Category: Life Page 2 of 4

Lately, not much has been happening. Well, not much in terms of career progression and projects. My family did experience several health situations that delayed a lot of things I wanted to do.

The toddler is doing well enough. Things are going again. Though, I’m still worried about various things.

Life goes on. I still don’t know what I’m doing. Still trying to live my values, even though I often wonder to what extent I’ve compromised to try to live a good life, instead of being a saint and serving the just cause as I sometimes think I should.

The reality of things is that I’m just a Joseph. I’m not special. Chances are I won’t make a significant impact, good or bad, positive or negative. I can push weakly in the direction of a better world in very small ways, but it will mostly matter only to those few that actually seem to care that I even exist.

For them, I’m still going.

My moral stance nowadays is that if it matters to anyone anywhere, it matters, and what matters in the universe, is just the aggregate of all these cares and concerns. The greatest good is made of the desires and dreams of everyone, without exception.

I’ve realized at some point that most people don’t seem to care intrinsically about the well-being and happiness of others. They may follow some rules that they should care, but most don’t do it because they actually, deeply care. I don’t know why I care. Why should I care about the happiness of a stranger? Why am I so strange?

People likely don’t believe I care. I used to try to hide it, because it was too easy to take advantage of me otherwise. Now, I don’t care about hiding it so much. I just do what I think is right, when I can. But at the same time, I don’t know if what I’m doing is actually right, or just what I delude myself into thinking.

I sometimes imagine that there are things happening at multiple levels beyond comprehension. Like time travellers and aliens are fighting a war across the multiverse. But in reality, why would I matter at all in something like that? So, it’s probably more delusion and hubris.

There’s a joke about the priest and the helicopter. Once, there was a flood, and a priest was stuck on a rooftop waiting for help from God. A boat appeared and the rescuers offered to help the priest. He said no, he’d wait for God to save him. Then, later, another boat, and another rejection. Then a helicopter appeared with people who could save him, but the priest, in faith, chose to wait for God. Eventually the floodwaters rose and he drowned.

Later, when the priest was in heaven with God, he asked why he wasn’t saved. God replied: “What do you mean? I sent two boats and a helicopter!”

Sometimes I think, if time travellers were real, they’d be the helicopter.

But of course, time travel is probably physically impossible, or cannot actually change the past, but only make things happen as they were, or create a new timeline, leaving the old one untouched. Those are the ways you avoid impossible paradoxes.

If such things were real, it would have nothing to do with me. They could erase memories and create local reality bubbles or whatever. They could be completely invisible, plausibly deniable. Just inconvenience you for two seconds at the door, and then you miss the car accident you would have had. And you’d have never known.

Same with aliens or simulators or anything else god-like in their technological power. You exist because they want you to, if they exist at all.

But my life seems very mundane, very pointless, full of frustrating, inconvenient bouts of mild suffering. I imagine I might exist just for the entertainment of some bored entity that just enjoys psychologically torturing nice guys who finish last.

I have no way to prove it. There’s still good things in the world. Nice moments. Beautiful music. It doesn’t really fit the narrative, the hypothesis.

More realistically, life is just a bunch of stuff that happens. We are particles dancing in chaos.

I want for things to matter. And yet…

The world continues to turn. We live and dream and hope and are disappointed, and then hope again, and the cycle continues.

Life goes on. The cost of taking risks is the potential for disappointment. There is no avoiding this. If you take no risks, you will never do anything, never hope, never fear. But such a life seems pretty empty.

So, we dream. We hope. We fear. We hope some more.

Someday, maybe, I’ll understand. Until then, I wander through meandering thoughts and foolish musings…

So, there’s that Simulation Argument that Nick Bostrom formalized a while back, and before that was considered by everything from The Matrix to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Bostrom’s argument specifically is that, assuming such technology is possible, and civilizations last long enough to make them, we are much more likely to be in one of countless ancestor simulations, than not.

It’s an interesting argument from probability. Some people take it surprisingly seriously, calling the average human an NPC and otherwise using it to justify otherwise questionable choices. Most people who discover the argument however, don’t really do anything about it, and probably for good reason.

The argument, even if true, doesn’t really tell us much. The simulators are an unknown factor, akin to God, but perhaps less certainly benevolent. Their intentions are inscrutable. We could be part of some scientific experiment, an experience machine for bored future people to live in the past, or any other of many possible alternative theories.

But, what does it matter? We can see from the degree of granularity that we ourselves are conscious and sentient. There’s nothing that suggests that other people aren’t also. There’s no evidence that sentient life isn’t actually sentient, though it might be convenient to simulate at lower fidelity.

So, in terms of happiness and suffering, these things are most likely still real, regardless of whether we’re in the ground truth universe or not. From a moral perspective, we still have responsibilities to other sentient beings, regardless of whether or not this is a simulation.

