Types of Reality

There are different kinds of reality.

Sensation. (Measurement.)

Memory. (Record.)

Meaning. (Interpretation.)

Expectation. (Prediction.)

Trend. (Law.)

Externality. (Objectivity.)

Universe.

I imagine these as roughly concentric circles, innermost to outermost. We can know the inner ones most exactly, but we can access only the smallest dot of reality directly from the center. As we move out through the circles, we pass through layers to larger stretches of what's real. The picture gets bigger each time. Every step is fallible. Outside all the circles, we have what actually exists regardless of us, yet it also intimately includes us. The universe contains not only all matter and energy, but also all information, which includes all interpretation and experience.

This is kind of a spur of the moment thing, so maybe the circles could be adjusted.

If you open this image in a new browser tab, you can read it better.

Life on the Shrinking Preservation of the Social Contract

My mother likes to say that the government doesn't make money. This makes sense from a certain standpoint. We pay taxes somewhat under duress, and it's difficult to fire a government when the job isn't done right. They aren't selling their services on an open market.

From another standpoint that acknowledges her objection—and I mean this as a pun—the statement may be wildly inaccurate. You'll see what I mean by the pun in a minute.

Let's imagine something very normal: buying milk at the supermarket. The transaction pays the supermarket and the farmer, and also the government through a tax. Money was made. Who "made" the new value? It would seem to be the farmer most of all, yet the farmer doesn't create milk. The farmer takes it from cows. In fact, the farmer probably pays someone else, or buys a machine. Although there is plenty of work behind the words I just said, the farmer depends entirely on the cows for milk. The cows are also raised and cared for—ideally well, but sadly often not. Either way, there is an outline of a reciprocal relationship. Cows, meanwhile, don't make milk from cow. Cows make milk from grass. This grass doesn't grow from itself, either, but from soil and sunlight. We could step further back into how the sun pushes out energy, but let's stop there.

No one "makes money" alone. That would be impossible. Everything is a transformation of matter and energy, and everyone takes a cut of the energy's influence. Governments provide a stunning number of services and may be the biggest providers of services in the world. In this sense, at least, the government "makes money."

The more interesting practical and ethical question is about opting in and opting out. Let's talk about something strange and unfair and privileged about me for a moment, something I can thank my mother for most of all. As of today, I have three citizenships: American, British, and French. The nice thing about the latter two is that they also carry EU citizenship, so, technically, if I could speak a local language and I was feeling brave enough and competitive enough, I could work in any of those countries like anyone else there. In many of them I could even vote quite quickly, being a resident. So for me, even though all 3 passports are currently expired and need renewing, there is this wonderful sense, for which I am enormously lucky and grateful, of having options.

This is something I would like for every person on Earth. It also comes back to the question of government services. There is research now saying that "big government" actually correlates with happiness and healthier societies. For decades "big government" has been a deep insult on American television. But whether the research has the whole picture or not, we all do intuitively understand, I think, the value of efficiency and effectiveness. If big socially generous governments like those using the Scandinavian model do help support healthy and happy societies, that is not because they are big, but because they are effective and efficient and relatively uncorrupt. They may be "big" in the sense of ensuring many services, but they are not "big" in the sense of being wasteful or bigger than they need to be.

But let me return to the original question and my point. We often rightfully object to services ensured by the government that we do not ratify or even approve of ourselves. The United States split from Great Britain not, perhaps, most of all because of gross humanitarian misconduct, and not even because of an expensive tax, but because of the idea of a tax combined with the insult and impracticality of denying colonials representation in Parliament. Had representatives been in Parliament with influence, they would have debated the merits of a small tax on tea from India to fund the war in India, and whether they won that debate or not, the tax would not have broken into a revolution. Not that year, probably not that century. Eventually, yes. The core dispute was over representation and services, especially at great distance.

