Breaking the Streak

 This is my 200th blog post, and the 51st Friday I have posted in a row. I have published a new blog post every Friday during 2020, and one of the things that kept me going was the desire to keep it up every Friday of an entire year. But I have decided I am going to break the streak now on December 11. Here is why:

Throughout the tribulations of 2020, one of the major things that kept me sane was keeping up with my streaks. I was writing books, making a YouTube channel, learning Japanese, and keeping up with this blog, and I was meeting my deadlines for all of them. Being unemployed during COVID-19, it was a way of proving to myself that I was a responsible person who kept up with productive habits.

This changed mid-November. It was National Novel Writing Month, and I had finally landed a job as a contract tutor for an online company. This meant I had to keep up with doing my job, writing 1,667 words per day, 1/2 hour a day on Japanese practice, writing a blog post every week, and uploading a new video to YouTube every two weeks.

And I crashed.

The first sign was when I did not get my YouTube video up on Tuesday like usual, and had to upload it on Wednesday instead. You might roll your eyes and say, “Big deal.” But for someone whose sense of self-worth hinged on keeping up with his streaks, it was a big deal, and it was the first domino to fall.

A week and a half later, I fell short of the 1,667 daily word goal. It was the first time in the five years I have done NaNoWriMo that I missed a goal I set myself.

That was it. From then on, it was all I could do to write 200 words every day, much less 1.7 thousand. The streak was broken, and it wasn’t coming back.

That was when I started to seriously think about what I was putting myself through with all these hobbies. So much work, and for what? Almost nobody reads my blog posts or stories. I don’t even like Japanese culture. I’m poor and essentially unemployed, and these things are taking away from time I could be spending on a job.

I quit Japanese practice when my streak reached 600 days, and have hardly thought about it since. No regrets. When November was over, I stopped writing my book, even though the story wasn’t finished yet. Of all my hobbies, there are only two streaks left: YouTube and this blog.

I am going to keep up with YouTube, because having one hobby is healthy, and YouTube is the one that gives me the most joy and sense of purpose right now. But for A Scientist’s Fiction, this post will be the final post in my streak.

You may say, “Chris, there are only two Fridays left in 2020. You made it through NaNoWriMo. It’s smooth sailing from here. Why not just finish it up?”

And I could. I had planned for this to be the final blog post, and had two others lined up for this week and next week. I could write those and finish out the year. But I won’t.

This crisis has brought me face to face with parts of myself I never wanted to acknowledge, and forced me to rethink my values and motivations. The truth is, for as long as I can remember I have lived in pursuit of approval and validation. I wanted everyone to see how smart and wise and talented I am. This has led me to build up all of these streaks and crank out blog posts, many of them ending up not good.

I could finish out the year, getting those satisfying check marks filling out the entire 2020 Fridays chart. But that would mean giving in to the forces that drove me to crash. Breaking off this streak two weeks before my goal is my way of tossing that aside and signaling to myself that I’m ready to live with new, more wholesome and sustainable motivations.

I will still update this blog from time to time, but when I do, it will not be because I want to feel good about myself, but because I have something worth saying. Starting now, I will focus on four things: strengthening my relationships with my friends and family whom I could not be more thankful for, my physical health, making quality YouTube videos, and making tangible steps toward a realistic and sustainable career.

Until next time.

Don't Idolize People

Sometimes we have the desire to find a person who has profound insight and follow them, listening to their every word like it is holy revelation. We look for this infallible saint among religious figures, philosophers, leaders of social movements, and famous entrepreneurs. In my own life, I grew up in among American Conservative Christian culture, and I believed they had all the answers. Then I started to see the flaws in that ideology, and I discovered Sam Harris, who seemed to have all the answers Christianity didn’t.

But then I started noticing Sam’s blind spots, and I searched again, finding other wise thinkers, including Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, and Sean Carroll. And while all of these people have good ideas worth listening to, they also all have blind spots and ideas that are not so much worth listening to. And so I discovered something that should be obvious, but is not so easy to act as though we believe: No one has all the answers. No one is worth pledging our intellect to follow.

So how do we gain knowledge and wisdom without falling prey to the same pitfalls as the people we follow? The answer is to listen to many different people who come at ideas from different angles, and not to dismiss their ideas just because they are different from the way we think. We learn to evaluate their ideas, take wisdom where we find it, and leave foolishness behind.

As someone who seeks out new perspectives, especially ones I am told not to listen to, I am one of the few people who have read both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx. Both of these thinkers have a lot of bad ideas, but they also both have some good ideas worth listening to.

Rand’s big idea that hooks so many people is the idea of living rationally. To choose goals for one’s life and work toward those goals using reason, not tradition or peer pressure or rules or authority. This is a very empowering way of thinking, which I admit I have not done well in my life so far, and am working at doing better.

However, that’s about the only idea of Rand’s that’s worth anything. Claiming to have bridged the is-ought gap and discovered objective symbolism and ideals is just bad philosophy, and to declare that people who do not live rationally are not worthy of partaking in the bounty of life is despicable. These ideas are the mark of someone who is full of herself trying to seize power and control the social narrative.

Marx is infamous for being the communism guy who inspired the totalitarian takeover of Russia and China and caused the collapse of many smaller countries. This means Marx is bad, right?

Not so fast. Marx identified a lot of legitimate problems with capitalism, some of which are still relevant today. For starters, he identified the problem of inequality of opportunity. In his day, it was much more rigid, with two distinct classes: the bourgeoisie, who owned factories, fields, and natural resource deposits; and the proletariat, who worked the fields, factories, mines, and stores in exchange for enough money to buy enough food to go back to work the next day.

These days it is easier for a factory worker or truck driver to rise up the ranks, get a good recommendation, and start their own business. But it is still hard, and relies on all kinds of factors out of the person’s control, like health, access to education, good connections, an encouraging environment, and natural talent. A sad fact of our economy is that the less money someone has, the harder it is to make money, and the less educated someone is, the harder it is to get more education. Forces are at play to keep those at the bottom of the economy poor.

Marx is considered the father of Social Conflict Theory, the idea that we humans divide ourselves into groups and those groups compete with one another for resources and status. Marx himself was a reductionist, saying all of human history is class conflict, which is clearly not correct, but it is equally clear that social conflict does play a significant role in history, and it is an essential lens for studying social science and for trying to resolve social issues.

For Marx and Rand alike, we should do what we do with all thinkers; take the good and leave the bad. The same is true for Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michel Foucault, Søren Kierkegaard, the writers of the American Constitution, Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius. All have wisdom worth listening to, and all have pitfalls we can fall into if we follow them too zealously.

Consciousness and the Question of Meaning

Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness
Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

We’ve talked about the Hard Problem of consciousness, and all of the ways it might be resolved. The conclusion that is the most consistent with my experience and knowledge is that consciousness is information changing and interacting with itself in certain ways, and that any time information behaves in these ways, be it in brains, computer chips, or large-scale systems, consciousness is there.

But if this is true, it leads to another question: why does each conscious experience have the character that it does? Why doesn’t chocolate taste blue? Why doesn’t a smooth ball feel like the direction left? Or one that is more easy to wrap our minds around: why does our vision fade to black when things get dark, instead of fading to white?

Religions and spiritual gurus have claimed to know the answers to this question since before history began: conscious qualia are what they are because they tap into a realm of existence beyond the physical where objective, transcendent meaning can be found. Materialists deride this claim, citing all the contradictions between religious and spiritual traditions, and how claims of objective meaning have been used to justify oppression. I am sympathetic to both views, and I think it is important to have waited until after we have talked about all the other topics in the consciousness series before tackling this one, to avoid falling into naive answers.

Let’s consider a question: could black and white have been switched? Could we have evolved such that dark things fade away into whiteness instead of blackness?

If physicalism is true, then whiteness and blackness are patterns in our brains. Intuitively, it seems the answer to the question is yes. It just happened in our evolutionary history that darkness is represented by the color black in our minds, but it could have been white instead. Or any other color, for that matter.