It’s possible that we’re alone in the simulation. But we cannot, realistically, find this out. We also, could, be in base reality. We really, really, don’t know. And that’s the thing. If we’re alone in a simulation and nothing really matters, then we can do whatever, but there’s a chance we aren’t, and for the sake of that chance, we should act as if our actions do have impact and matter.

So, at the end of the day, we go on our daily lives regardless of the Argument. It doesn’t change that, given what we seem to know about the universe, there is right and wrong and choices to be made and people to be considerate towards.

We can guess at what the hypothetical simulators want. We can try to hack the simulation. But chances are, it won’t work. Likely, they’ll just make us forget we were thinking about this, and the simulation continues.

Or maybe the world is real. In which case, it’s important to be who you are, and care about the things that you care about. Give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s really the only responsible thing to do.

When I was younger, I believed strongly in the idea of having dreams to aspire to. A part of this may have come from my English name, which is of a character from the Bible who had and could interpret dreams. So, the idea of dreams, either the ones when you sleep, or the wishes you want to achieve in your life, were both things I valued.

It went so far that I often ended up a sort of hopeless romantic, choosing to do what I felt sentimentally to be right, rather than what was necessarily rational or prudent. Often, I would let my emotions get the better of me, despite being normally fairly logical.

To some extent, this is encouraged in our culture. Movies and books have protagonists who chase their dreams and get what we, the audience, think they deserve. This is, in reality, something fed to us because it sells. The idea that we will all get what we think we rightfully deserve, this notion that the universe is just and fair, is something we hope to be true.

But the truth is, in so far as anyone can tell by the evidence of the actual universe, fate and chance happen to us all. Our aims are not always met. Hard work can be thwarted by bad luck. The forces of history conspire to overturn everything from time to time, often without rhyme or rhythm.

The reality is that most of us are not significant in the grand scheme of things. And the bigger our dreams, the bigger our almost certain disappointment.

That being said, I don’t think we should abandon our dreams. Dreams do serve a purpose. They act as a guide for our decisions. They point us in a direction that we consider worth going in. Chances are, we won’t reach our destination, but we’ll get somewhere closer than if we didn’t bother. And the journey will be more meaningful than if we simply took a random walk through the universe.

Nevertheless, there needs to be a balance between dreaming and being prudent. We can, in our foolishness, ignore the real opportunities in favour of a mirage. It takes wisdom to understand this, to recognize when to satisfice.

If we search vaguely for something optimal, we will never stop searching. Eventually, you have to decide what is acceptable to you.

This is what I eventually did with my life. I started a dreamer, chasing the impossible, but ended up finding an acceptable life to live. I did this because the alternative was to forever be unsatisfied, forever chasing the wind.

In truth, what I, deep down, really really want, is not something that I can realistically see happening. My trajectory simply fell way short. I did go further towards a good life than if I’d just meandered aimlessly, but I won’t pretend my life wasn’t full of disappointments.

The more you hope, the more you will be disappointed. The only way to avoid it is to expect nothing, which is probably worse for you in the long run. Disappointment is the cost of having dreams. I believe it’s something worth paying, and I won’t pretend dreams come free.

It is fun to dream, but sometimes, for the sake of actually doing something meaningful, you have to be realistic.

We like to imagine ourselves an important person, but actually, we’re much more likely to be the average person. You’ve never heard of them. They live a mundane, somewhat interesting life, but nothing that makes the news or the history books. They probably manage to keep a job and have a family and some friends. They do normal, human things.

People like me, find being an average person somewhat unsatisfying. But the reality is, we don’t have a choice in this. Most of the things that make people super special are also things completely outside of their control, those forces of history I mentioned earlier.

So, it’s pointless to be upset that your life is only so-so, especially if you’re a dreamer with absurdly high expectations. The reality is, we’re lucky to have what we do. And we should be grateful. The universe can take everything you have away from you in an instant. It is… capricious like that.

At the end of the day, I can’t stop dreaming completely. But I can understand the limits of reality, and not allow myself to be taken by foolish fancy. I can show prudence and wisdom, and act according to reason. This way, I can eke out a good, fruitful life. As long as I stay true to my values, this should be enough.

It’s something we tend to grow up always assuming is real. This reality, this universe that we see and hear around us, is always with us, ever present. But sometimes there are doubts.

There’s a thing in philosophy called the Simulation Argument. It posits that, given that our descendants will likely develop the technology to simulate reality someday, the odds are quite high that our apparent world is one of these simulations, rather than the original world. It’s a probabilistic argument, based on estimated odds of there being many such simulations.