Half a century later, or a little more, Henry Thoreau refused to pay his US tax, not because he wanted to stir up trouble, but (if we believe his own words) in spite of his desire to be accommodating and a good citizen. The consequences of this act, of his articulate case for "civil disobedience" and his invention of the phrase used by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many others, were felt around the world and are still felt, but we haven't collectively figured out, strangely enough, what this might actually mean for tax.

The fact is that by living in a country and assuming its citizenship and paying its taxes, we pay for membership in a club and the services it provides with the membership dues and subscription fees of taxes. This is at heart inescapably a social contract.

The trouble is that we are not free to shop around, and so the country of our birth absolutely monopolizes us. When I say "free" I do mean at liberty. You may acquire a citizenship in another country, but rarely easily or quickly. I became an American citizen at 13, having lived here for nearly 10 years. English is my native language. It took about half that time, from entering Kindergarten and being laughed at for my British accent, to learn to speak with an accent more or less indistinguishable from a native's. You can still hear my British accent in my American accent if you listen, and my American in my British, but that's because I speak both all the time and they bleed into each other. If I focus on one or the other for a few weeks, surrounded by others doing likewise, the noticeable influence of the other disappears. As I type now, I'm thinking in a British accent that is not particularly British sounding, in the sense that it is very neutral and unexaggerated. It's just how I learned to speak. Language partly defines us, and it's one of several factors that impede shopping around for the best government "club."

Switzerland is an outlier. It has four national languages. One reason Switzerland's highly capitalist, directly democratic, and relatively socially supportive system functions well is allegedly that, the country being so small, citizens have been able to move a few miles from one canton to another to shop for the best services. In response, the services—the benefits of "club" membership—have improved across the board.

If, like Thoreau, you or I were to go and live in the woods, then we would benefit from few of the overt services of any government, though we would, in a way impossible to calculate, benefit from its protections.

This is where I invite you to consider the terms of subscription to government services, and whether a person should be compelled to belong only to one government. In my opinion, the answer to the second question is "No." My multiple citizenship does not make me superior or immune, but it does make me less likely, I think, to see war as a practical solution, or economic hegemony over more naturalistic countries and societies, or ones still industrializing or trying directly to post-industrialize, to be excusable. We pay so little for the foreign goods we buy so cheap not because they are worth little but because we have the bargaining power to pay little. Multiple citizenship makes this realization bone-deep rather than simply intellectual. That citizen-of-Earth feeling persists, even, I think, if your countries are all "first-world" ones.

We need to make the phrase "social contract" meaningful. A contract is no contract if you are not at liberty to decline to sign it. At present, hunter gatherer societies have little to no protection against the commercial, environmentally degrading encroachments of companies spanning multiple nations. But how many of the employees of those companies work at several companies? How many of them have several citizenships? Or only the default one of Earthling, like my mother when she left Communist Czechoslovakia and the Soviets took her passport? How many of them have time to see what they do to natural landscapes? How many of them have been asked whether they would like to sign the "social contract"? The choice was made for them and they behave as if they have no choice.

If hunter gatherers were protected, if their roaming territories were set aside for them as part of an inviolable contract, then we would have custodians of wilderness. We would have another reason to preserve wildlife: humans are living there and want to live there. It would only be another step from that agreement to realize that animals too can decline to sign our contract, yet should be allowed to live. If you are not at liberty to decline to sign the social contract, it is not a contract.

Discompetitors Aim Distress, Eucompetitors Share Eustress

I often find myself arguing against competition, seemingly in general. This is strange, because I'm very interested in games and game design, and games are competition.

Friendly competition is brilliant.

What many people call competition, the more exclusive kind that I call discompetition, maybe doesn't motivate me as much as it motivates its proponents. If someone seems very motivated to win, openly salivating at the thought of beating me, I find that intimidating and figure I won't have the focus to overturn theirs. The social intimidation side of competition seems to drain my enthusiasm. I suppose that's the point at which friendly competition becomes unfriendly for me.