We have some evidence for this. An early psychologist, George Stratton, did a famous experiment where he wore glasses that turned his view upside-down. After a few days, he was able to function as if his vision were normal. When he took the glasses off for the last part of the experiment, he felt like his vision was upside-down again.

This suggests that at least the senses of up and down could have been switched, and if they were, we would not be any different from how we are now. This hints at the possibility that we would not be noticeably different if our sense of up were, for example, switched with the color blue, although it is not proof by any stretch of the imagination.

Alternatively, it may be that swapping around our qualia makes living less efficient, and if it is done too much, might mess up our brains in ways they cannot adjust to. It’s well known that we perceive reality symbolically, with concepts representing other concepts, which are connected to other concepts, in a web that encompasses everything we know and experience.

Much of this is arbitrary, a product of upbringing and culture. But some symbols and their connections seem to come pre-loaded into our brain structure. It might be that the archetypal symbols we inherit genetically are inextricably intertwined with one another and the other functions of our brains that swapping them or changing them too much would leave us non-functional.

The question I am trying to ask is this: are the qualia we experience an arbitrary shake of the evolutionary dice, or did they evolve the way they did because the quale patterns themselves help us to survive and thrive? If the former is true, then existentialism is true: the meaning in life is what we make it. If the latter is true, it opens the door to the possibility that there is meaning outside of us, locked up within the possibility-space of conscious experience, brought into being when it is experienced by conscious creatures like us.

This is all idle speculation. I feel hardly more informed on this subject than the Ancient Greeks who proclaimed everything to be made of water. We do not have the tools yet to investigate this question scientifically, though we may someday. All we have is storytelling and armchair philosophy—both of which I am happy to engage in, writing blog posts and novels and filling them with meaning to the best of my ability. Whether I create that meaning or reveal it, I do not know. But what I do know is that this question will bring me a sense of wonder and mystery to the end of my days.

Hyperspace and Repeating Time – Worldbuilding MoebiusWar

The book I’m writing for National Novel Writing Month this year is a fantastic space opera. And what is a good space opera without faster than light technology?

The Moebiverse uses hyperspace, a fourth dimension of space that exists in addition to the regular 3D universe. This version of hyperspace is curved so that any straight-line trajectory will end up back in the normal universe at another place faster than it takes light to get there through normal space.

Since hyperspace is outside of the universe, it is impossible to run into anything while in hyperspace, unless it is right next to you in hyperspace. This detail was inspired by the Stargate SG-1 episode “Fail Safe,” where they make a hyperspace jump from one side of the Earth to the other. Adding my own twist, you cannot enter hyperspace when the density of material is too high; it can only be done in empty space. This also means that if there is mass where you exit, you will skip like a rock off a pond and exit a few light seconds away.

Faster-Than-Light technology is notorious for being very hard to imagine without allowing time travel, as I’ve explained in this blog post and this video. There is a saying: FTL, relativity, causality; pick two. However, as I explained in this video, there is a loophole. We can choose an objective reference frame, and if this frame is only special when FTL technology is being used, relativity is still preserved in slower-than-light regimes, embedded within a non-relativistic FTL-inclusive space-time-plus.

In the Moebiverse, the objective frame is relative to the Shaper’s Path, a chain of galaxies which move conveyor-style at extremely high speeds through the universe. I do have to think more about this, though, because there are other galactic chains with their own velocities, and I guess an objective cosmic frame through which they move.

Speaking of galactic chains, let’s move on to how time travel does happen in this universe. That’s right, there is time travel, but I didn’t want the characters to just be able to do it whenever and to whenever they want. So I set up the Moebiverse to have repeating history. Every galaxy along the Shaper’s Path is the same galaxy, 400 years apart, and the time it takes to move from one position in the chain to the next is exactly 400 years. So if you can travel between galaxies, it is the same thing as traveling through time.

Of course, traveling to another galaxy is not as easy as traveling to another star. Stars are light years apart, but galaxies are millions of light years apart. If it takes hours to travel to nearby stars through hyperspace, it will take hundreds of thousands of hours to get to the nearest galaxy. That’s thousands of years. So in order to travel through time, you need something else. At this point, I’m still at the “just use a magical artifact” part of the time travel worldbuilding, and haven’t built up much theory around it.

Speaking of magical artifacts, the Moebiverse has djinns (called talias in-universe), objects that go back in time and become their past selves in an infinite loop. For reasons no one knows, these objects grant people magical powers. For instance, the elemental medallions in MoebiusQuest grant the wielder limited control over their respective elements, and in MoebiusWar the evil Spellcaster’s staff allows him to manipulate others’ emotions.

And that’s how the faster-than-light and time travel science works in the Moebiverse. I hope I can finish this book soon; I’ve been under a lot of stress lately and haven’t made the NaNoWriMo word quota at all this past week. Nevertheless, I have pushed on a little further every day and I am determined to continue until the end.

(Last-minute update: I wrote 2200 words yesterday, which is 3x more than my other days this week, so my momentum might make a comeback!)

Building a Teenage Fascist Empire – Worldbuilding MoebiusWar

 As you probably know, I’m writing a book this month, MoebiusWar. It’s like Star Wars, but with different magic and science. The galaxy is being invaded by a powerful totalitarian empire, and the remaining free worlds have banded together into an interplanetary Resistance.

The people of this galaxy have an interesting feature. In the first book, I wanted a believable reason why it was teenagers flying around saving the galaxy, not seasoned professional adults. So I decided they are not humans, but yumans, a species like humans except they stop maturing at around fifteen and stay like that for the rest of their lives. So not only is Tarran an evil fascist empire, it’s a teenage evil fascist empire.

I wanted all the good guys to justifiably be on the same side, which meant I have to make the invading empire clearly and obviously bad. So I took inspiration from totalitarian and authoritarian nations of real life, particularly Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, sprinkling in some colonialism as well.

It began with a superiority complex. The Tarran people believe their culture is the True Culture, their religion the True Religion, and their people the Chosen People. Thus, when they decided to go out and invade the galaxy, they didn’t see it as an invasion, but as a way to spread the Truth and Light^TM that their culture has achieved.

Because of this mentality, they are very blind to the social prejudices that are very obvious to anyone looking in, notably race and religion. While officially everyone of all races is treated equally under the law, in practice anyone without midnight black skin is treated as a second-class citizen. As for religion, everyone is institutionally required to practice Ar’eus, with all other sects and religions either extremely frowned upon or outright banned with harsh persecution.

The Emperor of Tarran, who is known as the Spellcaster, has a magic staff that lets him control the emotions of anyone who hears it stamp on the ground. This includes live broadcasts but not recordings, because that would break the plot. Spellcaster uses this power to give everyone in the empire intense happiness when they serve him, and depression whenever they doubt or question. It’s an aggrandized magical version of a cult of personality, when a confidence-dripping, chest-thumping narcissist steps up into a position of power and says “join with me against those inferior people who don’t belong with us,” and large numbers of people lose their minds and follow them.

And finally, the icing on the dystopian cake, informing on your neighbors. Near the beginning of the story, Spellcaster issues an edict that anyone showing signs of depression be turned in to the police for questioning, the rationale being that under Spellcaster’s spell, only those who harbor traitorous thoughts are susceptible to depression. Ain’t that the stuff of nightmares.

That is our dystopian totalitarian teenage fascist empire. The story so far has been a blast to write, with lots of interesting characters interacting with each other and dealing with the war in their own unique ways. If you want to read MoebiusWar, a link will be posted in an announcement blog post when it is done next month. You can read the first book, MoebiusQuest, here for free. Have a good November!

NaNoWriMo 2020: MoebiusWar

November is here once again, and that means it’s time to write another book! National Novel Writing Month is an event where hundreds of thousands of people around the world commit to writing a 50,000-word book in one month. This year is my fifth.

