LifeGame

Where is the universe?

Perhaps a silly question... but I was wondering about it on my walk home today. It seems that in order for a "thing" to have a "place" it has to exist in comparison to some other thing that is in a different place. As we zoom out or zoom in far enough, this way of thinking about things breaks down.

The other way of thinking about it, I suppose, is that this is in itself just a linguistic trick. If we think of the universe as "everything" then by definition it can't be in a place relative to some other thing, since that thing would itself be part of everything. But this may have nothing to do with how things are outside of the world of linguistic trickery.

In any case, if the universe is "everything" then I must admit it was hard for me to explain or consider where the universe is... but it was also hard to consider that the universe doesn't have a "where" since everything that exists seems to occupy some kind of location - and yet without a relative point to compare something too, it's really hard to say "where" something is...

Evolution and Natural Selection: The Card Game

Lots of people think that natural selection is a system of random chance. A bunch of random mutations happen and, wham-o, a dinosaur appears. This is a total misunderstanding and is a big reason why there's so many people that think it's "too unlikely" and there must be some kind of purpose, or intelligence, that created life (disregarding the problem that this intelligence must be created by something as well).

I was thinking about this in terms of a card game. Let's say that a bunch of us are playing cards. We don't know the rules, we don't know how many cards or what kinds of cards. We also don't know the rules of the game. We only know one thing... which hand wins. In this game the winner gets to exchange none, some or all of his cards. Over time, enough players will discover which combination of cards will beat and be beaten by other combinations of cards. Of course, in evolution there are many combinations of cards, billions of players playing many billions of hands in a game where the rules change from time to time.

The key point here is that simple combinations of trial and error over long periods of time will create winners... not by chance, but by slow improvement towards an optimal solution - the opposite of chance. The reason I think this is hard to immediately grasp is that we intuitively believe that to improve we need to be conscious of the rules, direction, restrictions and goals. This is not so. As with the card game above, the players do not need to know the rules at all. All they need to know is if they won or lost, if their situation improved or didn't improve. Over enough time, hands will emerge that are consistent winners. In retrospect it will look like those "players" are better... as if they were created or "destined" to win the game.

To go back to a natural example, I often hear detractors of evolution talk about how "half an eye" or "part of a wing" would be useless and so without the complete finished product, these things are useless - thus they must have some purpose. Just like the card game, this is not so. Although 5 Aces is better than 3 2s, 3 2s will still beat 2 2s nicely. Likewise, while half a wing won't let a primative bird-like creature fly, it might help it survive a 20 foot fall. As it gets slightly better wings, it can survive a 30 foot fall, and so on.

I believe this principle, and error in judgement, extends to many other applications. My own area of professional interest, software development, for example. Many times we don't know exactly what we're making, or what the rules for success might be. Trying things and seeing if they are "better" or "worse" is at the heart of what we call "research and development" which is just a risk diminshed way of saying try something and iterate, see if it works and people use it. The difference being that we apply scrutiny and intention to the result; decreasing the iteration time significantly - at least, in theory. Sometimes our intention blinds us, however. Many major discoveries are the result of directly challenging "obvious" things: the earth is flat, the sun moves around the earth, time is linear, and so on. It takes a certain kind of madness to navigate onto a sea without knowing exactly where you are going and playing a kind of insane version of marco-polo in hopes of discovering something... even if it's not exactly what you were looking for. In the end, many pieces of successful software may appear like they were created for precisely what they are used for, but quite frequently they were intended to be something completely different and they just kind of moved in that direction.

I doubt very much that Mark Zukerberg knew what would make Facebook work... he just thought it was this cool thing to try out and probably that it would catch on in some way. They he saw his hand beat a few other hands, exchanged a few cards and saw that those beat still more hands and so on. He, of course, had the advantage of evaluation and scientific testing which nature doesn't necessarily benefit from - at least not at the same iteration level... but the system is the same. In the end Facebook (arguably) looks like a complete, well designer, functional piece of software that delivers satisfaction to many millions of people at high scale and near 100% availability. While some people may say that it's amazing that it was able to achieve this without being designed that way from the ground up; I think the way that it was built is the only way it could achieve this result. It would be impossible to think of the millions of little things that had to happen to make it work - responses to competitors, user feedback, performance, available technology, etc. Trying to figure all that out in advance would have stifled the innovation and prevented Mark et. al. from reacting to what was going on around them. The only way it could possibly work is through keeping and exchanging cards over many millions of hands watching which one wins and which one doesn't...

Time Management: Great Lecture from Randy Pausch ("The Last Lecture" guy).

Just fantastic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0

All There Is, Is All There Is

Consider when you are driving down the freeway...

consider that you are in the traffic, among the cars, driving to your destination - be it work - be it home. Where are you going? Where are all the other people going? I mean, where are they going - really.

We all have these kinds of thoughts... it's as if, for a moment, the fabric of what we see and experience is kind of peeling away and revealing behind it something more. As if what we experience is kind of like bad wallpaper or the walls of a hollywood set. It's like those stars that shine in the corner of our eyes only to disappear when we gaze directly at them. Once in a while, we see how thin the veil is.

