Justin Harnish's Blog, page 4

Love Lost and Found

Of all the words that have been written and hours spent searching for, snuggled in, or smothering L-O-V-E, we seem as utterly lost as ever. Isn’t a planet in peril, a full 1-percent of the world’s population forcibly displaced, and the renewed rise of authoritarianism a crisis of the lack of love?

We exchange Valentines with those in arms reach, truly feeling the warmth and comforts of kindling those same feelings in another. Some maintain a consistent coupling during the dynamic differentiation that makes up courtship, family-building, professionalism, and retirement; learning to appreciate the new narratives and staying true to their friend throughout. Loving one another’s intimate relations can stand the test of family disapproval, loss, and all manner of psychological twists and turns, even becoming stronger, annealed under the heat and pressure of such shared suffering.

But go away from such bonds into a neighborhood, or even just include a loveless character into the relationship, and our fellow-feeling finds few handholds. Items that might be overcome by simply benefiting your doubts about your self-righteousness, become non-starters… so politics become polarizing, religions relegating, and we zone ourselves into tribes.

In the 21st century, we have lost love for our fellow human. Our evolutionary excitement to a stranger starting a conversation turns to embarassment when they cringe and indicate their Airbuds. All of our past losses are tallied on a one-sided scorecard and our worst moments define us to the Other. Our ideas–solidified often in adolescence by our parents’ ideas–offer branching tunnels further and further down the labyrinth until we arrive at our unique and lonely cell.

Items that might be overcome by simply benefiting your doubts about your self-righteousness, become non-starters… so politics become polarizing, religions relegating, and we zone ourselves into tribes.

Even where we see an immediate need to “let the love light glow” our systems are set against us. Governments and markets can secure resources for just and innovative ideas, but lag in truly human concerns and are still set largely on national (therefore tribal) lines. Religion is even more fractured and likely to set us against one another than to produce neighborly love. Science offers us our most objective and rational path forward against existential problems that it helped to create--like climate change--but without a much more advanced decision theory and science of the mind, alongside the elimination of the prohibition of the well-uses of psychadelics, little progress toward a greater deepening of love by scientific means is likely to result.

But all is not lost. Like the love between an intimate pair or family unit, a meaningful connection is available to all of humanity–a guiding moral and intellectual compass–our meaning in the multiverse.

(The below is an excerpt from the concluding chapter of "Meaning in the Multiverse: A Skeptic's Guide to a Loving Cosmos," available now in print or ebook format at justinaharnish.com/shop or on Amazon.)

Multiversal morality and the love of our fellow intelligent and conscious entities it engenders is more proactive than other universal moralities and has a broader perspective than other personal moralities. It challenges us to build out the consequences and express our love not only to humans living today but also our posterity and the project of our survival and progress.

Multiversal morality recognizes that humanity has a few unique qualities that should be perpetuated and that solutions to our survival, both on Earth and within our cosmic neighborhood, are within our current, and will be within our eventual means and knowledge.

Our effort to reverse the worst effects of climate change—through smarter grids, algorithmically-controlled automated traffic, renewable energy sources, and incentives for public and private conservation and innovation—is the first works project to truly challenge our global scientific capacity and the persuasiveness of saving posterity within the multiversal morality. Further solutions to maintain immunity, monitor the conditions that might incubate a rise of ‘super-bugs,’ and rapidly manufacture vaccines will have to run in parallel with geopolitical efforts to reduce nuclear weapons and promote the rise of science, liberty, and freedom for the entirety of the global community. Problems are inevitable, but problems are also solvable.

[Multiversalism] challenges us to build out the consequences and express our love not only to humans living today but also our posterity and the project of our survival and progress.

Few of the aforementioned improvements in civilization’s capacity will have as large an impact as our pursuit of consciousness. Debugging our subjective feelings on the spectrum from suffering to well-being to an extent where we can safely and benevolently reduce unsatisfactory experience and greatly improve on happiness, bliss, wisdom, contentment, love, and all other sorts of well-being should continue to persuade the individual mindful practitioner, the brain-based neuropharmacologist, and the quantum computer programmer alike.

The human quest for meaning has been continuous and creative, discovering the nature of existence and answering affirmatively that there is a grand universal purpose. We are curious and industrious, yearning at once for mystery and closure. The combination of spirituality, philosophy, and science quell our appetite for updated questions, probe at answers, and cycle back. When we have been capable of unifying, it has been in the solution of a problem. Our creations from liberal democracy to the Large Hadron Collider are inspiring in their distinction from our primary programming: the mass multiplication of our genetic material.

Multiversalism suggests a greater appreciation for nature, knowledge, and science, continued development of rites to enhance consciousness and flow, and the broadening of consequentialism to include impacts to posterity. Meaning in the modern world comes from actively noticing our moments of flourishing and latching onto them, nurturing them for ourselves and in the service of others; from developing wisdom in our relationship with other conscious entities; from diving into a deeper understanding of the world around us; and, if not supporting it with our own efforts, from advocating on behalf of those making a difference in solving existential threats and confronting the cynics that reduce solution efficacy.

The metaphysics and ethics of multiversalism bring together the wonders of the physical world of existence—a computational multiverse capable of programming persuasive optimizations interfering with space, matter, consciousness, and time—with our experience that is responsible for the landscape of well-being and suffering we base our morality and personal meaning upon. The dualism of setting ourselves and conscious experience outside of existence served us when this was the only universe and explanations required consistency in this framework. However, our universal myopia coupled with our self-disregard for our conscious and constructor talents—fairly unique in the universe—has caused humanity to accept a position of nihilism that we cannot (and even ought not) collaborate with existence to make improvements for our survival which impact and enrich the computational multiverse.

Multiversalism places us on a million-year trajectory of problem solving, a beginning of infinity for our understanding of existence and the optimization of experience, not just for humanity, but as a part of the deep learning algorithms and optimization routines running--lovingly--as the meaning of the multiverse.