The story I am writing is MoebiusWar, the sequel to my 2018 novel MoebiusQuest. Yes, I know how cheesy these titles are, and it is on purpose. These are stories my friends and I built when we were teenagers, and writing them brings back a flood of nostalgia for those days. When writing them, I let myself loose, throwing in tons of silly things I would never put in a real book, and not worrying too much about the craftsmanship.

In MoebiusWar, Conner and his friends journey to Shaper’s Next, a version of their galaxy 400 years in the future, to find the galaxy at war. The evil Spellcaster, ruler of the Tarran Empire, has the nearly unlimited ability to manipulate his subjects’ emotions to coerce them into serving his conquest. Meanwhile, the remaining free worlds have banded together in an allied Resistance to stand against his tyranny. With space battles, time travel, and magic, this book follows multiple personal stories on both sides of the war. The theme: how to remain positive and enthusiastic when the universe around you is going to hell, and your own emotions are being magically manipulated against you. Perfect for 2020.

In keeping with the tradition of breaking new ground during NaNoWriMo, this is the first sequel I have ever written. I did begin Mind and Mirrors, the sequel to The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster, [link] but I have lost interest in that story and I doubt I will ever finish it.

When MoebiusWar is finished, I intend to release it online for free. You can read MoebiusQuest right now, if you like. [link] The current version has been edited slightly, though it is still far from publishable.

In other news, I am about halfway through the second draft of my first real adult novel, An Odyssey through the Stars. The first draft was written during NaNoWriMo last year under the title, Earthbound: A Galactic Odyssey. It will need at least one more structural draft after this one, and another draft for line editing after that. Hopefully, within the next few years you will be able to find An Odyssey through the Stars in bookstores near you.

You can see my progress on MoebiusWar and An Odyssey through the Stars in the bars at the top right of this page. Happy NaNoWriMo to any of you who are participating in it, and I hope your week is at least ok.

This Time It's Not About Politics, It's About Standing Up for What's Right

There are three levels of attitudes toward politics. The first is through the lens of loyalty, of good guys vs bad guys. People who vote for their party because all their friends, family, role models, and authority figures vote for that party.

The second level is realizing that the first level is pointless tribal warfare. All the sensationalism, the rhetoric, the news commentary, it’s all designed to fire people up for the team against the other team. People at this level hold up their hands and say, “I’m not participating in that,” and they don’t vote or they vote for a third option out of protest. These people sometimes try to play peacemaker by trying to convince others that politics doesn’t matter.

The third level is to recognize how politics works. The rhetoric and sensationalism is indeed showmanship, but it has real consequences. The truth of politics is not in the words, but in the actions. People in the third level vote and take political action. Not out of loyalty to a party or a sense of belonging to a group of “good guys,” but from the principles they hold. They might vote for different parties in different years based on which candidates are best in line with their principles. The more people there are in this category, the better democracy works.

In the past my blog posts have been about ideas, not taking action. But there comes a time when it is no longer appropriate to merely play the philosopher. Right now, at the end of 2020, it’s not about politics, it’s about standing up for what’s right.

Real politics is discussing how to let legitimate immigrants in while keeping out the drug and sex traffickers. It’s debating whether we should focus on welfare or employment programs, or whether we should add more categories to the gender section of official documents. What we have in 2020 is not politics, it’s a man standing atop the gutted remains of a Party, happy to light the world on fire if it shows everyone that he is the one on top. That’s not politics, it’s despotism.

An eagle needs a healthy left wing and a healthy right wing in order to fly. Conservatism, at least what it is supposed to be, looks at traditions and the people who want to change or throw out traditions and says, “Hold on, we don’t know all of the consequences of changing this. Let’s be careful.” Conservatism suggests that maybe man-woman marriage is not just a tool for powerful men to remain powerful, but there may be something highly nurturing about growing up with a mother and a father that is extremely hard to find in other situations. Conservatism suggests that there is something about earning a living for oneself that gives a life purpose at a level that cannot be found when receiving charity or welfare. Conservatism says we should remember the history of ideas that brought us here and remember it well, because there are truths buried within it that we do not fully understand.

It is not conservative to put down protests with violent police force. It is not conservative to brush off major problems like hundreds of thousands of Americans dying from a disease or the global temperature increasing enough to have effects that scar the planet and humanity for centuries. These are not conservatism; they are cultish.

I don’t know if there is anything salvageable of the Republican Party. Perhaps the Democratic Party could split, and the Joe Bidens could be our conservative party and the Bernie Sanderses and Elizabeth Warrens could be our progressive party. Either way, something drastic has to happen to our political system to get us back to a healthy place.

Now is a difficult time to be conservative. Look around. Are the unknown risks of change so great that it’s worse than the trajectory we are currently on? It is good to be cautious and not to rush things, but there comes a time when your house is on fire and you have to get out. Enough with the dead weight stubbornness daydreaming about turning the clock back and making America “great” again. If we want to get back to a healthy political climate, we need to cut this brain tumor out of our country’s head. The time for change is now.

A Perfectly Rational Being

Over the years, I’ve played with a thought experiment: suppose there were a purely rational being who had no instincts, emotions, or irrational stimuli of any kind. Something we imagine robots and Vulcans to be like. What would such a being do? In the time it has taken me to get around to writing this, I have gone through three phases of what I thought the answer would be. So let’s dive in and imagine what a person/creature/AI would be like if they were perfectly rational.

Phase I: The Rational Statue

When we talk about rational behaviors, we usually mean things that advance our careers or keep us alive. That’s logical, right? But we run into a problem: the is-ought gap. Reasons to do things ultimately come down to instinct, not factual observations. Sure, we may need to stay alive in order to do anything, but without any drive to do anything, we have no reason to keep ourselves alive. Under these conditions, self-preservation is no more rational than self-destruction.

You might ask whether we already have perfectly rational beings in artificial intelligence. Isn’t a robot perfectly rational? Not at all. A computer program does not think about what it is told to do, it simply runs its programs, taking input and giving output. It is one hundred percent instinctual, not rational in the slightest. A perfectly rational being would indeed have the ability to give you the answer to any math or logic problem quickly and correctly, but, having no motivation, they wouldn’t, because they would have no reason to do so. A perfectly rational being would do absolutely nothing.

Phase II: The Rational Egotist

Then I thought of something that turned this entire argument upside-down: a perfectly rational being would realize that it might be modified sometime in the future to have instinctive, irrational motivations. Therefore, not knowing what those motivations would be, it would act in such a way as to keep as many options open as possible.

To start with, this would mean staying alive. It would also accumulate resources, including wealth, influence, and information. It will make deals and build trust, do favors so it can call in returns later. However, it will also screw others over when it calculates a sufficiently high probability to get away with it. After all, its ultimate goal is to open up future options; it has no sense of morality nor respect for laws or social conventions.

Phase III: The Rational Altruist

However, there is yet another major factor that turns everything upside down. A being who is perfectly rational will understand that individuality is an artificial construction. In a sense, every living thing that exists is an extension of one person, the universe. Thus, a perfectly rational being would not have to wait around for some unknown motivation in the future; it already has motivations, the motivations of other people.

Thus, a perfectly rational being with no motivations of its own would work for the benefit of others. It would not follow the whims of a master or people ordering it about, nor invest in caring for one particular child or homeless person at a time. Rather, it would be impartial and utilitarian, putting its efforts where they would do the most good. To that end, most of its efforts would be focused on medical research, alleviating extreme poverty, eliminating monstrosities like dictatorships and factory farms, and preventing extinction.

So that is how I believe a perfectly rational being would behave. The phases are hierarchical, that is, each phase takes into account all of the information of the previous phases. It’s like changing religious or scientific paradigms, the being will not slide back into a previous phase unless they receive new information that takes into account all of the information they already have. I don’t know how practical this thought experiment is, but at least it was fun. Maybe I’ll write an artificial character who goes through these phases in one of my books someday.

Identity, Self, and Other

Consciousness:

The Hard Problem

Dualism

Physicalism

Idealism

Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Suppose there is a boat. As the boat goes on many voyages, its pieces wear out one by one and are replaced. Eventually, there are no original materials left. But the pieces are saved, and they are all put together into a second boat. Which of these two boats is the original, the one that continued to voyage, or the one made out of all the original materials?

