Rather Suspect

The de-cluttering starts straightaway, everything put in its place. I walk through the neighborhood to get my morning coffee and my mind tells me: this is a crosswalk. This is a stop sign. That is the sidewalk. That is the curb.

It keeps going, with each moment collecting more-and-more. That is a tree. Those are leaves. Those leaves are red-orange today. Autumn.

This is a car, a car parked in a driveway. The driveway is on a slope, the slope is needed for the house to function. This is a house, those are windows. That type of window is called a Bay window.

And on. And on. And on. The machinery whirrs and it’s good that it does I suppose. But how much clutter is enough clutter? How many more things must my mind learn, sort, categorize — into how many groups, how many slots, how many places?

But when I feel your fingertips on mine I do not think: those are fingertips. That is a hand. That is skin.

I think only: the stars above are here for us, and always will be.

Last night the moon rose, as she does, casting her flashlight about. What did she find I wonder? Most everyone asleep apart from the lovers in their car, looking over the silver-black water from their perch on the hilltop. No doubt the lovers think the moon shines just for them and of course they are right, for more than any of the celestial gods Luna exists in that gap between dreams and awakening, between faith and belief.

Do you not place importance on your dreams? Is your arrogance such that you feel the moon has nothing to teach? Careful that. What appears to be true in the daylight often shows up quite differently in the shadows.

Luna’s shadows are ever changing, each night twisting slightly, and if you wish to know her power you need only observe the tide. She lifts entire oceans such is her strength. Think for a moment of the whale hundreds of feet beneath the surface; even he can feel her hand lifting his massive body.

It is difficult sometimes to see those shadows. For one, of course you have to be awake when others are not. So a certain discipline is needed, a willingness to step out into the night alone. But she will shine her light on you as well if you allow it, and you should. Look to her, through the darkened trees, and then to the ground. Examine the shadow you cast, take it in. Take that shadow inside with you and invite it into your dreams. And see now what she can teach you.

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Listen. Yes, we sent you there for a purpose. We placed you on a small blue dot of a planet, wiped your memory, made it so that you had to learn everything from scratch. The first two or three years you had no awareness but then you started to build that part of you: the memory-creating part.

And since then, interestingly, that’s all that you’ve done: created memory after memory. So much so that you had to invent an entire physics so that you could explain these memories to yourself. You made grand leaps, constructed an entire fictional god you called Time, and then rationalized it to yourself using those same memories. You told yourself those who came “before” you (as if that idea alone made any sense) had other, lesser gods, primitive gods. Zeus, Thor, Yahweh — you say now these were ways others constructed explanations for things they couldn’t understand.

You say, Now (another invention, another god), that you have no need for a god, because you’ve found Science. But, tell me, how fulfilling is it? Does it bring you peace when you awake with a start in the middle of the night?

You say, the point of life is to live it. Based upon what, may we ask? How is it that your preoccupation with constructing memories entitles you to claim you know the “point” of anything?

But we share this with you not out of any anger or spite. How could we ask any more of you, given what we’ve done? You will learn. You will stop focusing so intently upon making memories, and when you do your Time will hold less power over you, just as Science did, in fact, help you fear thunder less when it replaced Thor.

Fear drives all this, and we wished there had been a better way. And there will be. But at this stage in your development Fear is the strongest guide, the loudest. So it is often best to turn towards Fear, something you know.

Many of you try to avoid that fact, spending your precious “Time” (how is it you made a god that is also a currency is something we wish you would reflect more upon) on things like looking at photos of what others are doing and inventing devices so you can do more of this. And then, strangely, you elevate this to something you call “living” when you do something that is photo-worthy.

All well and good of course, it’s the path you’ve chosen. Again, yes, we did place you there, and yes, there was a reason. But the mechanism for how you exist there we didn’t plan, and how could we? You aren’t a machine. You could argue that you have no agency, but it isn’t true. You do have it, you just haven’t discovered it yet. Along they way you have found, and will find, false agencies. But these will never satisfy.

Why this message to you? Only because your allegiance to your holy Time has many of us concerned. Not all, mind you — many of us believe it is no more worrying than any other fictions you’ve created. But a few of us have raised objections that are at least somewhat compelling.

So, we shall try to say this in a way you might understand. Let go of your so-called memories and, when you do so, be alert and aware to what may fill the void. You will feel Fear. Listen to what it is telling you.

