Ran Prieur

July 16.

2024-07-16T16:40:36Z

July 16. Today's subject, doom. Historians say the fall of Rome happened so slowly that people at the time didn't know Rome was falling. But right now, everyone knows America is falling. There are cultural differences in how we think it's falling, but whatever changes we don't like, we can all imagine them being permanent. Even if changes do not accelerate, but continue at the rate of the last quarter century, historians will look back and see us right now inside the date range of a relatively fast crash.

In the last three days we've seen three darkly iconic spectacles at public events. At least they're increasingly silly. The first is all in the news. The second was the Copa America final, where thousands of fans without tickets forced their way in, which has never happened at a large American stadium. The third, at last night's Home Run Derby, was possibly the worst ever singing of the national anthem at a major event. But is that the whole story? Sonic theorists in this reddit thread think it was a tech error, either with autotune or in-ear monitors.

Two more doom links. From 2015, The Really Big One describes an earthquake, with a one in ten chance of happening in the next fifty years, that will reduce the northwest coast to rubble, including my neighborhood. It doesn't even mention how many tech company headquarters are here.

And The Peculiar Phenomenon of Megacryometeors, chunks of ice big enough to smash through roofs, falling out of a clear sky. Specialists "believe that the recent increase in the frequency of these megacryometeors worldwide may be due to the effects of global warming."

July 12.

2024-07-12T12:00:55Z

July 12. Two fascinating geography links. Why Is Chile So Long? Because it covers a long, thin, isolated area that's unique in the world. At the end the author gets into how that isolation also makes it an outlier in language.

Should this be a map or 500 maps? In the late 1700s, a guy tried to make a map of Spain by asking local priests to draw a map of their region, and compiling them. Instead he got 500 wildly different maps, and died trying to reconcile them.

There are many things to take from this story -- about beginner's mind, the diversity of human experience, and the interoperability of language. But what stood out to me most was two opposing lessons about shared protocols and modularity. Tomás' experiment failed. It failed because each amateur cartographer injected their own methodology and process, resulting in incompatible maps. But in another sense, Tomás succeeded. Sure, maybe this collection of artifacts would be useless for military strategy or commerce, but on the other hand... LOOK AT THESE MAPS, THESE MAPS RULE. Imagining a world in which Tomás successfully imposed a protocol and stripped these maps of their individuality feels... tragic? Dystopian?

I'm obsessed with this story because it gets at a dynamic embedded within everything designed that we rarely think about. Once you notice it, it is present in almost every conversation, at every aperture and zoom level: modularity is inversely correlated to expressiveness.

There's more discussion in the Hacker News thread. By the way, the original piece says "18th century" which I changed to "1700s" because Let's stop counting centuries.

July 10.

2024-07-10T22:40:33Z

July 10. It's been too hot this week for heavy thinking, but today it cooled off enough that I can at least riff on the last post. A reader comments: "I believe the phenomena of schizophrenia, hearing voices, self and identity, and spiritual awakening are all elements of the same underlying psychology structure which can be manipulated from the inside." So the criminally insane, and awakened saints, are just managing the same kind of thing in the worst way and the best way.

I use the word "subconscious" instead of "unconscious" because I think whatever it is, it's conscious. But maybe that's not going far enough. Another comment: "Really, there is no subconscious. We can plumb the entirety of our mind to its very depths once we get over our own resistance." So the only difference between the "conscious" and the "unconscious" is exclusion by the ego. I would say the same thing about the "paranormal", that it differs from the "normal" only in falling outside some walls constructed by a specific way of looking.

Everyone knows the story of Galileo, who made a telescope and saw moons around Jupiter, and the Church said, according to our ideology, there cannot be moons around Jupiter. Now, in the conflict between empiricism and ideology, science is often on the other side. I mean, I still trust biologists to evaluate vaccines. But you might get some synchronicity, or apparent telepathy, or a strong hunch that cannot be explained by peripheral sensing, or a useful Tarot reading. That's empirical information. And science, reaching outside its wheelhouse, says, you have to ignore that because we can't explain the mechanism.

July 8.

2024-07-08T20:20:55Z

July 8. I've been working on a complete rewrite of my Books page, and while I'll surely be adding more, it's finished enough to post. The emphasis is now heavily on metaphysics, with smaller sections for social philosophy, fringe science, and fiction. I've also just updated the sidebar to the left, to clearly distinguish my stuff from other people's stuff.

July 5.

2024-07-05T17:50:36Z

July 5. New Spotify playlist, R.E.M. Dreamy Deep Tracks. That title is more descriptive, but these are just my favorite REM songs.

July 4.

2024-07-04T16:40:11Z

July 4. Whenever I hear about a crazy person who did a terrible crime, typically killing their family, because they heard voices telling them to do it, I always wonder: Why don't they just not do what the voices say? I mean, if I were facing a hard decision, and a voice in my head gave me advice, I'd probably follow it. But I wouldn't go against my core values. Never mind murder -- voices in my head couldn't make me litter. I'd just be annoyed at them.

Obviously something else is going on. The words "kill your family" are not where the action is. The person is being compelled on a deeper level, and the words are at most a carrier for the compulsion, and at least a residue. It could be the part of the iceberg that's above water, or the shadow, in the rational world, of a more potent sub-rational process.

Now I'm thinking, can this happen to non-crazy people, through voices not inside the head? Can a voice on the radio, or the TV, or the internet, serve as a carrier or a catalyst or a pointer for something that's happening on a deeper level than language?

If speech has persuasive force, and if the words don't hold up rationally, then the next candidate is the non-language part of the voice: the tone, the timbre, the vibration. This makes sense to me. My most transformative experience was not from drugs, but from a song, and not from the lyrics or melody, but the sound.

There still has to be something deeper, because what is it that makes a vibration compelling for one person, and repellent for another? I think this is an aspect of human identity, especially collective identity, that remains undiscovered. And my practical advice, in these crazy times, is not to use the word "irrational", but instead sub-rational. Because there's something going on in there, even if you don't know what it is.

July 1.

2024-07-01T13:10:58Z

July 1. Back to philosophy, I've written about the consciousness of animals and plants. But if we take psychism seriously, it opens all kinds of interesting doors. And if we take pagan metaphysics seriously, we have to wonder about the consciousness of gods. What is it like to be a god?

I can see three levels of answers. One is that gods exist purely as a behavior of human consciousness, as already understood by psychologists. So what it's like to be a god is simply what it's like to be a human believing in that god; and through known channels of communication, humans can decide what the gods are like and what they want.

If we go deeper, gods can exist in the human collective subconscious. If humans disappeared, they'd disappear too, but they can coordinate our behavior in ways that physicalism doesn't recognize, and without us being consciously aware of it. This answer seems most likely to me, and it could also apply to demonic possession.

Or they could exist on some level deeper than humans. We're an opportunity to them, but they don't need us. This is how it usually is in fiction, and you can see examples in the TV Tropes page for the Old Gods.

Notice that on all three levels, the gods are mutable. We could change our minds about them, or they could adapt to changing culture, or they could put on different masks. I tend to agree with Ezra Pound, who wrote, "The Gods have not returned. They have never left us."