This thought experiment is called the Ship of Theseus, and it goes back to Ancient Greece. Its answer, as we talked about in our discussion of reductionism and holism, it that which ship is the original is completely arbitrary, we decide. Objective reality has nothing at all to say on the matter.

That’s fine for inanimate objects, but it can be a lot harder to swallow when we try out the same idea on human beings, particularly ourselves. Every few years, the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies are cycled out and replaced, even in our neurons and other cells that stick around. Imagine if all of the atoms from you of ten years ago were reassembled into a new person, whose consciousness picked up as if waking up after going to bed ten years earlier. Which of these two people is the real you? If we want to be consistent with the Ship of Theseus, the answer is completely subjective. Both versions of you have equal claim to be the original, as was discussed in my YouTube video on the subject.

This feels like nonsense. After all, you know that you are you. This other person is clearly someone else, a new person with false memories. But this concept of a continuing self which is distinct from all others is an illusion. To demonstrate this, let’s ask what a self is supposed to be.

If the self is not found in the matter that makes up our bodies, maybe it is in our soul, a self-contained essence of identity that remains with us, unchanging, from the moment our lives begin until we die. However, as science continues to develop better tools to look into the body and the brain, we understand better and better how the mind works, but there is still no sign of a soul to be found. So it appears that souls are a relic from mythology and folk wisdom, and unless souls are a metaphor or an abstraction of something else, we have no reason to believe they exist.

Perhaps what the soul is an abstraction of is the continually evolving process of consciousness over time. Except our consciousness is not continuous. It turns off when we are asleep, and turns on again when we dream or wake. And we have lapses in consciousness now and then even when we are awake. To top it off, the experience we think of as “this present moment” is actually the result of the brain ordering and constructing an experience based on sensory information it received a fraction of a second ago over a period of a few milliseconds.

With some meditation practice and an open mind, we can discover that our conscious experience is not a homunculus, an internal receiver of perceptions and generator of thoughts and will. Instead, our conscious experience is the perceptions, thoughts, and will, which arise, exist for a moment, and then disappear again. Thus, the consciousness we have now is different from the consciousness we had ten years ago, or even ten minutes ago.

Furthermore, rare phenomena show that our consciousness is not necessarily bound within our bodies. I’m not talking about out-of-body experiences or anything like that; I mean things like connecting brains together to make a collective consciousness. Right now, we have very few examples of joined or split consciousnesses. We would hope so, because performing experiments in this area would be the ultimate personal violation.

Nevertheless, we do have a few points of data. Patients of split-brain surgery who have the two halves of their brain separated can develop two distinct personalities, one in each half of their brain. In terms of joining consciousness together, we have cranially conjoined twins whose brains are connected, and, to a degree, these twins share consciousness.

Science fiction goes crazy on these ideas with thought experiments of collectives, groups of people—perhaps hundreds, thousands, or even millions—who link their minds together and become one giant person. Famous examples include the Borg in Star Trek and the Formics in Ender’s Game.

In these stories, it is sometimes possible for an individual body to disconnect from the collective and become an individual person. But if that person has been in the collective for long enough, they are not the same person they were before they joined. Rather, they are a small version of the collective who now only has access to body and one set of senses.

Thus, it would appear that consciousness is not made up of distinct units, “selves,” that can link together and separate, but it is more like a liquid, which can join, mix, and separate like droplets and bodies of water. This analogy especially makes sense when thinking about the distant future when the vast majority of conscious life will live within an immense virtual reality network.

Coming back to us, here, today, we may see ourselves in a new light. Now, this model we’ve always taken for granted of distinct individuals, of you, me, that person, and the other person, does not seem so set in stone. We don’t all have our own unique, fundamentally separate existences from one another. Rather, it’s almost as if we are a collective already. All living things, lakes of consciousness. One, but for the space between us.

In this view, it can be said that there is life after death. Not an afterlife, nor is it quite reincarnation; it’s all the people and animals who are still alive. I am you, and you are me. We are the universe, and when one droplet of consciousness evaporates, there are still an ocean’s worth remaining.

I realize that a lot of what I said here sounds pretty weird, and I admit it does stray quite a bit beyond the realm of well-grounded science. But it’s not just something I thought up out of nowhere, nor am I repeating something I heard someone else say. I did take some liberties with narrative interpretation—it’s entirely subjective whether we consider everyone today to be a collective or individuals—but the liquid-like interpretation of consciousness is the most logically consistent analogy I can think of given my knowledge of current science and philosophy.

9 Video Games that Changed My Life

Stories are one of the most powerful forces in shaping our lives and our societies, and video games, as I have said on many occasions, are the most powerful form of storytelling that has ever been at our disposal. The reason is that, in addition to having all the sensory fullness of a movie, video games make us, the players, participate in their stories through our efforts and choices.

After seeing bestselling author and my personal hero Brandon Sanderson talk about his favorite video games and why they were important in shaping who he is, I got a sudden inspiration to do the same. So here we are, a list of video games in no particular order that have either touched my life or influenced my practice as a storyteller.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

The core gameplay mechanic of Ace Attorney is presenting pieces of evidence to refute inconsistencies in the stories told by others, be they witnesses in court, suspects under investigation, authority figures covering up injustices, or your companions who need cheering up.

This game trained me in the philosophy of empiricism, in the construction and deconstruction of narratives based on evidence, which I have put to use in all of the philosophically-themed posts on this blog. If it weren’t for the Ace Attorney games, the way I approach philosophical and scientific ideas might have been different.

I could list all nine of the English-translated Ace Attorney games on my list of favorites, and my number one would be Trials and Tribulations, a masterful work of art full of incredible characters and well-crafted mysteries. But the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, was the one that cracked open the door in my mind, the one that started me down this incredible path of logic and evidence.

Celeste

On the surface, Celeste is a challenging platformer with distinctive mechanics to test our reflexes, puzzle-solving, and muscle memory. And if that were all it was, I would have been happy. But it also has a powerful story about overcoming anxiety and depression, of a woman named Madeline climbing a magical mountain that brings her face-to-face with the things in her mind tormenting her.

In chapter 2, a copy of Madeline embodying the negative voices in her head breaks out of a mirror to haunt and torment her. In chapter 3, we meet Mr. Oshiro, a ghost who has been stuck for an untold amount of time in the hotel he used to manage, who failed the challenges Madeline must still face. In order to reach the summit of the mountain, Madeline must stop running away from her alternate self and make peace with her instead.

Celeste has the best mixture tough love and positive affirmation, with levels that challenge us to our limits mixed in with wonderful, compassionate characters. This game has helped me tremendously in dealing with my own emotional struggles, and it has influenced how I view and interact with others who are struggling.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

It has long been a theme of storytelling to remind us of the magic and mystery the world was full of when we were children. In my opinion, nothing does this as well as the Legend of Zelda. The player goes out to explore, discovering magic and learning skills, ultimately fulfilling their destiny and playing a role in the grand narrative of the world.

Breath of the Wild does this more fully than any other game in the series. From the beginning, we know we are meant to save the world. But we also know we are far too weak to take on the evil that threatens it. How do we get stronger? By running off to the ends of the earth. Climbing mountains. Discovering natural and artificial wonders. Meeting people and helping them.

I have played many games that encourage the spirit of exploration and adventure, but none of them reach quite the level of mastery as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Riven

The Myst games are renowned in video game history for putting point-and-click puzzlers on the map, for using videos of real-life actors to play the characters, and for telling stories as much through their environments as through text.

Every Myst game requires the players to figure out the science and technology of each of its worlds. In Riven, this is taken to the next level, as the entire game is one giant meta-puzzle, and to solve it, the player must learn the story of the world.

I, unfortunately, was too young to appreciate it when I first played it, and I used a guide. But maturity has given me new eyes with which to see how profound this game really is.