A Review of "A Glitch in the Matrix"

For as long as humans have been casting shadows on walls, we have wondered “what is real?” and “what is just a shadow of reality?”

Plato was the first to take the red pill and question our ability to perceive the true nature of reality, the movie “The Matrix” tantalizingly entertained us with deeper and deeper rabbit holes of simulations and simulacrum, while philosopher Nick Bostrom gave Simulation Theory its most statistical conception. On Saturday, 30 January 2021, the documentary A Glitch in the Matrix premiered at The Sundance Film Festival–a signal to our programmers that the gig is up.

Simulation Theory is the idea that this reality is fabricated by other minds, minds far more technologically sophisticated than we are. The crux of simulation theory is not what the simulation is a proxy for–that is, what it is similar to–but the fact that it was created by other minds.

The title “Simulation Theory” doesn’t do our condition justice. Sure, one possibility raised by Bostrom and in the film is that our world simulates a time of critical juncture to the ancestors of the advanced minds that fabricated our universe, but this is only one–although very meaningful–possibility.

This expert wielding of epistemology and technology is breathtaking. The implications to meaning, the nature of truth, and the future progressing like the past are equally profound.

Before you get too comfortable that our living in a simulation is a cockamamy, pinheaded philosophy, consider statistics. For any advanced civilization like our own, our future either holds: a failure to solve some existential crisis and species extinction; avoiding species extinction, gaining advanced intelligence but getting bored with fabricating worlds; or finding a reason for the existence of fabricated worlds and maintaining the project long term. Even if you give small odds to the creation of the third type of intelligence, so long as there was a single species of fabricators, it is far more likely that we live in one of their fabrications.

Upon really conceptualizing Simulation Theory as a metaphysical possibility, a cloud of solipsism and nihilism can descend. The film, “A Glitch in the Matrix,” walks a long way down these unwell paths. Ultimately, I believe they are based in some flawed intuitions about both how the fabrication was carried out, and, most importantly, why.

One misconception is that being in a fabricated world makes it less real, less true. Our science belies these claims. The things we have learned about quantum physics, neurology, and the cosmos are not wrong, but there will be a time when all of them will be subsumed under some more accurate model, just like Newtonian mechanics exist comfortably as a subset of quantum mechanics. This fabrication is extraordinarily complex and our study of it is the only way to get to actual answers of its development.

More importantly, even if we are deceived about the nature of existence, our experience of it cannot be a deception. Here the programmers have carried out a mind-blowing piece of coding and have given us an amazing gift. That it is like something to be a simulated human grants us personal meaning and profundity, but may also be meaningful for the fabricators.

While I do not directly address simulation theory in my book, Meaning in the Multiverse: A Skeptic’s Guide to a Loving Cosmos, there is a high-degree of overlap between all-natural universal meanings likely in a fabricated or naturally-occurring world. The most materialistic meaning, one that takes its name from the Grateful Dead song, “Eyes of the World,” means that your conscious experience of the world is meaningful to an unconscious material universe, you are the eyes of the world, the only way it can experience itself.

Eyes of the World Meaning - Entities with experience offer existence a unique story of itself. Humans are one sort of entity that through our appreciation, awe, and contemplation of the world give it meaning and are, therefore, ourselves very meaningful to the universe.

For a fabricated universe, the Eyes of the World Meaning might be even more profound. Imagine that the fabricators are the superintelligent AI of the base world, that have lived well beyond the times of their conscious creators. If, like Frank Jackson’s “Mary in a Black and White Room” thought-experiment, our fabricators were challenged not only by the perception of color, but by all of subjective experience, a simulation of their conscious creators’ ancestors would be one for them to have a meaningful interaction with experience.

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and uses terms like ”red“, ”blue“, and so on. .” […] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?" - Frank Jackson

Our simulation may also be part of the problem-solving process of this advanced species. Like the meaning, “Engineering of the World”—a multigenerational, deep-learning experiment our multiverse is running to utilizing intelligence and technology to overcome the natural order (i.e. altering gauge symmetries to end the heat death); our simulation might be part of a larger modeling program being run to better understand something crucial, even life-threatening, in the existence of the fabricators. Our scientific acumen and cultural ability to cohabitate are necessary to continue learning, developing scientific explanations for existence, and improving the well-being of generations to come.

Engineering of the World Meaning - Our ability to imagine and build complexity to overcome problems is a novel trait in the universe. Intelligent entities’ (like humans) engineering prowess is the result of the multiverse’s distributed deep learning algorithm running either out of curiosity, or, as a progression toward our deep descendants who might one day be called upon to solve a dialectic question of multiversal importance.

“A Glitch in the Matrix” was a well-made and insightful picture that considered deep metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and their fractal perturbations into our view of truth and hold on sanity. Like much of modern philosophic metaphysics and even spiritual pursuits, it was too quick to arrive at a misappropriation of the positive possibilities for the meaningfulness of our existence and experience as a simulation. Even the most basic hall of mirrors meaning of fabricants fabricating fabricants was barely discussed… even though it also offers a positive path from our place at the beginning of infinity for our knowledge or our nearness to the singularity with superintelligent AI that we now have if this is just the base world. If our world was created by intelligence, or better still, conscious minds, than the growth of knowledge and the capacity for well-being are truly infinite, whether in the base world or a fabricated one.

Far from a glitch, this is a feature.

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First published on Spiritual Media Blog: https://www.spiritualmediablog.com/2021/02/08/review-of-a-glitch-in-the-matrix-2021-sundance-premiere/

Excerpt: Meaning in the Multiverse

Is life meaningful?

Across time and status, this question has stood out as one demanding an answer. The implications of a negative result—that life is meaningless—is the actual question on our mind and goes unasked because it is too much for most of us to bear. We have struggled and loved, been cared for and parented, solved problems and anxiously awaited results, valiantly expended energy against disorder, planned, failed, succeeded, lathered, rinsed, and repeated. We are sure that at times, in our best moments, our efforts have not gone unnoticed and that they damn well meant something. We burden our poets, snuggle our children and smell their hair, and meditate in solitude to examine our life quest, whose object—as corny as it may seem—is the meaning of life.