In my world, the best competition is implicit. Someone is not competing to put me out of the game, but in respect for my skill or potential to gain it. Someone competes with me because we both see deep value in much the same thing. What this person learns, I occasionally steal, and vice versa: we are flattered that the other steals from us. The work is difficult and we don't always like each other, yet there is no cap on applicants to wisdom. We enjoy discovery and compete to beautify the forms by which people can apply.

Notice that neither of us is being driven out of existence. In fact, we wouldn't like that. It would be sad to lose a fellow player, learner, worker.

When I argue against competition, I argue against not eucompetition but discompetition, against not eustress but distress. I argue against industrial-military arms races and all economic practices that allow those in comfort to reduce the comfort of those not in comfort. I argue against the backhanded supposition that each of us is in a struggle for existence against the others: I call it backhanded because it is an insult that creates the situation it describes.

There is a wonderful cartoon of the former corporate structure of Microsoft, with guns pointing in defense against imaginary guns. Competition of this kind creates trenches along every visible boundary (patently ignoring the slipperiness of optical illusions): racism, nationalism, sexism, religionism, generationism, classism. We are forced to unite in these superficial groups to defend against the guns they imagine we are pointing at them.

Narrowing Down Consciousness

Consciousness is the appearance of choice.

I'm willing to bet money that in a few years science will accept this as fact. The full explanation will be a little more complicated, but the statement won't be false. To be more specific, in order to create consciousness, the choices that appear have to relate to each other. What follows is my riffing on a much more mathematical approach by the neuroscientist Guilio Tononi called Integrated Information Theory. (It's riffing, so please do not consider my words an explanation of his theory.)

Imagine that 1000 little choices appear this second. 1: bat left eye, 2: photograph a crane, 3: walk out of screening, 4: lift jacket to put on bannister, 5: shift prototype car to neutral, 6: book tour... etc. If no choice depends on any other choice, and the choosers are not related to each other, then this set of options isn't actually conscious! An automatic, non-sentient robot could deliberate and choose any option or set of options, for example randomly. Even a die roll could do that. On the other hand, what if 1000 options appear this second and they're all closely interrelated? Let's suppose they all occur to the same person: you. Perhaps physically you can only pick one. 1: bat left eye, 2: bat right eye, 3: bat both eyes, 4: lift left pinky a little bit, 4: lift left pinky, but a millimeter more... etc. Or maybe you can even pick ten and hold them in short-term memory, but only if they go in a particular coherent sequence—a known set of muscle movements, with adjustments for this particular situation—reciting the ten digits in order, for example. Perhaps 499 options will result in net profit or happiness while another 501 will result in net loss or unhappiness to the same individual (ie, you again), and it's important to at least guess what will lead to the most profit/happiness and away from the most loss/unhappiness. This starts to seem more like our subjective experience of awareness.

Note: don't get caught up on the numbers. You wouldn't exactly count these options, you would feel some of them.

The appearance of new options seems to be ordained by the law of physics that says entropy always tends to increase—that is, the second law of thermodynamics. With entropy increasing, the number of different physical states in the universe is increasing. Doesn't that mean a huge number of previously non-existent options are constantly flowing into the universe? In all science, this seems the most likely candidate for a source of consciousness. When we learn about entropy in school, we usually learn the apocalyptic view that "disorder always increases." This is inaccurate, though. When you pour raspberry juice into club soda, the color eventually mixes in evenly: the final pink hint-o-juice (my friend's expression) is a more entropic state, not a less entropic state, even though it seems more orderly to us. Chaos as we understand it has not erupted in the fizzy drink. It looks smoother, more even than before. The second law of thermodynamics may actually say "intelligence increases."

Much of everyday consciousness is choosing about choosing: deciding which options to promote in our thoughts and which to ignore. But that's still choosing! And the choices are interrelated!

Nature is not wasteful. I do not personally believe it is possible to experience a single thing without the ability to act in some small way. Without any hard science on this yet, that's obviously debatable, yet it's my considered belief. Even if the mystery act is a movement of thought or a shift of mental attention, there is always an act implicit in every feeling.

Let's suppose the idea is starting to make sense. Can we break it?