God of War Ps4

You may not have expected a game with a title like God of War would make it onto a list of profound and positive games. Nevertheless, I knew within the first ten minutes of God of War 4 that this story is something above and beyond.

All of the God of War games are filled with grandiose mythological imagery, from the Steeds of Time wading through the ocean to the mountain-sized Atlas literally holding the world above the realm of Hades. However, whereas the first three games were mainly gratuitous power fantasy with a little bit of story, the fourth game is mainly story with a little bit of power fantasy.

And what a story it is. Instead of tearing up the world on a quest for redemption or vengeance, the Greek hero Kratos now has a tiny shrimp of a son named Atreus whom he loves dearly. The dynamic between these two characters gives the story a fire that is rare to see in video games.

Both father and son learn from each other, as Kratos teaches Atreus the ways of the world by telling him the tale of the Tortoise and the Hare and trains him to deduce what happened on an old battlefield by reading the clues. At one point, they come upon a chained dragon. Kratos wants to leave it alone, believing it will attack them and they will be forced to kill it. But he is persuaded by Atreus to free the dragon on the slim chance it will be grateful and help them on their journey.

I have only played a few hours of God of War for the Playstation 4, less than half of it. But from what I have seen, I already know it is going to be one of the most incredible stories I have ever experienced.

Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight has depths of metaphorical significance on levels rarely attained by any work of art. It explores themes of worthiness and divinity by having the player take control of a bug in a world where life is cheap, and which is constructed and dictated by powerful forces that are either long dead or immaterial and instinctual.

The player can finish the game not knowing what they have done or the impact of their actions on the course of the world. This may seem frustrating from an outside perspective, but it is woven into the design of the narrative so well as to be one of the story’s most powerful and unique aspects.

Add to this the exploration, the treasure collection, the artwork and music, and the challenge, and we have a recipe that puts Hollow Knight solidly at number 2 on my list of favorite games of all time.

NieR: Automata

I did not enjoy playing NieR: Automata. Action games were never my strong suit, and the battles, which constituted the main challenge of the game, felt to me unsatisfying and repetitive. In addition, the unusual structure of the story rubbed me the wrong way.

However, I did notice that all of the robot characters and enemies were named after real-life philosophers, and that the aesthetics and themes of the different chapters had method beneath their veneer of absurdity. After talking with friends and watching analysis essays on YouTube like this one and this one, I have come around to the view that NieR: Automata may be the most profound piece of existentialist literature ever created. And also, the lead character is an attractive woman, which is always a plus.

Danganronpa V3

This entry will most likely come as a surprise. Most of you will probably think, “Dragon-what?” And then if you look it up, you will find it is a story about a group of teenagers who are trapped in a school together and forced by bizarre circumstances to kill each other to escape. And then you might think, how could a story like that possibly rank on a list of most positive life-changing video games?

The answer is because the ending of the final game is the most powerful, most profound ending of any story I have ever experienced, be it video game, novel, movie, theater play, or spoken word. And, I can’t tell you what it is, because it wouldn’t be half as impactful without the rest of the story building up to it.

What I can tell you is that the theme of truths not always leading good places and lies sometimes being the best way forward has had a great impact on my view of the usages of language and storytelling beyond their literal meaning and the truth values of their words. Danganronpa V3 showed me that fiction is the bricks by which we construct our narratives of our world.

The Witness

Although most of the other games were not in order, The Witness takes its solid place among my favorites at number 1. Nothing else, not stories, not people, not transcendental experiences have had as much of an impact on my view of the world as this game has.

The premise is simple: take a walk around an island, solving puzzles and contemplating the nature of existence. At the beginning, there is no apparent goal, just go out and explore. Here and there you find videos and audio quotes from famous philosophers, theologians, and zen masters, bringing together the best of Eastern and Western philosophy.

Through the course of the game, your perspective of the game world shifts, and you see the same things in new ways, and some of these new perspective lenses unlock new mechanics of the game. In fact, it is possible to get the true ending within the first minute of playing, but it is almost impossible to notice it unless you’ve already gone through the world.

The Witness has influenced my views of many philosophical topics, from metaphysics to consciousness to psychology to theories of knowledge. It has gotten me to look at the real world in new ways, just as it taught me to look at the game world. If anyone ever asks me to name one video game they should play, my answer will be, without hesitation, The Witness.

Games that will probably make this list once I play them:

The Talos Principle

All I know of The Talos Principle is that it is a puzzle game where you play as a robot contemplating its own existence. People have told me it is the perfect game for me, and I believe them. I own it on Steam, but I cannot play it because I can’t afford a powerful enough computer at the moment. 

Miegakure

It’s 4D! Need I say more? When Miegakure is released, it will make video game history as the first 4-dimensional game in existence.

The way it works is that you can only see one 3D slice at a time. With the press of a button, you can rotate this 3D slice through the larger 4D landscape. This has the effect of making things look like they are changing shape, growing out of nowhere or shrinking into nonexistence, or floating in midair. But this apparent nonsense is perfectly logical, once we realize we are looking at 4-dimensional structures.

And that is my list of the most influential video games that shaped who I am today.

Parable of the Burdened Laborers

A number of people gathered before a prophet and said, “Give us tasks, for it is harvest and we wish to do God’s work in the field!”

And the prophet replied, “God’s work is difficult, and it must be done while carrying a weight upon your back. Are you sure you want to be assigned tasks?”

And the people replied, “Yes! Give us tasks!”

And the prophet said, “Very well.” And he went to each of the laborers and placed an invisible object on their backs. One of the men felt the weight press down upon him as the prophet anointed him. It was heavy, but the man shouldered it and set off into the field to do his work.

After a time had passed, the man looked around and saw a number of the other laborers sitting in the shade. “What are you doing?” He demanded of them. “God has given you tasks. How can you sit around on the job?”

The resting workers looked at him, and got to their feet and began to work again.

A short time later, the man looked around and saw the same laborers sitting on the ground. And he said, “You lazy and disrespectful workers. God has given you tasks. How can you sit around instead of performing the tasks he has assigned you?”

At that moment, the prophet came into the field. And the man said to the prophet, “Look at these people who rest instead of doing the work God has assigned them. Send them away so that they may not partake in the fruit of our labor.”

The prophet looked at those who were working, and he looked at those who were resting. And the prophet commanded the burdens he had given the laborers to become visible. And the man saw that on his own back was a small brick, but on the backs of those who rested were packages of ten, twenty, and even fifty bricks. Only one man who rested had a burden of just one brick. The prophet said to that man, “Be gone, for you shall not partake in the fruit of this labor.”

To the rest of the laborers, those who were working and those who were resting, the prophet said, “Let those whose burdens are light finish their tasks. And when they have finished, let them aid in the tasks of those whose burdens are heavy. For all of you shall all partake in the fruit of your labor.”

And the prophet left. And the man who had judged those who rested finished his task. But when he finished, he did not help those who were still laboring.

And once all the work had been done, the prophet returned and removed their burdens, and began to divide up the fruit of their labor. But when the prophet came to the man who had judged, he asked, “When you finished your task, why did you not help those who were still working?”

And the man said, “I have faithfully completed the task I was assigned. Please give me my share of the fruit of our labor.”

And the prophet handed him a single small coin and said, “Because you did not help those whose burdens were heavy, your share will be divided among them. Go and join the man who did not work despite his burden being light.” And the prophet sent him away and divided his portion among those who had done the least work because their burdens had been heavy.

And the man took his coin and left, angry at the prophet and at God because he had worked an equal share of the labor but had not been given an equal share of the reward.

The End of Illusion

Image found here

One of my goals in my pursuits of thought, and indeed one of the goals of philosophy itself, is to pierce through all the misconceptions and arbitrary knowledge we have built up through experience and culture and find a place of raw truth, the sandbox within which all knowledge is constructed.

Now, after building up a toolbelt of knowledge and contemplating the nature of reality, the Bayesian network model of knowledge, the is-ought gap between fact and morality, the concept of narratives, and the effects of language, I believe I have finally found a place free of all illusions. It is this: what happens happens, and all else is interpretation.