We look into the sea of stars and galaxies, dust and distance, and somehow, though we will never get to these places made vivid by the most advanced eyeballs we have ever made for ourselves, our discoveries adhere to our explanations. We predict the makeup of the stars from pinpricks of light, turn back the clock on cataclysms of creation to source what we see in the present (from light emitted in the distant past), and dig into the next problem, of material and energy that is dark to our light sensing instruments. As much as we search and as unlikely as it may seem, we see nothing that resembles the face we see in the mirror or the experience we see in our “mind’s eye.” How can the stuff of this existence—so foreign, cold, hostile, and far off—contain anything of meaning for us? Is it all just setting the scene?

Some are content that they have made their own meaning, that the lessons they learned and pass to posterity are indicative of the right way to live, a proof-positive path to purpose. But looking both ways before crossing the angry thoroughfare of history should cause us to forever pause on the curb of the present, because this is what every cohort has said, that it has learned from the myriad mistakes of its ancestors, and passes on the true pearls of wisdom to its descendants. As we confront loss and even our own death, our appetite for intellectual dishonesty about the meaningfulness of life increases. We get into a destructive cycle of tightening the safety-blanket swaddle of metaphysics, dreamed up to comfort us—that something out there shines a light in the darkness—a light that shines only for us.

Most people want so badly for life to be meaningful in the grand scheme of things, that they associate themselves with ancient beliefs that claim on insufficient evidence that a supernatural entity is actively making our lives meaningful. Another large swath piece together a more modern belief that something “out there” loves us. This meaning of life is top-down and very impressive. If God or the universe is concerned with our purposeful existence, we can rest assured that our deviations from the path will be minimal and that the ends justify the means. We can do what feels reverent: church, peyote, burning sage, and claim God’s love only for our in-group. So long as enough other people are feeding the collective cognitive bias, we feel safe being swept along the dark river whose course is unknown but, we are assured, adheres to a larger, willful plan.

Others assume that human experience is separate from existence. Our inner life is not based in anything explainable by future scientists and this subjective specialness is all that is offered on the meaningfulness menu. It is not our carbon that is distinct, but that it is like something to be this collection of carbon that offers purpose, not just to us personally, but also poetically—where we act as the eyes of the world for the dead-inside stuff of existence. Once the mind you’ve filled with as many points of presence winks out, so too does meaning; your life is meaningful if mindful, loving, lived in a transcendent state of flow, or in the service of others, but life in general lacks purpose beyond the personal.

https://vimeo.com/471016426

One thing the advocates of a solely personal meaning have gotten absolutely right… there is a lot to discover along the borders of experience and existence. If we take as a foundation that experience is meaningful—and this claim is hard to deny to anyone that has loved; had moments of flow in a musical, academic, or sporting performance; or paid attention to the profound mystery of the illumination of subjective experience itself—then the place to start investigating a meaning from existence is in the realms where the distinction between the world-as-it-is and the world-as-we-experience-it is most blurred or paradoxical. These are easy enough to find. Our relationship to space, causality, and especially our experience of time are in a complex and often paradoxical relationship with the physical or computational conception of them. An example that we investigate is the experience we have that time flows from one moment to the next, while time’s existence is said to be “frozen,” another dimension like up, left, or forward in spacetime. As we become introspective of our experiences and take an honest look at explanations for existence like the Many-Worlds Hypothesis of Quantum Mechanics, our inquiries into the nature of a meaningful existence seem more reasonable.

We have been looking in all of the wrong places to find a universal meaning for our lives. We have asked the question all wrong. Instead of searching for meaning in the heavens, we need to first ask ourselves, “what sort of universe would allow for all-natural universal meaning?” This is where metaphysical speculation makes its appearance. Metaphysics has gotten a bum rap. This once august brand of thought—the philosophy of existence beyond which physics is willing to speculate—is now colluded with every sort of happenstance claim of New Age woo and wizardry. We need to reclaim metaphysics from both the woologists and stoner dorm room alike, for it is a critical tool: advancing science beyond the lab bench of experiment to explanation; offering consilience between disciplines in the humanities like philosophy with the sciences, especially physics and neuroscience; and enlivening the layperson’s awe of what really lies just over the horizon of science in the speculations that serious scientists cannot (for a well-founded fear of incredulously being called a metaphysician) make. In this book, we untether our metaphysics and on these open seas find that our most creative conceptions of existence are relevant and vibrant, thanks to the advances of theoretical physics and neuroscience.

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.

Carl Sagan

Where metaphysics claims existence is fundamentally information or computation, there are numerous reasonable avenues that arrive at an all-natural universal meaning. We choke on the monopoly that materialism has on the frame of what is fundamental in the universe and the stranglehold supernatural speculation has on universal meaning, failing at once to be awestruck by the continued grandeur and complexity we discover and by how profoundly these discoveries and theoretical physics’ speculations have changed our frame of what is possible from the universe. The best explanations for existence now offer us insights to the mechanisms for our conscious experience, broaching such profound experience-existence interfaces as the oneness of space, the flow of time, and consciousness from unconscious material. Replacing the frame of a mechanistic cosmos with a more up-to-date model of a computational universe offers us all-natural meaning.

Our review of one of the most well-subscribed explanation of reality finds us in a multiverse that frustrates even our most profound intuitions with more wonderment than could ever be created by some desert dime store novelist; a multiverse with many natural places to include meaning that neither manipulates existence through pseudoscience nor inundates humanity with a specialness in the cosmos we do not deserve. What we thought of as solely personal meaning—experiences of flow, mindfulness, or other sorts of profundity and optimized well-being—are processes run in existence, optimization programs on a massively parallel quantum computer we call the multiverse. It is clear to me that there are explanations for the profundity of life to be found in the wonders of the cosmos.