Then we "snap back" into reality. We go to work, we go home, we pay our bills, go to bed and forget about the experience. But it leaves behind a nagging sensation - a burning question. I believe this is a cause of great anxiety and ultimately a loss of "meaning." This idea that meaning is this thing out there somewhere, but we are stuck in here somewhere. But this disintegration is ultimately an illusion. The traffic, the bills, work and home, the wallpaper and the stars in the corner of our eyes is all and everything. It is simultaneously the something more and the disintegrated meaninglessness.

This is because our instruments for comprehension and experience are selective and limited. The process of experience and understanding is by definition discriminatory. These words I write and you read travel through at least 3 stages of limitation. The first is me using my instruments to understand (my senses + my brain). The second is the technology (i.e. language) I use to express it. The third is your comprehension of the second. I have to pick and choose and in doing this I leave out most of everything. It's very clumsy system.

To imagine this limitation, we can do some experiments. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to see the world through heat differences. No sound. No feeling. All you can sense is differences in heat. How different your commute would seem now! Perhaps you would notice the hotness of the cars compared to the coolness of the grass. Your fellow commuters would show up as red masses - their clothes and makeup would not matter - their choice of car would not be noticeable (outside of engine heat, perhaps).

This exercise may seem pointless, but in going about your day thinking about what is being missed in both experience, understanding and expression - we can consider how much more there is. People often intuit that there must "be more." This can be afterlife, or a hidden world of some kind. But all there is is all there is - and there's a lot.

 

Happiness for the Holidays and the Importance of Zen

We wish it to each other at this time of year, perhaps more than any (at least if you are a member of Western Civilization), but what is it we're wishing?

Intuition and behavior are parallel for a while but then diverge strongly. When people are "poor" more things do indeed make them happier. Once above that threshold, however, it doesn't make much difference. In fact, nothing much does. Here's some books explaining why. 

I'm interested in something different, though. I want to know why people are so interested in happiness as a state. We're obsessed with it and I think it's an outgrowth of conspicuous consumption which began around the 1920s (it existed before, but not at such scales). Amazon returns about 2700 non-fiction books with the word "happiness" in them (about 800 for "satisfaction," 516 for "productive" and 280 for kindness). Ok, so aside from a non-scientific study of Amazon's book choices, why does this matter?

We tend to see our lives as a state rather than a process. We are happy or we aresad or satisfied or whatever. But this is not how it happens in experience. Happiness, sadness and satisfaction are relative measures of change over time. They are emotional calculus. You can't "be" happy, you can only transition your relative happiness index, if you will. Thus, you need to actively integrate unhappiness and dissatisfaction into your life. I'm not saying you have to do things that cause that, but rather that changes in happiness and satisfaction are just part of the human experience.

In Zen, there's this kind of constant idea that seeking zen results in physical punishment. Walking up to a zen master and asking him how to find enlightenment will result in him smashing you on the head. In this way Zen seems like a kind of gag religion where the "master" provides you with a near endless list of meaningless tasks to perform. But something else is going on here. "Looking for" something implies that you and the object of your desire are somehow separated. This separation is created by your mind - it doesn't exist in the "external" world (which we only know through our senses anyway). The act of "looking for [x]" is what separates you from [x]. Thus, the idea is to find something you have to not look for it. Of course, the zen master is smart... he understands the difference between you not looking for something and you trying to not look for something. Trying to not look for it is still looking for it, which creates the separation - and the requisite knock on the head.

What you do is create barriers that you then have to break down. If you think you need a zen master to give you 10,000 meaningless tasks to do before you think you "earn" enlightenment, then that's what he's going to let you do. If you don't think you need that, then you don't. It's already there and you're just playing a game that it isn't. You think that he is the one playing the game, but really you are. If you say "why do you keep making me do these stupid tasks" he'll smack you on the head again - because it's you making yourself do those stupid tasks and he's just frustrated that you keep insisting you need to do them.

It's not that happiness is the elusive thing we need books and studies to find. It's just a part of the rich human experience - always there, ready to be experienced, we just need to convince ourselves to not build up the barriers in the first place.

So, going back to the start. Intuitively we know that more stuff and more money and more whatever will not make us happy (neither will less). In practice, though, we spend most of our lives in pursuit of precisely those things. This dichotomy creates a kind of psychosis from which there appears to be no escape. I think the more compelling model is to stop looking for what will make us happy or satisfied and instead just see it as a series of different experiences all of which have value.

C G Jung saw this in his treatment of undesirable human psychological behaviors. For years people would hide from their "evil" similar to how we avoid "unhappiness." His idea was to "integrate the evil" by bringing it to the forefront. Repressions and ignorance only make these negative experiences stronger. Until we understand them to be another part of the human experience it's difficult to get out of this psychotic state.

This manifests itself in nearly every culture in the form of popular myth or religious text. I would argue that Jesus' confrontation with Satan is this act of integrating the evil, though we have now confused it with suppressing the evil. Jesus doesn't run away or suppress Satan, he directly confronts the temptations the lie before him and in doing so dispells theillusion. Eating, power and even surviving a fall are not important once you have integrated yourself into everything else. The idea of having dominion over the earth is rediculous if you see youself as integrated into it. I'm not going to go into a long monologue about this but I think that what we see here is the intuition that we see one thing at the expense of not seeing another. I think it's a great and basic human myth that echos in our minds.