It is very hard to talk about this idea using language. After all, by describing it, I am, well, describing it. That in itself adds a layer of interpretation to something which is supposed to be beneath interpretations. Yet, as we discussed last week, it is possible to use words to describe things beyond words, so I will attempt to do so.

Consider how the squirrel sees the world. The squirrel has no language, knows no words. Yet still it perceives the world. Though it has no word for “cloud,” it notices differences in patches of the sky. Though it has no word for “tree,” it knows there are cylindrical surfaces with lots of footholds to grab onto.

There was a time before language, when all things saw the world as the squirrel does. There was a time before perception, and a time before life. Yet the universe existed back then, just as much as it exists now. And it behaved according to its inherent nature, just as it does now.

This is reality beyond illusion. That which is, independent of perception or belief. It does what it does, and all concepts, narratives, and models, from philosophy to religion to science, are merely interpretations.

What Words Do – Literal Meaning vs Manifest Meaning

 “Actions speak louder than words,” the saying goes. And it is quite clearly true. If someone says “I love you,” and another person gives you a gift that shows they have been paying attention to your likes and interests, the second person’s intention comes across much more strongly. But there is a deeper level to the phrase “actions speak louder than words:” words are a kind of action.

In our culture, we think of words as a tool for communicating ideas based on the words’ literal definitions. If I say, “Light is an electromagnetic wave,” it is natural to assume I am communicating the physical structure of light, and that is the end of the story. But if we are in a group of people talking about cultivating an inner light to share with the world, and I say “Light is an electromagnetic wave,” then the group would give me dirty looks. This might frighten me, and I would say, “What? It’s true.” This would drive a wedge between me and the rest of the group, and they might ask me to leave.

Here is what just happened. If we look at the literal meanings of the words, “Light is an electromagnetic wave,” and, “What? It’s true,” we find a true story. Light is physically an electromagnetic wave, and it is indeed true. But the actions of these words, what I call their manifest meaning, is to say “I do not buy into your spiritual metaphor and neither should you,” and then, “You shouldn’t be upset, because I am not trying to get you to change your beliefs.” In the realm of actions, these true phrases are, in fact, deceitful.

If you think about it, we never say anything simply because it is true. There is always a reason behind what we say. I have never mentioned before that there is a large parasol in the yard outside my window, even though it is true. This is because I have never had a reason to bring it up. Even now the reason I am telling you about it is not because it is true (although it is), but because it illustrates the point of this blog post. The reason we say words is not because of their literal meaning, but because what we say and when and how we say it is an action.

In order to understand other people, we must not only look at the literal meanings of the words they say, but at the actions they are performing by saying them. If we get too caught up in the literal meanings of the words, we get confused and do not understand. This is true not only for others, but for ourselves as well. In the above example, the person who says “Light is an electromagnetic wave” does not understand their own actions, because they are fixated on the literal meanings of their words. The exchange is not about physics, it’s about personal growth and its effects on others.

So we see that for words to be true, they must not only be literally true, but manifestly true. Yet I would go even further and say manifest truth is more important than literal truth. There are times when what someone needs to hear is not what is true, but something motivational. For instance, if someone is going through a hard time, we can tell them, “Hang on, everything will be okay soon,” even if there is no sign of when things will be okay. Maybe it’s literally true, and maybe it’s not, we don’t know. But the manifest truth, “You don’t have to suffer as much if you think positively,” is. However, straight-up telling someone “You don’t have to suffer as much if you think positively” is not nearly as motivating, and for some people it has its own manifest meaning, “You are to blame for making yourself suffer.” This is obviously not the message we want to get across, so instead we say, “Hang on, everything will be okay soon.” Everybody knows this statement’s literal truth is uncertain, but it is still sometimes the right thing to say; its manifest meaning is true.

Knowledge is power, and with power comes responsibility. The positive value of recognizing words as actions is immense. It can help us understand and make peace with one another, especially regarding sensitive topics. But there are those who use manifest meaning to manipulate others for their own gain, and understanding the idea of manifest meaning helps us guard against their influence. In politics, manifest meaning is prioritized over literal meaning, no matter what party, no matter what country. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the current United States President, Donald Trump.

It is no secret that Trump spouts nonsense all the time. There’s no point beating around the bush; he does not care about literal truth, and everyone can see it as plainly as the Emperor’s New Clothes. Some people point to the nonsense he says and call him an idiot. But this interpretation is wrong, as evidenced by this one damning fact: Trump got elected President of the United states. You don’t bumble your way into that position. Trump’s ejaculations of the mouth may be nonsense when taken literally, but it all has the same manifest meaning: “Life is a status game, and I’m the winner.” If we interpret his words under this lens, it all clicks into place.

You may be wondering, what is the manifest meaning of this blog post? That, my dear reader, is the question you should ask anytime you read a text. In this case, it can be summed up in this simple idea: words are not just words, they are actions. They have effects and consequences, sometimes independent from their literal meanings. If we want to understand others and navigate through the maze of human communication, we must internalize this and practice speaking and interpreting in terms of manifest meaning rather than getting caught up in the endless, needless tangles of literal meanings. When we do, we will discover life to be so much clearer than it appeared before.

Vast Minds – A Bizarre Possibility of Physicalist Consciousness

Consciousness:

The Hard Problem

Dualism

Physicalism

Idealism

Identifying Consciousness
Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Disclaimer: The content of this blog post is outside the realm of current scientific knowledge. These ideas are meant as a fun exploration of possibilities, and should be taken with the same level of seriousness as life on other planets and alternate universes. 

Despite all of the revelations of science and philosophy, consciousness remains one of the universe’s most incredible mysteries. We have gone over several explanations of consciousness in this series, and in my judgment, physicalism fits best with the jigsaw puzzle of science. In particular, the version of physicalism that says consciousness is patterns of information in the brain. For this discussion, we will assume physicalism of this kind is true. (And remember, it has nothing to do with the q-word!)

Brains are made of neurons, a very simple machine. A neuron fires an electric pulse if it receives enough stimulus, and that’s it. But get enough of these simple machines together, and we get a system that exhibits conceptual models, self-awareness, free will, and consciousness.

If consciousness in the brain is a result of the collective information processes of neurons, then it stands to reason that if the same information processes happen in another system, such as a computer, that system will be conscious too; consciousness is substrate-independent. The unit of computation is the transistor, which behaves somewhat differently from a neuron, but wire enough transistors together and they can do anything a network of neurons can do. Thus, it should be possible to build a computer that is just as conscious as a human.

But here’s the question that comes to my mind: if we’re going to introduce the idea of substrate-independence to talk about conscious computer programs, why stop at computers? Drawing the line there seems just as arbitrary as drawing it at brains. A few adventurous thinkers extend the idea of substrate-independence to systems like billions of people standing in a field, raising flags or pulling levers. If these people can imitate the human connectome well enough, then this field of 80 billion people will be just as conscious as the human brain it is emulating.

So let’s be speculative pioneers and take this line of reasoning to its extreme conclusion. Let’s dispense with the idea of mimicking brains, and ask what kinds of sufficiently complex systems in general might be conscious? For instance, what about an ant colony?

Ants are not very smart creatures. For brains, they have only 250,000 neurons, which may not seem too shabby, but it is only .0003% of the 80 billion neurons humans have. These little brains can run programs to tell the ant where to find food, what task to perform, when to attack an enemy, and a number of other simple things like that. If an individual ant is conscious at all, its awareness is very limited, more of a mush of impressions and sensations than a thinking mind.

But what about the colony as a whole? The capacity for ants to build nests, gather resources, and wage wars is not in the individual ants, but in the collective actions of the colony. When ants come into contact with their sisters, they interact by sharing pheromones. This influences what each ant does next. The meeting between two ants is the unit of information sharing for the colony. Could the meetings of ants add up to information processing in such a way as to make the colony as a whole a conscious mind?