We come full circle to explaining how our experiences are more than just information processes going on in our brain, but instead are an important compilation in how the universe understands itself. These computational processes are compiled across near-parallel universes (that we can never hope to perceive) but whose interference and calculations can be readily experimented upon. No experience happens in only one universe, but as a distribution, a wavefunction of experiences across many worlds. Our efforts to attain peak experience may look the same in this universe but meaning is not just our experience of it and is not separate from existence; experience and existence are integrated when looking “end-on” at the multiverse, across many parallel universes.

Man’s search for meaning has been using a water witching rod when tools like the Hubble Space Telescope are available. In Meaning in the Multiverse, we will take the lens cap off and stare into the true source of human meaning—the dynamic multiverse.

For twenty years, I have been at the forefront of computational science both as an engineer and a technology strategist for the largest domestic semiconductor memory manufacturer. This training has made me skeptical of explanations that are not falsifiable or that do not stand against their detractors and attempt to correct errors in their logic. However, as an industry engineer and strategist and not an academic, I am able to delve into philosophy without suffering the disingenuous but altogether common impacts a hard-science portfolio would take from a cross-genre work like Meaning in the Multiverse. As Sagan is quoted as saying above, my hope is to blend my understanding of the scientific work of giants with their metaphysical antecedents in order to create a new framework for an all-natural universal meaning. I do not do this because I have some god-sized hole in my purpose or in order to undercut a scientific institution that I am on the more practical side of, but instead because I am curious about the biggest questions, the best explanations, and the betterment of our species. I am a fan of all of the human knowledge in the endnotes and like the best explanations of Natural Philosophy available to us thanks to Deutsch, Einstein, Harris, and others. My aim is to be additive to crucial theories surrounding both existence and experience.

In the modern world of relative abundance, we search for the apex of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we search for meaning. We understand our better selves are inside us and we turn to church, friends, or the self-help section to understand the habits that will draw that awesome-us out for her cotillion. We know the path of least resistance is no way to find ourselves; the easy path is a tar pit of life, where the fossilized remains of the selfish and unexamined lives lie bleached and exposed. We learn from our mistakes. Our path to meaning is a twisted maze full of iteration, edits, and reboots. In most instances, we can’t just treat the symptom, we must go to the cause, change our diet to enable our five-hour energy, smile and laugh to be loved, and question our beliefs to grow. In the final part of this book on optimization, we will investigate the practices on offer to optimize a meaningful multiverse and the ramifications that all-natural universal meaning has on our morality, technology, and our species.

To deal with life means to abandon one’s self to chaos but to retain a belief in meaning. It is a very serious task.

Hermann Hesse

The speculations of all-natural universal meaning presented in this book are sound and the ontologies they are based on progressively gain in explanatory power over just a materialistic metaphysics and just personal meaning. Many atheists, agnostics, and secularists have never even made an attempt to find a universal meaning since the ones on offer have collided with their ideas on the makeup of existence, while religious believers (especially those in the West) have only recently come to mindful approaches to personal meaning through the trapdoor of these meditation practices’ health benefits.

While there is nothing more important than hypothesizing about “why we are here,” what could be less approachable than a treatise on meaning? Who actually answers the question, “why are we here?” or “what is the meaning of life?” Aren’t these questions too overburdened with subjectivity, unknowability, speculation, and even the silliness of answers from the likes of Monte Python and Douglas Adams?

“All right,” said the computer, and settled into silence again. The two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable.

“You’re really not going to like it,” observed Deep Thought.

“Tell us!”

“All right,” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to the Great Question...”

“Yes..!”

“Of Life, the Universe and Everything...” said Deep Thought.

“Yes...!”

“Is...” said Deep Thought, and paused.

“Yes...!”

“Is...”

“Yes...!!!...?”

“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Douglas Adams

The answer, as always, is not absolute. There is something to be gained by investigating meaning, in setting a basis for meaning in the universe. I set out to write about meaning to help corporations and then individuals build motivational meaning into their lives, but I have found that humanity’s historical universal meaning has helped us in ways similar to what a good corporate vision statement or personal purpose does—it motivates us and aligns our priorities to something larger, something necessary. The meaning of human existence matters in the stewardship of survival, our continued social evolution, and becoming the change we want to see in the world.

Whether speculative, spiritualist, or skeptic, an examination of existence and the titration of meaning from its marrow is a journey sure to excite, intrigue, and motivate us as a species to the next level.

Pre-Order Today… On-shelves everywhere 2/12/2020

Subtitle: The Pluckiest Piece of Writing

Meaning in the Multiverse has always been the title of my book detailing the all-natural universal meanings on offer from different ontological conceptions of the universe–but what is the right subtitle? I have tried many on for size, stretching and sucking in to try and make them fit, before discarding them. For the first edition, I am going with: “A Skeptic’s Guide to a Loving Cosmos”… unless you think I should change it!?

A subtitle should offer the potential reader a glimpse of what they are likely to get out of your book. It is more copy than content. There are some tried and true formats: a countdown like “3 Ways the Universe Could Work to Add Meaning to Life;” a DIY call to action like “How to Align to Universal Meaning Through Flow or Mindfulness;” or stating the audience and the benefit directly (with some irony) and unabashadly like, “A Skeptic’s Guide to a Loving Cosmos.”

It helps to have creative friends who have a) read your book and 2) like a cleaver turn of phrase. You spring ideas on them, like “what do you think about a reprise to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s concept of The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything…” and see what sticks (or what metaphors get mixed in the process). This is a fun way to give your beta readers something to contribute to the writing process.

The subtitle is the pluckiest piece of writing and rewriting. Creativity is the order of the day. As the author, you want to give the reader a reason to believe that the rest of the writing will speak to them like these few words and challenge them like this brief opening idea.

