Tag: determinism

The Blindboy Simulation

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This is something I will admit I know next to nothing about. Admittedly most things I chirp on about I know a lot less than I would like to or attempt to give off the impression of knowing. Not even knowledge, at least an understanding of. Although as I write that I suspect knowledge comes before understanding so I’m maybe saying them in the wrong order. Anyway I was just listening to The Blindboy Podcast which is hosted by Blindboy Boatclub who is an Irish satirist and one half of hiphop duo The Rubberbandits. I had never heard of him until I watched an episode of Frankie Boyle’s New World Order in which he was one of the guests. The premise of the show is a few comedians sit around discussing a couple of events which happened in the week and one guest comes on to discuss one topic. Blindboy’s was to do with the Union and the inevitable recession facing the English. I don’t think he quite connected with the rest of the guests and he had some interesting things to say but they didn’t seem to be on the same wavelength which was shame. I did though research this man from Limerick who wears a plastic bag on his head to hide his identity and it turns out he has a podcast. I’m now onto the third episode of this. He has a lot.

The first one was an interview with Graham Norton which was quite interesting and I suspect I’m not the only person out there who made that their first episode. The second was a dissection of QAnon which is a dangerous anti-semitic conspiracy theory that suggests Donald Trump is going to save the world by revealing the secrets of child murdering celebrities and adrenal creams. I’m half way through the third one and he’s discussing snails which can’t stop masturbating because they catch some kind of bacterial disease or something. That’s the first half and apparently he ends with a story about taking ecstasy live on Irish radio but I haven’t got that far.

Part of the snail story discusses simulations and how we may be living in one. It relates to fungus that take over the minds of ants, resulting in zombie ants which spread the fungus throughout the colony which then feeds the fungus and so on. I have heard of this, or at least recognise the images he describes about fungus growing out of the ants they’ve taken over. He discussed about how scientists with the use of quantum mechanics discovered something about black holes and how whatever this thing is points towards the idea that we are simply living in a simulation. What I know next to nothing about is quantum mechanics and black holes. I do like to reference quantum mechanics when trying to disprove the absolute truth of determinism because of the existence of random events but beyond that, and I doubt I really know the workings of that, I don’t know shit. But that doesn’t matter.

The point is that potentially we are living in a simulation. Blindboy mentioned the ancient Vedic scriptures which also suggest we may be living in a simulation. My mind then drifted on to science and how it has been proving a lot of things previously dismissed as nonsense, such as auras. In someway science is already like a religion. It is blindly followed as truth despite constantly changing and proponents of science, which I am far more than I’m not, can and are accused of being dogmatic in the process. Science then is becoming a religion, in certain respects at least. The important point though is that we’re just living in a simulation. Or maybe we’re not. But maybe we are. Does that mean there is a point to it all. There is a point to existence after all and maybe it isn’t simply to push a boulder up a mountain and watch it roll down the other side. Anyway, interesting podcast, well worth a listen.

Would Your Eternally Recur Given This Moment?

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Nietzsche was a man of many ideas. I previously mentioned Amor Fati; his idea that we should love our fate, and now I’ve just come across another concept of his that I feel worth butchering in my simplicity – eternal recurrence. Eternal recurrence is the idea that we are destined to repeat our lives over and over again for eternity. Now why he believed this is unclear, and it seems like something completely impossible to prove as anything other than theoretical. We would need to somehow step out of our understanding of time itself to do so. Saying that if we were to do this and view time not as linear but in a way I am unable to fully comprehend then this idea of our lives moving from beginning to end would be inaccurate and every moment would be existing always. I think I’ve heard it described as that in the past and if true would potentially make eternal recurrence true, just not as we would have previously understood it. If it were true though, and importantly we knew it to be true, would it make us view or live our life differently.

This could become a, are you happy with your life and would you change it moment, but that seems to simplify everything a little too much. For the sake of this though, no I don’t think I would change it and what has gone before as any outcome of any change is completely unknown and I don’t lack that much contentment with my life. Saying that it does make me feel I’m settling somehow and should strive for more or better but surely that misses the point somehow.

Assuming I live until seventy, I would be half way through my life now. There are things in the first half – which is all of it so far – that I cringe about and wouldn’t want to repeat, but then they accumulatively caused this moment now. And in the second half, in the knowledge that we will have to live it over and again for eternity do we start making the most of our life. If we decide upon that then does that mean we haven’t made the most of it so far and if we don’t have to repeat forever, would we somehow be content with this lack of value, if that’s the best way of putting it. Would this be an indictment of the way we live our lives, perhaps giving us the type of kick up the arse that makes us do something with our lives. An awful phrase and unnecessarily pressurised concept if ever there had been one.