Ant colonies have between 500 and 10,000 ants. This is much less than the number of neurons an individual ant has. So it seems unlikely that an ant colony would be more conscious than an individual ant. But that conclusion is dramatic in itself; the very fact that known science does not dismiss outright the idea that an ant colony could be conscious if it had enough ants is mind-blowing!

Now that the door is open, let’s let ourselves loose and imagine the possibilities of consciousness in other collective systems. Perhaps the internet is conscious. After all, it is a network of sites and files and cookies and all that, which people and programs are constantly clicking through and changing. Perhaps the entire internet is one giant conscious mind, or maybe pockets of it are minds, like Facebook and YouTube.

What about more abstract things, like economies? The economy shares information through transactions, and every transaction influences future transactions and the overall state of the economy. Might an economy be conscious? Could our purchases, working hours, and business ventures contribute to the health and wellbeing of a living mind?

What about other complex systems? Might weather patterns be conscious? Ecosystems? In another discussion, we analogized ideologies, religions, and cultures as memetic organisms, propagating themselves through memetics rather than genetics. Might religions, ideologies, and cultures literally be alive and conscious?

It all seems absurd, and for all I know, the answer to all these questions is no. To the best of our knowledge, the only things in the universe that we can be certain are conscious are brains. But, consciousness is the least understood phenomenon known to science, and it may well be that once we understand it better, we start to find consciousness in all kinds of places we never expected.

Facts about Morality – How Small can We Make the Is-Ought Gap?

Some time ago, we talked about the is-ought gap, the idea that there will always be an unbridgeable logical gap between facts and moral duties. This is true, but that doesn’t stop us from turning the lens of fact onto morality, and seeing how close we can get.

To begin with, let’s step back to get a look at what morality is from an impersonal, objective point of view. Out of all the different views of morality there are, they have one thing in common: the idea that some things are better than others, that there are potential ways things should be and actions people should take, and there are potential ways things should not be and actions people should not take.

What determines what is judged to be good and what is judged to be bad? It starts with stimulus reaction and anticipation. Some things cause pain, and some things cause pleasure. We naturally recoil from pain and seek out pleasure. This is the beginnings of morality.

It is not the whole story, of course. We often abstain from pleasure or allow ourselves to suffer pain in the service of higher values. We might value order, justice, honor, or a clean mind, and make sacrifices in the realm of pleasure and pain to serve these values. The weight we give to each of our values determines our morality. In fact, we can think of the instincts surrounding pleasure and pain as values, and describe morality as the process of making choices and choosing rules for life based on our values. Values can be fluid; we might occasionally be able to choose our values, but most of the time they are influenced unconsciously, either by nature or by socialization.

It is not just our own circumstances that influence our values, but our capacity for empathy and compassion, to imagine what it is like to be in others’ shoes, and to want good things for them as well as for ourselves. There is a part of us that wants to do what is good for everyone, to make the world better, not just our own lives and actions. This is a double-edged sword, because although it can motivate us to help others, it can also make us think we know what is good for them better than they do, and to try to control their values and the choices they make.

On top of our values, we craft narratives. These can come in the forms of myths and stories, ideologies, philosophies, and religions. Narratives shape our values and help us remember them when the pleasure and pain stimuli become strong enough to make it hard to think. Compelling narratives for values different from ours can influence us to adjust our values in their direction.

The space of moralities is vast and varied. But despite all the variety of this moral landscape, the goal of all moral systems can be summed up in one statement: to make things good.

This is intentionally vague, because “good” means a lot of different things. Some say it’s happiness, others fulfillment, wellbeing, absence of misery, eudaimonia, or any number of similar concepts. In fact, as the philosopher G. E. Moore pointed out over a hundred years ago, it is impossible to define “good” as any specific thing. But in this context, we observe that any time a person looks at themself and the way things are and the way things will be, and says, “this is good,” they all share the same core idea: to be satisfied with one’s life and the world.

Despite “good” meaning different things to different people, it is the goal of all morality. Thus, we can take all conceptions of goodness and all measures according to all people, and indeed all conscious creatures, and add them together to make a “total goodness.” For any event, action, circumstance, etc., there is an objective level of total goodness, determined by the aggregate of its subjective, individual goodness to every person and conscious creature. This is messy and complex and always changing, but it does, in fact, exist.

And here lies the question. Can we say it is an objective, factual moral imperative that we ought to aim to increase total goodness? Well . . . No. Because we run into the is-ought gap. Even though the total goodness of something is an objective fact, that does not mean it is a fact that we ought to work toward increasing the total goodness. There is still an unbridgeable gap in the logic.

Any passage between is and ought requires a leap of faith. But the more descriptive facts about morality we take into consideration, the smaller the leap required. To me, the leap from the fact that there is such a thing as total good to the opinion that we ought to work toward increasing the total good, is small. Not even a leap, really, just a step. I am willing to take that step, and I invite you to take it with me. Let’s make this world a better place.

God, the Personification of Our Relationship with Existence

When I was growing up, I believed God existed. This God was a superhero, and his powers were to know everything, to manipulate reality with his thoughts, and to be perfectly good in all ways. As I learned science and contemplated philosophy, I came to realize that such a superhero does not exist. For me, that was sufficient to start calling myself an atheist. However, I remain open to non-physical, naturalism-compatible interpretations of God, such as an archetype, the impersonal, unconscious principle that separates what exists from what does not exist, or today’s topic, a hypothetical person who knows and understands everything.

As human beings, we struggle with existence. We strive to understand our place in it, how we relate to those around us, to the world, and to the universe. When difficult times happen, we want to know why. As individuals, there is so much we don’t know; most of this world is beyond our comprehension, not to mention the rest of the universe. This can be absolutely terrifying, as is captured by the fictional genre of cosmic horror. But we can find relief from this fear by imagining that there is a person who knows and understands it all, and whom we can talk to and get advice and comfort from: a God.

Of the many ways we conceptualize God, one of them is as a friend, a mentor, or even a parent. We imagine God as a person with us, who has our best intentions in mind and understands and fully appreciates the world both as it is and as it could be, who understands the whole picture and our place within it. When we talk to this God, either by words or thoughts, we call it prayer. We act as though this God is with us always, seeing our thoughts and emotions without judgment or bias, and when we are tempted to do something we feel isn’t right, thinking of how God would see the situation helps us to follow our conscience.

Some atheists criticize this version of God for being nothing more than an imaginary friend. But “imaginary friend” has childish implications, and it comes across as an insult rather than a criticism. God is much more than an imaginary friend; he is an archetype, a mythological figure with the qualities of knowledge, compassion, and empathy taken to infinite extremes.

Believers will also bristle at the word, “imaginary,” since it has connotations of being made-up and arbitrary. But archetypes are not arbitrary; they are the personification of profound things. In my mind, God is not real, because a thing is only real if it is real in the same way as matter and light and space and time; that is, physical. But archetypes are discovered, not invented, and for some people that is enough to call them real despite being non-physical. Thus, an argument here would be pedantic.

This version of God is not specific to any religion. Archetypes do not depend on the narratives in which they are expressed. My favorite short story is “The Egg,” by science fiction author Andy Weir, where the main character dies and has a conversation with this version of God about humanity and its purpose.

Despite calling myself an atheist and having a lot of issues with religions, I still sometimes act as though I am sharing my experiences with a God, and I still pray from time to time. I am not ashamed of this, nor do I see it as being inconsistent. Because what ultimately matters is not beliefs, but actions and their consequences, and sometimes acting in a spiritual or religious way helps us cope with the difficulties of life, appreciate the good things, and find the meaning in existence. This view is called Spiritual Naturalism. Like all great mythology and fiction, God does not have to exist in order to be significant.

The Barrier – A Short Story

This is a work of fiction. Characters, events, locales, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The Barrier

by Christian Horst

At the end of a canyon lies a town, and all who live there share in abundance and joy. There is no way to the town but through a canyon, and the canyon walls cannot be climbed. My tribe has journeyed far to reach the town, as have many others from all over the land.