A long time ago, I had an interesting experience. Back then, as a Christian, I wrestled with my faith and was at times mad at God for the apparent evil in this world. At one point, in a moment of anger, I took a pocket knife and made a gash in a world map on the wall of my bedroom. I then went on a camping trip, and overheard in the news that Russia had invaded Georgia. Upon returning, I found that the gash went straight through the border between Russia and Georgia. I’d made that gash exactly six days before the invasion.

Then there’s the memory I have of a “glitch in the Matrix”, so to speak. Many years ago, I was in a bad place mentally and emotionally, and I tried to open a second floor window to get out of a house that probably would have ended badly, were it not for a momentary change that caused the window, which had a crank to open, to suddenly become a solid frame with no crank or way to open. It happened for a split second. Just long enough for me to panic and throw my body against the frame, making such a racket as to attract the attention of someone who could stop me and calm me down.

I still remember this incident. At the time I thought it was some intervention by God or time travellers/aliens/simulators or some other benevolent higher power. Obviously I have nothing except my memory of this. There’s no real reason for you to believe my testimony. But it’s one reason among many why I believe the world is not as it seems.

Consider for a moment the case of the total solar eclipse. It’s a convenient thing to have occur, because it allowed Einstein to prove his Theory of Relativity in 1919 by looking at the gravitational lensing effect of the sun that is only visible during an eclipse. But total solar eclipses don’t have to be. They only happen because the sun is approximately 400 times the size and 400 times the distance from the Earth as the moon is. They are exactly the right ratio of size and distance for total solar eclipses to occur. Furthermore, due to gradual changes in orbit, this coincidence is only present for a cosmologically short time frame of a few hundred million years that happens to coincide with the development of human civilization.

Note that this coincidence is immune to the Anthropic Principle because it is not essential to human existence. It is merely a useful coincidence.

Another fun coincidence is the names of the arctic and antarctic. The arctic is named after the bear constellations of Ursa Major and Minor, which can be seen only from the northern hemisphere. Antarctic literally means opposite of arctic. Coincidentally, polar bears can be found in the arctic, but no species of bear is found in the antarctic.

There are probably many more interesting coincidences like this, little Easter eggs that have been left for us to notice.

The true nature of our reality is probably something beyond our comprehension. There are hints at it however, that make me wonder about the implications. So, I advise you to keep an open mind about the possible.

One thing I’ve learned from observing people and society is the awareness that the vast majority of folks are egoistic, or selfish. They tend to care about their own happiness and are at best indifferent to the happiness of others unless they have some kind of relationship with that person, in which case they care about that person’s happiness in so far as it has an effect on their own happiness to keep that person happy. This is the natural, neutral state of affairs. It is unnatural to care about other people’s happiness for the sake of themselves as ends. We call such unnatural behaviour “altruism”, and tend to glorify it in narratives but avoid actually being that way in reality.

In an ideal world, all people would be altruistic. They would equally value their own happiness and the happiness of each other person because we are all persons deserving happiness. Instead, reality is mostly a world of selfishness. To me, the root of all evil is this egoism, this lack of concern for the well-being of others that is the norm in our society.

I say this knowing that I am a hypocrite. I say this as someone who tries to be altruistic at times, but is very inconsistent with the application of the principles that it logically entails. If I were a saint, I would have sold everything I didn’t need and donated at least half my gross income to charities that help the global poor. I would be vegan. I would probably not live in a nice house and own a car (a hybrid at least) and be busy living a pleasant life with my family.

Instead, I donate a small fraction of my gross income to charity and call it a day. I occasionally make the effort to help my friends and family when they are in obvious need. I still eat meat and play computer games and own a grand piano that I don’t need.

The reality is that altruism is hard. Doing the right thing for the right reasons requires sacrificing our selfish desires. Most people don’t even begin to bother. In their world view, acts of kindness and altruism are seen with suspicion, as having ulterior motives of virtue signalling or guilt tripping or something else. In such a world, we are not rewarded for doing good, but punished. The incentives favour egoism. That’s why the world runs on capitalism after all.

And so, the world is the way it is. People largely don’t do the right thing, and don’t even realize there is a right thing to do. Most of them don’t care. There are seven billion people in this world right now, and most likely, only a tiny handful of people care that you or I even exist, much less act consistently towards our well-being and happiness.

So, why am I bothering to explain this to you? Because I think we can do better. Not be perfect, but better. We can do more to try to care about others and make the effort to make the world a better place. I believe I do this with my modest donations to charity, and my acts of kindness towards friends and strangers alike. These are small victories for goodness and justice and should be celebrated, even if in the end we fall short of being saints.

In the end, the direction you go in is more important than the magnitude of the step you take. Many small steps in the right direction will get you to where you want to be eventually. Conversely, if your direction is wrong, then bigger steps aren’t always better.