriMo, although I'm being pretty half-assed about it. We're up to the 4th here and I ain't posted sheeeaat, although I've got a dab of writing done.  I'm also out of town for awhile, so I suspect this will not be a "win" year. I find that I just don't give a shit.  Which, of course, leads to the question "Why?"  (shrug) I dunno. I'm just a slave to trends, is my guess.

This, incidentally, means I'll be posting some more-or-less-sometimes-less fiction on here shortly.

You know how I get.

And, so, how's your life going?

In Our Next Episode: Various pontifications on subjects I may or may not know diddly about.