Before us stands a great vertical surface, stretching from wall to wall and high into the air. It is transparent like tinted glass, darkening the view of the other side. I wonder about it, but no one else seems to mind, walking through it as if it isn’t there. When I reach it I pause in curiosity. What is this boundary, and why is it here? I reach out my hand and touch it, and find it solid as a wall of plastic.

“Hey.” One of the elders of the tribe calls my name. “You going to stand there all day? Come on.” He passes by me and walks through the barrier.

Confused, I feel around on the area of barrier he just walked through. It is as solid as the rest.

He turns around. “Why are you just standing there? Get a move on.”

I raise my eyebrows and knock on the barrier. The hollow sound echoes through the canyon.

The elder steps toward me and says my name. “Don’t be difficult.”

I throw up my hands. “What am I supposed to do?”

He looks at me for a long moment, and then turns around and says, “If you won’t come, then we’ll move on without you.”

He steps forward, and the rest of the tribe follows, walking around me, passing through the barrier as if it doesn’t exist. I stare after them, tongue-tied at the elder’s casual cruelty, and the ease at which the other tribe members follow his lead. The last member passes by, looks at me, and keeps walking forward. I am left standing alone.

“Hey,” a woman’s voice says. I turn to see a beautiful woman standing nearby, a stranger, smiling at me. She holds out her hand and introduces herself. I shake it and give her my name in turn. “I’m going to the town,” she says. “Want to walk together?”

“I’d love to,” I reply, “but I’m having trouble getting through here.”

“What do you mean?” She asks.

I pat the barrier. She continues to look at me with questioning eyes. “I mean I can’t get through,” I say slowly. “I don’t understand what’s confusing about that.”

“Well,” she says, “I guess if you’re not going, then it was nice to meet you.” She walks through the barrier.

“Wait,” I say, “I’m going, I just can’t get through the barrier.”

She turns around and looks at me. “What barrier?”

I narrow my eyes at her. “What do you mean, what barrier?” I say, hitting it several times with my hand. “The one you just walked through? The one that’s about as easy to miss as the color of the sky?”

She frowns at me. “Look, maybe we’ll meet again in town.” She turns and walks away.

“Wh—” I say, holding up a hand. But she recedes into the distance without looking back.

It suddenly dawns on me what the difficulties I’m having with communication must be. Not only are other people unhindered by the barrier, but they can also neither see nor hear it. It appears that this barrier, as incredible as it may be, only exists for me.

Determined to find a way through, I search the barrier from one wall of the canyon to the other, from the ground to as high as I can reach. Every inch feels as solid as the rest. After a second time through, and a third, I sit down on the ground, exhausted. All around me, strangers continue to walk through the barrier, completely unaware of its existence.

I fall asleep on the grass. When I awaken the next morning, I lie there, staring at the barrier, trying and failing to think of any options for attempting to get past it.

In the corner of my eye, I see a man walking by wearing a psychologist’s uniform. With a spark of hope, I sit up and call out to him. “Hey, can I ask for your help?”

The man sees me and smiles. “Sure,” he says, “what can I do for you?”

“There’s this barrier preventing me from going forward,” I say. “No one else seems to be able to see it.” I tell him about what happened to me yesterday.

“I see,” the psychologist says. “It sounds like you’ve had some failures, and you’re discouraged by them.”

I look down for a moment, thinking. “Yeah,” I say, meeting his eyes again. “I guess that’s true.”

“Well then, if you’re willing to work with me, I’ll have you back on your way toward town in no time.”

I smile and stand up. “All right!” I say. “What do I have to do?”

The psychologist beams. “Great job! That’s the first step down with flying colors! Now, repeat after me. ‘I am not a failure.’”

“I am not a failure,” I say.

“Good. Now say, ‘I have what it takes to succeed.’”

“I have what it takes to succeed.”

“Head high, back straight! ‘I am worthy of success.’”

Enthusiasm boils up within me. “I am worthy of success.”

“‘I am worthy of esteem.’”

“I am worthy of esteem.”

I continue repeating after him, saying things like, “People like to be around me,” and, “I belong in town.” By the time we finish, I am full of vigor, shouting the lines with all the energy I have.

“Awesome!” the man says, clapping me on the back. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? I’ll see you in town.” And without another word, he strolls off.

I hold out my hand, pressing on the barrier. “B-but . . .” He is too far away and doesn’t hear me. I mutter, “But what about the barrier?”

I rap my knuckles against the barrier. It’s still as solid as ever. I wrack my brain, trying to think of where I went wrong, of what I could have said to make the psychologist understand my problem instead of assuming it was in my head.

Maybe he did understand it. Since nobody else can see the barrier, maybe it really is in my head after all. Maybe all I need to do to get it to stop blocking my path is to stop letting it. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. There is no barrier. I am just like everyone else. On my way to town, where there is food and celebration and friendship. There is nothing in my way. I confidently start forward on my journey.

Pain explodes through my nose and forehead, and then my rear. In a daze, I open my eyes to find myself sitting on the ground, the barrier looming above me, dark and solid as ever.

Reality is a bitch. I groan through gritted teeth, and sorely lift myself back to my feet.

Several voices call my name. I turn around to see around ten of my friends coming my way. I sigh, and smile at them. They approach me. “We’re going to town. Come with us!”

“I would like to more than anything,” I say, “but there is a barrier preventing me from moving forward. It seems to only affect me. Look.” I lean against the barrier in such a way that without it, gravity would pull me to the ground.

“Huh,” one of the men says. “That’s weird.”

A woman points and says, “Have you tried going that way?”

I follow her finger to a path in the side of the canyon. Its entrance is on the other side of the barrier. I shake my head. “I can’t reach it.”

“Oh.”

They stay with me for a while, talking and laughing. For a time, I can forget the barrier and the town, and enjoy the company of these wonderful people. But eventually things start to wind down, and they decide to move on.

“We hope you can join us in town soon,” one of them says.

“If it takes a long time, we’ll come visit,” another says. “And you can give us a call anytime you need someone to talk to.” She points to a phone on a small table . . . which is on the other side of the barrier. “See you.” They turn and leave.

I smile sadly and wave. “Bye.”

Others pass me as the days go by. Most ignore me. Some give me dirty looks or shake their heads while pretending not to notice me. Some are kind and believe me, and I can see in the eyes of a few that they have barriers of their own. But I can’t see theirs, and none of them can see mine. Some come back from town to visit me from time to time. They brainstorm ideas with me, or talk about the joys and struggles of town life. I treasure their support. But I learn that I am the only one who can understand my barrier. I am the only one who has a chance at finding a way through.

There is one thing that gives me hope. When I press my thumb hard into the barrier, so much that it starts to hurt, it leaves an indent, which takes about a minute to smooth over again. With no other options, I press hard. Then, I push on the lip of the indent, widening it.

It is a long, tedious task. I have to keep applying pressure to the whole area, lest it rebound and force me to start over from the beginning. I keep pressing until the skin of my thumbs is raw and I start to bleed from beneath my nails. Then I switch over to my knuckles and push with them until they are skinned and my joints throb. Still I keep pushing, hoping that if I push enough, the barrier will tear and I will be able to open a hole big enough to crawl through. I don’t know if that is possible, but there is nothing I can do but try.

People continue to pass by me. Most don’t understand. They don’t see the effort I’m making. A few call me lazy, and tell me that if I refuse to move forward, I don’t deserve to live in the town. I ignore them and keep pushing. They were lucky enough not to have barriers, and because of that, they have the luxury to believe that the world is fair.

As I lean my shoulder to rest against the area I have been pushing on, I notice that others are struggling too. Some lean forward, as if pushed back by a strong wind. Some lift their feet with effort, as if crushed under a great weight. And I realize there is so much more going on, a whole world of struggles and barriers that most people never notice.

At the moment, I don’t have energy to put into anything but my own efforts to get to the town. But somewhere in the back of my mind, a seed is planted, and I think that maybe, once I reach the town, I might devote a portion of the happiness and energy I receive there to helping others through their invisible barriers.