To answer this question, I think we need to ask an even more basic one: was the internet a good idea?

Most of the time it seems the response to this is: of course! Look at how wonderful it is to have all that information at your fingertips!

But the problem to me is that phrase: all that information.

Having a system like Google Maps provide you directions is amazing. Being able to read up on any topic on Wikipedia is incredible. And watching a YouTube video of a plumber replacing a faucet is no doubt helpful to thousands.

But the trouble is, because the internet is about all that information, we also get trolls, and flame wars, and good old propaganda — every hour of every day.

So what does this have to do with the Metaverse? Simply that it raises a question: is the intent to continue to push all that information through that system as well? If so — what will stop it from being yet another propaganda machine?

My belief — and perhaps I have become a Luddite in saying this — is that we need to ask some more fundamental questions here about all of our communication technologies. They are powerful, yes — but whom are we serving when we create these technologies? And to what end? “Some information is good, so clearly more is better” simply doesn’t hold water.

How about instead of a Metaverse we create instead a MinimalVerse? A LessVerse? A SimpleVerse? Provide me an experience in which everything I touch feels rich and fulfilling and perhaps there is hope.

Over the years my perspective on ambition has changed dramatically. When I was very young, I saw ambition not just as positive but central to a good life. To live is to achieve, to achieve is to live. My simple view was that there was a giant ledger of accomplishments somewhere and the goal was to put something significant into that ledger: a scientific discovery, a work of art, a breakthrough novel, a thriving business.

My heroes were always those who had done something significant, whether a Greek philosopher from millennia ago or an inventor who had just created something new.

But over time — years, decades — I began to question the cult of ambition. If we don’t know why any of us are here, and we don’t have a clear understanding of life’s purpose, why should it be that “achieving” anything is somehow a positive? One person exists and invents the radio, another writes a novel, and a third simply walks through life and appreciates it — which life is the most valuable?

That said, it feels strange to envision a life with no achievement. But is that simply a cultural value I’ve inherited — encouraged, no doubt, by our caplitalistic economic system? If you exist, you must “create value” somewhere, for someone — else, how can we decide what to pay you?

But rather than simply punt today with the statement “ambition is suspect,” I would like to offer an alternative. That is, rather than focus on “achieving,” perhaps there might be value in setting a goal as “healing.”

Obviously there is a degree of hubris in that statement as well — does “healing” imply that (a) something is somehow unwell and (b) we can make the distinction between what is unwell and what is well?

Maybe — it is possible I’m simply (erroneously) trying to recast ambition in a nicer light. But it does seem to be true that as humans we are wired to recognize suffering, and that there would appear to be an abundance of it. And — more hubris here — perhaps if we were to orient not around “creating” but “healing” — we might find some degree of peace at both an individual and collective level.

This might be too simplistic but to me healing generally implies “gentle nudges” to help things go where they mean to go in the first place, rather than grand, sweeping gestures. A forest on the edge of a lake can likely do just fine by itself, but should a fire break out it’s possible that afterwards clearing a bit of brush and some fallen trees might allow for the forest to rebound. Perhaps not, but it might be preferable to clearing the forest and building a resort.

But does this remove our ability to do those “big” things like discover relativity or invent the iPhone? Perhaps. Or — perhaps — if we asked each time we set out on something new what we are healing by doing so, we might be less likely to embark on clear acts of folly (launching wars, designing weapons, destroying the planet for trivial financial gains) and at least orient our ambition in a more positive direction.

Ambition can still exist, but not as a first-order goal. Instead, it is a tool, in service to something higher. Ambition in service to healing.

In a terrific essay earlier this month entitled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, Jonathan Haidt writes how social media has led us to “the fragmentation of everything.”

Haidt writes:

Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

He continues:

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

The past ten years have been marked by intense fragmentation and polarization throughout out culture — with the culmination (thus far) of course being the election of a president whose singular focus was of course the key to every viral post: cultivating outrage.

Haidt does an excellent job of describing they why of how we got here, but he is somewhat less effective at describing solutions. He puts forth three worthwhile but pretty vague solutions: harden democratic institutions, reform social media, and prepare the next generation.

These are all well and good, but the question I would propose is: is it even possible to “reform” media platforms which are explicitly designed to amplify the most provocative content, regardless of its basis in fact? Or are we facing a point in which the existing platforms will need to fall, with a new model in its place?