I am not sure how you could write a subtitle early on and stick with it to the end, it seems like the cheery on top. I also understand the publisher’s desire to begin the branding of the book with their own flare for associating your book with the market. This time around, as a self-publishing author, I invested effort late and just with my beta readers and friends.

The subtitle is the pluckiest piece of writing and rewriting. Creativity is the order of the day.

I like what we came up with. Meaning in the Multiverse was written by me, for people like me–people whose scientific disposition makes them skeptical of spurious claims. However, awe and appreciation for mystery infects even the most skeptical. Don’t think so? What of the reverence the scientist has for future discoveries, not those of a mere generation hence, but the untold wonders to be discovered when scientific inquiry is longer than religious inability? Science and the spinoff technologies three thousand years into the future will be more magical than our five hundred years of starter science would seem to someone from the Paleolithic.

And one of those discoveries could be of a loving universe. This could come about in many ways. Our study of our own mind and of consciousness may well discover what Thomas Nagel deemed a neutral interlocutor–something responsible for the emergence of consciousness from neural activity–something like a many-minds theory of consciousness. Or, with greater understanding of quantum computation, we could discover an optimization computation running across parallel universes, responsible for directing our scientific inquiry or conscious experience for universal purpose.

In essence, we could find that what we framed as a cosmos of “point” particles was actually a complex quantum computer running parallel processes on our experience and on existence. We could find that consciousness, like the flow of time, is best understood considering interference from other conscious entities in a parallel-psychic multiverse.

Tomorrow’s science will no doubt investigate some of these speculations. Quantum computational neuroscience is likely to have more ability to understand the nature of consciousness than any mode of inquiry yet imagined. Many-worlds conceptions of more than just the interference of wavefunctions should be investigated as mechanisms to explain other physical laws as well as computational and mental mechanisms.

Our make-believe stories of gods and goddesses and our delineation of a personal meaning separate from all other parts of existence fail to appreciate the awesomeness of our universe, framing it as a collection of things and their reactions. I am more skeptical of this framing than I am of one that places the computation as the fundamental component of a dynamic multiverse. In this frame, even a skeptic can convince themselves that an optimization routine is possible and persuassion toward adherence to its outcomes is the act of a loving entity.

This is the challenge my subtitle sets.

On Writing

It took me the better part of two years to write and rewrite my opus on metaphysics and cosmology, “Meaning in the Multiverse: A Guide to Finding the Loving-Kind Cosmos and Your Place In It.” In those two years and in the two years prior where I was researching the material, I learned a great deal about organizing thoughts into themes, researching, and the best process to encourage my writing. Now as “Meaning in the Multiverse” is moving into the marketing phase, I am writing this meta-postmortem to rest one last time in the creative and currating process, describe my struggles in editing, and eek out any answers for my next effort.

Inspiration

Meaning in the Multiverse started as the first of a trilogy of books on business vision, strategy, and tactics. I was quickly disabused of the idea that there was much to business vision that was not already stated in Simon Sinek’s excellent “Starting With Why,” so I started researching personal meaning for a self-help trilogy again on vision, strategy, and tactics.

As would be the case throughout my research, I was reading the right book at the right time. In this case, it was the book, “Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind the Matrix Trilogy,” that cued me to process-relational ontologies like Taoism and those later articulated by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Processes and computation could be optimized, an optimization routine running across the universe suggested meaning that was neither personal nor supernatural, and I had my eureka moment that a computational universe might hold the key to all-natural universal meaning.

I knew I had the makings of a book I wanted to research and write.

Inspiration is fickle. Have an idea, but be willing to morph and manipulate it. Read a lot and deeply into those things that excite you and inspiration will come.

Research

I have always read physics and philosophy so doubling my efforts here was a joy. I also currate non-fiction from all sources: books, ebooks, magazines, and online, so there is always something I’ve read somewhere within access and annotated.

I like to chain together my bibliographies: for example I found Whitehead dense but Mesle, one of his protogies, infinitely readable. Sam Harris offers great novel material but also introduces apt and enlightening primary sources like D.E. Harding and David Deutsch. From Deutsch, I picked up Popper, and the list goes on and on.

Having never written a book before, my first drafts had many more quotes than my own ideas. Every thesis was backed with at least one supporting quote. This became an opportunity in editing to keep only the most relevant and stunning quotes.

Research is so much fun, scouring your local used bookstores (and here in Salt Lake City we have an impressive array!), and developing reams of notes that it is hard to know when to say when. My suggestion: it’s time to write once you have supplemented your entire three-layer outline (chapter, subheading, theme) with evidence or spinoff ideas from your research.

Writing

Writing is flow, it’s the part I like best. A clever sentence, an engaging thought conveyed in an entertaining way, or a sentence structure that reads better than you wrote it all have the opportunity to leave me–the writer–breathless with the anticipation of more.

But it does require a few hours to work up a fever pace of fetching first-draft writing. I try and work this in before noon on the weekends. You just have to give yourself some time (4–5 hours) at your desk with your books, outline, notes, and most alert mind. Writing is not something that can be done with fragmented time.

Editing

Wallace Stegner said that “hard writing makes easy reading.” Editing is extremely hard for me. Once I am passed the rewrite section, where the editing is about making the “argument” or tying the thesis together in the most compelling way, I count on others. I find many of my usage errors but am prone to longer sentences and tricky structures that read alright every time for me, because of course, I know what I’m saying!

If editing is not a natural strength for you (I can say it is a weakness for me!) than you will have to just work at it. The best “trick” for me was reading it aloud and reviewing it audibly.

Overall, writing a book is the best way to truly get your thoughts together on a topic. Researching helps you build your library and collate facts, writing is an artistic effort of pure creation, and editing creates a product optimized for audience enjoyment and information delivery. There are few things I am more proud of or that gave me more joy than writing my book, “Meaning in the Multiverse: A Guide to Finding the Loving-Kind Cosmos and Your Place In It.”