But saying that it does allow us to see what value we put on our attempts at existing so far if we do play the hypothetical game. Perhaps that’s the whole point. It could be that Nietzsche never meant it in any actual sense but merely as a tool to see how much we love our life or our fate, if there is such a thing. But then he thought there was so we have no control anyway. If everything is eternally recurring then this has already happened, you have already read these words and you will read them again and again for eternity anyway. And if time isn’t linear, this moment is always happening. Sorry about that.

Aeon

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Now feels like a good time to plug a favourite website of mine. Aeon is all about ideas and when you read though the titles of the different articles they publish, the mind illuminates with excitement. They generally publish essays and short videos. The essays are usually three to four thousand words and of a high enough level not to be considered light reading. For this reason I can get a bit lazy as I know it will involve a certain amount of mind effort to read one. It is things like this that allow me to realise that my use of the internet doesn’t go much further than looking at football, politics, buying things and generally killing time and shutting off my brain. The internet is the greatest invention and has the potential to revolutionise society on scale not obvious since the printing press and I use it to kill time and shut my brain off. I know I’m not alone in this. Humans are ridiculous.

Aeon then involves a little effort, if you’re me, but it is well worth it. They used to also publish Ideas that were usually around the one thousand word mark which my short attention span was more suited to but they unfortunately seem to have done away with them recently. They publish essays on philosophy, science, history, psychology, law, nature, education and every sub category within.

For example this is an article on Ashoka Maurya who was an Indian Emperor over two thousand years ago. Seeing first hand the horror of warfare he creating ‘an infrastructure of goodness’ which also included the spread of the teachings of Siddhattha Gotama – the Buddha – and changed the face of the Indian continent in the process.

This is an article on the spread of pathogens throughout history, from The Black Death to polio, and how they’re generally spread silently by the seemingly healthy.

This article discusses free will and determinism, using our understanding of the sometime random actions of molecules to give some answers to this age old argument.

This is an essay on the concept of ‘hysterical women’, how women’s pain is often medically overlooked and undertreated but that ‘believing all women’ is not necessarily the answer and oversimplifies the issue.

This discusses how not only is privatising public services bad economics but also how it undermines our social and political bonds as a community.

And finally this is an article about how fish are nothing at all like us but that they are sentient beings and that they finally deserve a real place in our moral community.

Ultimately these are just a few examples of articles they publish and even then they’re only the ones I’m drawn to. There’s a little of everything for everyone. I mention Aeon because they’re not a massive publishing or news company, they don’t have adverts all over their website and they produce really interesting work. It’s online magazines like this that people need to be made aware of in these times of sensationalism and factual inaccuracy.

Just because I can I’m attaching a video of sea life in the Ningaloo Canyons off Western Australia. The video is on YouTube but is from Aeon, or at least that’s were I found it. There is also a video on the creation of the police force by Robert Peel in 1829 and what that has meant for society up to the present day. Enjoy the fish for now though.

Amor Fati

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Having just watched a six minute School of Life video on youtube about Nietzsche and his concept of Amor Fati I find myself slightly confused. Much of what I hear of Nietzsche confuses me, much of what I read of him I agree with but usually forget, and some of which I disagree with but suspect may actually be correct, just a little harsh for my sensitivities to accept. He seemed to be complicated and misunderstood, and I’m sure I remember him saying something along the lines of inferior minds will misunderstand him and terrible things will be done in his name. Certainly my mind is inferior to his or may I say different. I doubt I’ll be such a groundbreaking philosopher as he was, the man was arguably the best, or most significant. And how to define inferior, for at least I can talk to women. Yeah fuck you Nietzsche with your superior mind and your constant rejections. It’s the small victories which keep our egos believing. I remember working as an extra on Game of Thrones and seeing the actor who played the handsome hero John Snow wearing platform shoes and having to stand on a box to make him appear slightly taller, my tall man ego won that skirmish. Unfortunately I may have been the only one playing.

Amor Fati means a love of ones fate and it has distasteful fatalist overtones, which I don’t necessarily feel comfortable believing or accepting. We may debatably live in a mildly predetermined world but the future only exists as much as the present allows. The premise of Amor Fati is that you love what has already passed or that you at least accept it. A refusal to regret what has gone before and not look back, this he believes to be a virtue. Perhaps this is him refusing to accept the hardships of his life, the rejections, the mental illnesses, and on a hypothetical note had his life been wonderful and jolly these ideas may never have come to him. In that case, for creating the environment to have these ideas, all that went before him had to happen. What is not to love about that. Believing in determinism or fatalism is not a requisite of acceptance. While we are all guilty of looking back longingly or regretfully, how we deal with adversity is what is of most importance. There is always something to learn from every moment if we so choose, the good or the bad, and how lucky we are to have adversity in our lives to give us that opportunity for development. If that is to love ones fate then amor fati me.