I believe the most likely scenario is the latter. The trouble is, what are the steps that need to occur before that transition to take place? There are, of course, so many people with so much invested in making sure the existing platforms continue — and so the goliath will not fall easily. Then again, history has shown that the lifespan of both companies and products (especially in the tech sector) tends to shorten with each generation. From RCA to Atari to AOL to MySpace to Yahoo, time and again high-flyers tend to be brought down more quickly than one would typically think.

But what would it take for that to occur? Presumably there would need to be demand for a platform that isn’t based on outrage — but yet is more compelling. Are there any examples of that in the world?

Physicists and philosophers sometimes speak about the “arrow of time” — this strange aspect of time in which it continues to move, and in only one direction. In my understanding, this is generally believed to be related to the increase in universal entropy.

In my last post, I spoke about how using spatial words (like understand) to describe time feels limiting. Today, I’d like to extend that just a bit and say that using a linear word would seem to be equally limiting.

That is, visualizing that we are somehow on a straight path that is moving in a particular direction — the past “behind” us, the future “ahead” — to my mind still allows us to fall into the trap of spatializing the idea of time. We even then go so far to speculate whether time travel is possible by bending time — as if the plan were to simply change the shape of that arrow.

But today I’d like to briefly explore a different mental model for time — instead of a straight arrow, would it be better to think of it as a rotation? Imagine our entire three-dimensional (spatial) universe existing as it always does — but instead of that universe somehow traveling along on a straight arrow, in fact we simply stand at the center and rotate that universe around us? There is perhaps still an “arrow” — but it is a curved arrow, already (and continuously) bending.

I often find language curious — and to that end I want to remark today on a single word: moment. We so often refer to a “moment” in time as an “instant” — but, in physics, the concept of a moment has a very specific meaning, which I’ll paraphrase as: a force or system of forces may cause an object to turn.

How curious that our language should evolve such that we use the word “moment” in our day-to-day to talk about time, but yet ignore the fact that we’ve also used it to describe a rotation.

In 1949, philosopher Jean Gebser published the first edition of a profound work, The Ever-Present Origin. In this book Gebser proposes that, just like biological processes, consciousness has evolved (or, in his words, mutated) — and it continues to do so. Through a deep survey that cuts across the arts, science, painting, writing, archeology, and so much more, Gebser posits that consciousness has (and continues to) “gain dimensionality.” As consciousness mutates from the archaic, to the magical, to the mythical, to the mental, and (now) to the integral — consciousness is able to incorporate more information into itself.

So, for me this begs the question: what will it take for consciousness to deeply incorporate time into itself? Or — to put it in a simpler and more direct format — what does it take for us to deeply understand time?

Newton brilliantly added to humanity’s body of knowledge by engaging with the concept of the infinitesimal, while Einstein introduced the concept of relativity. Both greatly advanced our understanding of this slippery concept we call time — but today I’d like to propose that there may be a different way to explore this concept altogether.

What does it mean to “understand” time? Rather than focus on the concept of time in that question, let’s take a step back and look at a different word: understanding. We think of “understanding” as a concept based in knowledge — to “understand” something is to “perceive the meaning or intent” of it. And, when we deeply understand something, perhaps it is easy for us to make predictions about what will happen next. For example, if you hand a giant ice cream cone to a three-year-old who is holding the leash of a Golden Retriever, I think many of us can predict what’s going to happen next. We “understand” the situation pretty deeply.

But if we look at the word “understand” more fully and break it down, it shows itself to be quite limiting. To “understand” something is, presumably, to “stand under” it. Perhaps we can think of that word as us “constructing a platform” upon which we may place our new knowledge. If we’ve seen, on perhaps a few occasions, an over-zealous dog eat an ice cream out of a three-year-old’s hands, and then seen that same three-year-old burst into tears, we (internally) have that “platform” upon which we can interpret this scene when we next encounter it.

But look at these words I’m using to describe this incorporation of knowledge. “Stand under.” “Construct a platform.” “Place upon.” What do these words all have in common? They are all spatial words.

“Let’s dive more deeply into that idea.” “I get where you’re coming from.” “Let’s go ahead and connect the dots.” “We’re going to need to revisit that concept.” “Thanks for sharing that, I really need to take that in.”

The words and phrases we use to talk about knowledge are the exact same words we use to talk about space. These words suggest — perhaps — that our current mental framework is most comfortable “fitting” (again, another spatial word) new concepts into a spatial framework.