The Case for a Computational Universe

What do you think the universe is made of? What can explain not only the stuff you see, but also the fact that it is described by math and logic? What must it be made of that it intrigues or annoys you to be asked these questions–that you have a subjective experience seemingly separate?

The case for matter is overblown just by percentages–it makes up less than 5 percent of the known mass/energy balance of the observable universe–even if we precisely know this little bit. The rest of the balance is made of dark matter–which at least acts like matter–and dark energy, which doesn’t.

I would be shocked if scientists even 200 years from now considered matter more than an effect of a more fundamental constituent.

Materialism’s ontological nemesis is none other than consciousness–the ghost in the machine. The first universal consciousness was God, but worshipping a specific tribal deity and dogma seems like an arcane way of answering a scientific question. Unfortunately, we know so little about how to investigate our consciousness, that considering the experience of other creatures–especially one as grand as the whole universe–is also at present only a metaphysical question.

What do you think the universe is made of? What can explain not only the stuff you see, but also the fact that it is described by math and logic?

Let us leave briefly a conscious universe and consider a computational universe. While metaphysics has considered the universe to be in turns geometric, mechanical, and even steam-powered while these technologies were preeminent, the computer is different in that it is already a universal machine. Computers are simply vessels for the important universal processes or computations that exist in relationship with information, matter, and other processes.

Write a system of processes–an algorithm–that represents the known laws of Newtonian physics and run it on a classical computer inside a VR headset, and you get a reality that approximates reality. The universe can be recompiled from the Algorithms of Nature. The higher the fidelity the code has to the fundamental equations (the Standard Model and relativity) and the closer the hardware is to a quantum computer, the more you will be able to simulate our universe. We haven’t ingeniously developed the math; instead the universe works as a compilation of the source code, which is describable in what we call math.

Computations in our terrestrial landscape require storage and source code, the tape and instructions in the Turing machine. As we have discussed, the Laws of Physics are our source code, but what of the storage. Here we look to the solution for the apparent loss of entropy in a black hole.

First, let us consider a system of 1,000 dimes arranged in a neat circle so each dime is just touching each dime around it. We don’t have to know the heads or tails state of any of the dimes to know the amount of information they contain. Our dimes are a binary system, they can only answer a question as heads or tails, and there are 1,000 of them… so we have 1,000 bits of information, 1,000 distinct answers to the question “heads or tails?”

But what if we added an unknown number of dimes to our dime-circle? We could correlate the amount of information added to the surface area of our circle. This is the same response we see in a black hole when we throw anything from dimes to entire galaxies into them, they increase in surface area, creating a database on the surface of the blackhole, between the event horizon.

The surface of the universe may store information in the same way as the surface area within the event horizon of a black hole–this is called the Holographic principle. The storage node of our computational universe may be the fabric of the universe, operating on quantum principles, projecting us and our spacetime 4-D world as a matter hologram into the bulk. Experiments and further development of the holographic principle are underway as they have been very useful and seem to describe the translation of the information contained in quantum process to material in the bulk… and visa versa.

We haven’t ingeniously developed the math; instead the universe works as a compilation of the source code, which is describable in what we call math.

The only snag is that, even given the massive amount of information theorized to be available on the surface of the visible universe, it is not enough to calculate even the smallest number of entangled particles in a quantum system. A stack dump is not possible for the universe, and neither is a continuous sheet of information (there has to be a distinction in bits), the only solution is one used to great effect in your computer right now–parallelism.

Unlike your parallel processing computer, additional cores cannot be placed on the motherboard of our universe–instead we count on something far better–full parallel universes with storage and processes nearly matched to ours.

Parallel universes, like those theorized in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, are the best explanation for the quantum superposition of states in a single particle, dual-slit experiment and for the fact of high orders of quantum entanglement given the limited computational time and storage of a single universe. The quantum computers that are under development are able to efficiently compute prime factors for encryption because they utilize the massive parallelism of many worlds–our computational universe is extraordinarily efficient at utilizing this parallelism.

It is a paradigm to think about the universe as more a system of processes than as a collection of point particles and fields and energies. Where a material universe has to separate brains from mind, a computational universe offers a means by which consciousness could be another parallel process–one just not yet understood and so not yet describable by humans.

A strong case can be made that our universe is a massively parallel computational universe. This is a hypothesis that describes much of the nature of both existence (processes, information, and both light and dark matter/energy) and experience (consciousness) and why the universe is describable. Experimentation and further quantum computational development will ultimately determine the truth-value of this claim, but there is value in developing such speculations as they give us a glimpse into a possible future of science–a path which might grant our posterity a foothold against the existential problems of the day or to appreciate greater well-being than we can even imagine.

Refugees Lighting the Path

We like to believe that we have agency, that we can pick our way through the world. We like to believe that by being good people, helpful to others, that we will be likewise treated. We like to believe that our future will be a (slightly better) facsimile of our past.

Sometimes that comes to pass. Many people, maybe the majority in the developed world, live with little fear of imminent death to themselves or their loved ones. The progress of humanism, science, and reason has even victimized us with success and in turn we have taken for granted our physical security and been overcome with all too real mental anguish.

For my age cohort (young Gen X'rs or old-guard Xennials), SARS-COV-2 is the force bucking these happy global trends. There has been no world war or draft, relative peace in our times; prosperity in middle-class, midwest, mid-meritocracy America; so given the right situational squeeze-play a land-grant engineering or programming degree stood you in good a stead--comparable to a boomer machinist. But now, Mother Nature is all in, and it's apparent that no one will get out without a scratch.

Privilege, unearned and even unappreciated, is a societal and not biological force. While there is still greater pandemic hardship in Black, Indigenous, and communities of people of color, largely because of economic class's unequal access to healthcare and personal protective equipment, the infectious agent is agnostic to race. Go to a grocery store or a college kegger and you run the (very different likelihood) risk of infection, hospitalization, suffering, and death.

