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.