You might even be asking yourself as you read this. “Where do I put this new information?”

Clearly, not every knowledge-related word we use is spatial. But it does seem reasonable that there is a spectrum. Were I to draw an axis with words and phrases like “vague ideas” and “fuzzy thoughts” on the left side of the page, and “deep understanding” and “solid knowledge” on the right side of the page — I wonder if it’s likely that the more we “understand” something, the more spatial it becomes?

Which returns us to the concept of Time — and to Gebser. If we wish to “understand” Time, that means we must find a way to describe Time in terms of Space. This is exactly what Newton and Einstein did, of course, and thus these ideas felt like the “breakthroughs” they are. (Note the spatial nuance even of that word: breaking through.)

But one might ask the question: is Time something that can be understood, fully, inside a spatial construct?

To explore that, let’s jump to another metaphor for just a moment. Pretend there is a room with a security camera inside it (but no microphone), and you are a physicist sitting at a desk monitoring the screen showing what is transpiring in that room. In the morning, five painters enter the room with canvases, and you watch them create beautiful landscapes. At the noon hour, five gymnasts enter the room and put on an amazing floor routine. In the early evening, a set of bugle players enter the room and play Taps.

At the end of the day, someone asks you to describe what you saw. What would you say? Perhaps something like the following. “In the morning, five painters created some beautiful scenes. In the mid-day, five gymnasts performed some beautiful and athletic feats. And in the evening, five individuals came in, held a metal device to their mouths, and stood motionless for a minute before leaving the room.”

The point is: because your security camera does not pick up sound, the only way you can describe that scene is using the visual tools you have available to you. You are not wrong in your description — but you are fundamentally missing nearly everything that is going on in that room at the end of the day.

If our internal “knowledge” tools are overwhelmingly spatial — and it turns out that time is as well — then it is entirely appropriate to talk of “understanding” time. But what if time isn’t like space at all? What if, in the above metaphor, time is more like sound, more like music, more like Taps? Then our internal knowledge tools — not the tools we use to measure time, but to even think or talk about it — are insufficient to describe what’s going on.

Gebser called this level of consciousness the mental. We might also call that logical. But my question for today is, is this more accurately called, simply, spatial?

And if so — and if there are concepts that fundamentally are not spatial — then the idea of “understanding” something like time might not just be hard. It might be impossible. Because to do so is like trying to describe a set of bugle players using only a security camera.

In my last post, I proposed that consciousness is a second-order entity: it’s awareness about awareness.

Second-order entities are funny things because they tend to feel quite similar to first-order entities. For example, when one dog encounters another it doesn’t know, it will often instinctively growl and bare its teeth. It feels a first-order emotion — fear — and it responds instinctively. When the other dog shows itself to be friendly, most dogs will quickly “shake it off” and the fearful emotion is fully processed.

Many humans of course feel fear when they encounter a strange dog on the street as well. But a number of humans also often experience a second-order emotion: anxiety. A human might think about having to walk past a dog park tomorrow to get to work, and they may fear the large Doberman they see there each day. However, at 9pm on a Sunday night while sitting on their couch, it isn’t that they are fearing that Doberman directly. It’s that they fear the fear they expect they are going to feel tomorrow morning. In this way, anxiety is a “second-order” emotion — it’s fear about fear.

What does this have to do with consciousness? If we consider consciousness as a second-order emotion, it’s interesting to explore what emerges simply by making this distinction.

First — awareness about awareness gives rise to a very peculiar entity: Self. Think about it this way. A dog encounters a chihuahua and, simply because it’s a strange dog, initially feels fear. We humans might do the same at first but then, when we realize the tiny stature of the chihuahua, feel embarrassed (at ourselves) for feeling that fear. Or perhaps a dog feels enjoyment at having a treat. We humans feel enjoyment in going out for a nice meal at a restaurant, and then we feel smug (and self-confident) that we earned enough money to treat ourselves to such a feast.

In the first example, that second-order feeling gave rise to self-loathing, where in the second example, it gave rise to self-confidence. In both cases, the feeling about feeling gave rise to the Self.