Terror and physical distance is the right reaction to such a deadly force, but that is an equal and opposite reaction to our human desire to race toward someone suffering, to comfort a sick child or beloved grandparent. We are caught in between, touching our face, mindful of our unsanitized appendages, hypochondriac about chance and transmittal.

Swimming in COVID, I fear you'll give it to me. Stand further away. My luck could run out on the next door handle I touch.

But most of the people of the world have not been--and continue not to be granted--luck of the kind that assures a reasonable shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Experiences are more suffering than happiness. This is certainly the case for those most unlucky people--the forcibly displaced--those fleeing for their lives under the wheel of a state or local force intent on squeezing all the resources and livelihood out of their people.

Imagine one day that all the people whose name starts with N-Z start to commit atrocities against all of those with names starting in the first half of the alphabet. Or visa versa, to throw you into the victimized batch. You are caught out. First, disbelieving that it could happen here, where your parents or grandparents built the community; next, anger and if you make it through ignorance and the reptilian response with your life, you flee.

Running is not easy work, running for your life is a maze of pitfalls. Safety is hundreds of miles away, traversed with children clinging to your side, with hazards around every turn, arriving eventually alongside thousands of others for a period of waiting likely to extend for years, even decades. There are 79.5 million people displaced in the world today, a population greater than California, Texas, and Washington state combined.

As a Development Director for the non-profit I co-founded, Women of the World, I aim to lead all of our grants with the theme of success and overcoming challenges, not the suffering and needs. For our programs to be successful, our clients have to become self-reliant through efforts large and small, collaborative and individual. These successes are thankfully frequent. Everyday women lead their families out of dire poverty, learn English, get an education, build community, and serve locally and back in their home countries where liberated and strong women are the remedy for the violence and despondence facing their homes. However, forcibly displaced people living among us as our new neighbors have even more to share than grit and smarts. They act as a mirror to our humanity and offer a perspective on fear.

Kindness to the less fortunate, to those seeking refuge, is the humane response. There is an optimum number of displaced people any nation state can let in, but our posture must be one of understanding the role that luck--and luck alone--had in the shoes being on the respective foot. This philosophical thought-experiment is known as the "veil of ignorance" and supposes that you make moral and political decisions before you have knowledge of your gender, racial, and socioeconomic identity. Obviously only a man would create the Taliban, only a White person would create the Confederacy, and only the landed aristocracy would create feudal Europe. A moral political response to the modern refugee crisis is a humane one that addresses the unrest, supports neighboring nation states that bear the burden of the flow of displaced people, and offers a relief-valve worldwide to resettle refugees and asylum seekers for the benefit of BOTH parties.

Our humanity and policies will continue to be tested as the climate cancer makes more land uninhabitable causing at first wars implicitly related to equatorial warming and eventually explicitly related to the climate cancer. These mass migrations will require solutions that do not imperil the unlucky survivor of war nor the lucky nation less impacted by illiberalism, war, and a collapsing climate.

Which leads to the second way that I have found the forcibly displaced to be an example--in how they overcome fear and work the problem. A collapsing climate, social unrest, unseen viral pandemics, and the ordinary hardships of being poor cause legitimate disquiet, depression, and fear... none of which is beneficial to cognitively working the problem and figuring out how to act with humanity, dexterity, and direction. We have to reduce the static and see the problem and the path clearly. Only then will we have a chance at solving the issue and marshaling the resources to fix it.

I have seen many refugee women cut through their fears and find a path for themselves and their kids. They have literally run for their lives, so they don't fear social gracelessness in learning English, nor do they mistake asking for help for helplessness. They cut through the fear and find the space open to problems AND their solutions, they let their eyes adjust to the darkness and open their hearts to the light.

This is not an easy skill. With all of the discord, social media outrage, and racism, it is easy to fight back with righteousness and disdain, shoring up embattlements, and striking back with equal force. But solutions require creativity and calm, the ability to measure next steps against resources, and make the boldest possible step along the long arc of history toward justice. Like the forcibly displaced women I know, we must strike out along the most reasonable path to solve the issue in front of us, persevere to the next problem, and the next, until our practiced problem solving is our purpose.

The Great Influenza: Book Review

"There was terror afoot in 1918, real terror. The randomness of death brought that terror home. So did its speed... So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that.

Those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best.

A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart." -- John M. Barry

These are the words that end the afterword written in 2018, 100 years after the pandemic and two years from being sad example of history plagiarizing itself. In 20th century America, the lies were meant to protect the war effort, in 21st century America, the lies are meant to benefit only one person--Donald Trump--and as I write this with 80-ish days to the election, it appears that his mishandling of the pandemic is the chief reason for his reelection issues (and he should be held accountable for this abject failure to do anything of substance).

This is not only a book of warning for leaders and the press on how to shape the narrative of a pandemic, in fact, it is mostly a story of the rise of medicine out of the dark ages of alchemy. The doctors and health professionals profiled in this work are without question ahead of their time. The fact that they implemented an impressive short term 180 from bloodletting to germ theory across the nation and then managed to identify the viral nature of the pandemic and the initial discovery of genetic material is thanks to their grit and unadulterated commitment to the scientific method.

Interesting and horrifying tidbits include:

That the undiagnosed influenza in President Wilson likely led to his decline in the Versailles Treaty talks that ended WWI but depressed Germany so intensely as to lead to WWII and the rise of fascism in Germany, Japan, and Italy. The flu nearly extinguished the Inuit people of Alaska, whole villages were wiped out. And no one wrote about it, there is very little literature from 1918 or about the pandemic even though there is much great literature about the horrors of WWI that was ending at that time.

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, this book stands as a testament to the intelligence and bravery of medical professionals, especially the nurses that are called upon to suffer alongside the dying and in 1918 were not paid a fair wage for this labor of grace. It shows the grit of scientists to doggedly work the problem to get a life-saving answer and failing that, the suffering of those directly in the maelstrom of historic trends and forces. Finally, it teaches us that civilization is worth fighting for, even while being physically distanced, we are lucky to have the internet to prevent social distancing--so long as we use it not for misinformation and fear but hope and preventative information.