What about color? What does red tell me to do, or suggest? On the surface, red is not an option but a phenomenon. We know what it feels like, but we have no idea what it would suggest that we do.

Here's an idea about colors that reaches deep into evolutionary history: Approach or retreat? Freeze? Eat!? Pure sensory information is always cresting into a worldview, a conscious bubble that creates us, lets us know some of what we can do, provokes desires, desires that lead to shoulds. No choice has any meaning out of context. Your sensorium embodies (or disembodies?) all the context you can possibly know, imparting all the meaning you can experience before a choice; yet as soon as the choice is made, it has new meaning for observers you never imagined. Context, collected and represented by our senses, gives meaning to choice, which gives meaning to observers. If there were no "what we can do," I believe we would be unable to see red.

Case in point: when you are deep in a dreamless sleep, you do not see red, even if your eyes open. You still have some very minimal level of consciousness, but you're not using it to make many choices at all. A spot of red in your visual field probably doesn't have any weight in the thin trickle of choices your brain is still making, so you don't experience it.

All consciousness is choice.

The words do not mean we choose what we experience; I am not sure the words mean we deserve what we get; but if correct, they do mean there is no choiceless situation.

Maybe everything you feel is a latent choice. Here's a slightly more fanciful way to put it:

Consciousness is a heavy influx of interrelating choices. It happens at a kind of thermodynamic vortex, almost in a seesaw moment of enemy forces. Brains, as learners, look as if they are organizing, not dispersing and randomizing. Yet entropy increases even in a developing fetal brain. Options bud and accumulate. In a not-unlike way, civilization appears to reverse entropy, draw things together, build clear patterns from noise. Meanwhile, even by the wisest, most advanced civilization on the upswing, much random heat is produced: options bud and accumulate. Those two directions occurring at once, increasing options and drawing together, might produce consciousness.

The universal principle of least action says that in every real physical movement, the least energy possible is radiated. The universe follows the most intelligent line of motion. The cosmic bank account is debited more carefully than you'd ever dream: boundlessly more carefully than that. This rule, this "careful" sparing of any excess of motion, is—or so I've read—equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics.

The rule is reminiscent of two motives that drive every economic actor and together give rise to the theory that economies mirror the laws of thermodynamics, with money behaving just the same as energy. The first incentive—analogous to the efficiency of the principle of least action—is to buy low. Spend frugally: your thrift will allow you to make more transactions in all, and your greater number of transactions will necessarily end up dispersing money all the more widely over space and time, satisfying the entropic goal of dissolving every concentrated source of energy by diffusion. The other side of the second law of thermodynamics, as it could be understood in an economic sense, is a deep desire to seek the richest source of energy—sometimes called "negative entropy" or "negentropy" when concentrated like this and highly apt to do work—or to put it another way, the biggest pile of gold.

To mythologize this for the sake of visualization, the god of ever-increasing entropy wants us thriftily disbursing gold to all corners of the world (by buying low, thus allowing us to make more transactions overall), while fishing for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow under the surface of that lake (by selling high, thus acquiring more for less work and allowing us to make more transactions overall in a second, opposite way).

Perhaps we can explain a mysterious force with thrift and the pot of gold. What is the richest source of negentropy you will ever find? A singularity. The only known manifestations, and these are only supposed manifestations or near-manifestations, are black holes and the Big Bang.

Gravity may be a simple and direct consequence of the universe's desire to form singularities. Think of it this way. The principle of least action suggests some wisdom in spending savings. Where do the savings come from? There are no savings. How do we make savings? Gravity. It is certainly the simplest way I know of to pile things together, to make a pot of gold. Without it, the principle of least action would indeed be the principle of no action. There would be no fuel for anything, let alone for a Big Bang.

In this synthesis, gravity is the battery charger of the universe, even universes. By the law of gravitation, the multicosmos seeks singularities, and wherever they form, it seeks to express pent-up potential as sparingly and deeply and expansively as ever, in long-lived universes full of sentience.