But there is a second emergent property in this “second-order” processing that is perhaps even more surprising. For a feeling to be a second-order feeling — and not simply a longer version of an initial feeling — there needs to be a “gap” between the two feelings. That is, there needs to be the “object” (the first feeling) that the “subject” (the second feeling) can act upon. But if those two feelings are of the same type — for example, fear about fear or enjoyment about enjoyment — then what constitutes that gap? And the answer is: it’s a gap that we create. And we name that gap Time.

And thus, what is consciousness? Nothing more than a second-order informational- (or perhaps emotional-) processing system that, because it is second-order, creates two emergent properties called Self and Time.

It becomes immediately apparent this must be the case when we examine the relationship we inherently feel between these two properties. If we become unaware of Time (as, for example, when we sleep) — we have no concept of our Self and we (intuitively) label this state as being unconscious. Alternatively, when we “lose track of time” we often describe that state as “being in the flow” — and our concept of Self tends to fade into the background when that happens.

Awareness — like fear — is a first-order feeling. But consciousness — like anxiety — is a second-order feeling, And just as anxiety “feels like” fear (but is, in fact, quite different), so too might consciousness “feel like” awareness.

And yet, not only is it not the same — it’s so different it literally is the act through which we construct Self and Time.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.

He says.

Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.

So writes Kurt Vonnegut to introduce chapter two of Slaughterhouse Five. This section seems as good as any to spend a bit of time exploring the unique relationship between awareness and consciousness, two concepts I think about frequently.

It seems we could, imperfectly and in a backwards fashion, define consciousness as, simply, second-order awareness. That is, consciousness is “awareness about awareness.” If we are standing on a mountaintop in Yosemite, breathing in the cool mountain air, surveying the limitless blue sky above, we might feel “aware” of our surroundings. We exist — fully — in that moment.

But if we then reflect upon our awareness — if give some thought to the seven-mile journey it took for us to ascend the mountain, the supplies we needed to pack, the plans we needed to make in the weeks leading up to the trip — we might also feel (perhaps) proud of what we’ve accomplished.

The “in the moment” feeling of expansiveness is awareness. The “awareness of our awareness” — the feeling of pride — is consciousness.

What is the distinction? Awareness is fixed — there is a singular “origin” point from which one might be aware. Consciousness, however, is the act of picking a different origin point from which one can observe one’s surroundings.

Awareness is the view from the Self. Consciousness is the view of the Self. To “become aware” is simply to open one’s eyes. To “become conscious” is to choose to observe that scene from another’s eyes, another perspective.

For some reason, humans seem to handle consciousness in the dimension of space quite well. We can sit on the couch looking at the armchair across the room and it is not at all difficult to imagine how the room might look were we sitting in that chair instead. We can imagine lying on the floor looking up, or being a fly on the ceiling looking down.

Changing our perspectives — our origin points from which to observe — comes quite naturally when it comes to the spatial dimensions. And because this is so natural, it’s easy for us to be conscious of our surroundings and yet (for many of us) to lack awareness. We often become absent-minded professors, observing the world from every vantage point but the one our bodies inhabit.

The situation seems to be reversed when we try to do the same in the dimension of time. When it comes to time, we always observe the universe from “now,” a singular origin point we label the present. We have awareness in the temporal dimension — we can see the sunlight streaming through the window right now — but we seem to struggle when it comes to becoming conscious in this dimension. That is, we find it difficult to shift our origin point. How did that sunlight look three days ago? What will that sunlight look like in two-hundred years?

We sometimes can vaguely imagine how our ancestors might have lived, but to “bring that memory to life” we rely on spatial artifacts, like photos, stories, or antiques. We convert our temporal awareness into spatial awareness so that we can become spatially conscious of it. In other words, we don’t really know how to become conscious in time so we make the transformation in order to become conscious in space.

For Billy Pilgrim to “become unstuck in time” doesn’t mean “things just happen out of order.” It means he is aware of his awareness — he is conscious not only in the spatial dimensions but in the temporal ones too. He has become conscious of time in the sense that he is aware there are multiple temporal origin points from which he may observe. He can, in fact, “see” the sunlight both now, and three days ago, and in two hundred years. Unlike the rest of us who are still “stuck in time” and can only imagine that sunlight existing “now” or not existing, he is literally aware of that sunlight from multiple origin points throughout the temporal dimension. It’s not that the sunlight exists “only now” and then disappears. It’s that there are multiple temporal vantage points from which to observe it.

Why should it be that it’s so much easier for us to shift our perspectives in space than in time?