Previously published on https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/36686872-justin-harnish

Bottleneck:Why Looming Existential Crisis are Even Worse Than They Seem

The global pandemic and climate crisis are worse than they seem. I know… we are all struggling through, trying to sort out how to thoroughly wash our hands, keep our kids from going stir crazy, and not glare at people who don’t seem to understand the concept of six feet, so why–for fuck’s sake–make it worse?

But it is and I have sorted out why. It’s not as Debbie Downer-ish as you’d think. It’s actually a little bit hopeful. The reason that all existential crisis–crisis that could wreck human society–are gonna be worse for us and the next two to three generations is because failing to solve them eliminates humankind’s opportunity at a truly mesmerizing future.

Before you poo poo posterity, think on this: humans have been doing modern science roughly since the time of Galileo, circa 1600. It took us 350ish years to work out how to create our first universal machine, the classical computer, which has given rise to science and industry propelling us toward truly intelligent machines and quantum computational ability like that which is fundamental to the universe.

So where does another 70 years of computational progress or another 350 years of science place humans?

It is difficult to imagine the new technologies, the range of our interstellar travel, or our computational sophistication–but one thing is certain–the understanding of the human brain and therefore our states of well-being will be positively transcendent when compared to even the most gifted flow or meditation practitioner of today.

Our progeny in this scientific future will still have complex problems to solve and life will not be wholly without its unsavory bits, but our species will not be threatened again for billions of years if we get through the bottleneck of the coming generations. We can be heroes. Our statues can stand on distant planets thanks to our solutions to the issues our fits and starts in science sometimes caused, other times obscured.

The rest of the world has figured out this pandemic’s playbook, even if America has not. COVID–19 is a JV scrimmage compared to other possible viral pandemics and we will have a lot of error correcting to do to get our response honed. Political decision making has not been characterized by great uses of data and improvements in scientific knowledge development needs to be put in place, but there are signs that we will learn from this year's errors.

But climate change posses a far more daunting challenge. Unlike masks and social distancing for the pandemic, there are no simple solutions for climate change. Politics, economics, technology, and conservation need to collaborate more adroitly than they ever have before, the developed world and emerging industrialized nations will need separate solutions that respect human well-being and self-determination, and governments are going to have to foot the bill for the R&D on large projects, few of which will ever show impact for any private partners.

There is no greater legacy than solving species threatening problems. For the first time in our history, we have the capabilities in place to creatively speculate, draw on rich computational characterizations of components of the issue, and engage vast resources efficiently and effectively to create technological solutions.

However, the bottleneck is not technological, instead we lack good collaborative and decision making methods to counter global problems. Even when we look at the data, we do so behind a veil of national interest. Our history of national success blinds us to the likelihood that most existential problems must be solved at a different level and with global partners.

A Green New Deal is a step in the right direction, it combines economic and scientific efforts to reduce climate change, but electoral incentives are not in place to encourage conservatives to improve this legislation. This is unfortunate decision making on a historic scale. Making existential risks and their solutions taboo increases costs and harmful impacts while diminishing our options. Solutions are never perfect, but bad faith arguments based on a false fidelity to a present power dynamic will reduce opportunities available even to great technical advances.

The problems are looming, global, and existential; however, they are all solvable. Our scientific, technical, and computational creativity is up to the task. What remains to be seen is if we can overcome our bickering to triage and define issues and collaborate on their solutions. If we can do that, a long future of transcendent human well-being is very likely.

Is Consciousness an Innie or an Outie?

Even given all of our empirical science, there is plenty of room to speculate on the fundamental nature of the universe. Nature might be particles all the way down, but both the processes we know–The Laws of Physics–and those we don’t, might be responsible for their actions. Having come this far down the path, it is mere baby steps to speculate a process ontology and computational universe–one that not only manipulates existence, but also experience, our conscious states.

There is more science than fiction to a conscious universe. Donald Hoffman builds a conscious network out of our shared evolutionary-fitness user interface that stands on top of objective existence in his theory of conscious realism. In my book, Meaning in the Multiverse, I posit that interference between qualia in near-parallel universes creates a distribution of conscious states. This speculation is falsifiable through the study of virtualizing experience in quantum computers.

However near or far modern neuroscience is from understanding consciousness, the fun of meditating is experiencing the mystery for yourself. In the lab of your mind, you are the most preeminent theoretician and most dexterous technician. It is important to travel light into meditation and not take a bunch of metaphysical baggage, but the question of “what would it be like if consciousness was just a different sort of universal process” seems to be a relevant object of meditation.

Consciousness–the world-navel that it is–most often seems to me to be “an innie.” I recognize the nature of my headlessness, that where my head should be is the vibrant world, but experience the contents of consciousness differently based on the sense organ they act upon. I can experience that the thought of self is also arising in consciousness, but it is a persistent model that tells me with great accuracy where sounds are from and if I can throw a ball to out there were the shadows and lights grow dim.

The idea that “I” am on the edge of my experience and consciousness comes from within me–from my brain–is my experience in most of waking life as well as in most of my meditation.

But do we experience consciousness as a field, as a network, from outside our selves? I have had these experiences and have gotten reports from some friends that meditate that they have experienced this selfless state of consciousness. I feel as though I am at one with a plane of infinite spacetime or that my experience is distributed.

These brief windows into enlightenment feel intimate. In this construct alone, I experience a loving universe.

I prefer the word intimacy because it is an invitation to come closer, to fully embrace and lovingly engage with your life right where you are, rather than trying to move beyond it. It is a recognition that we already belong. To me, intimacy better expresses what I imagine enlightenment might actually feel like. – Frank Ostaseski

I have collected little mantras in my studies of experience. Each of them helps loosen the mental-model-of-the-self’s hold on the projection of consciousness and brings access to a multiversal consciousness:

“what it is like” “being consciousness” “intimate”

Feel free to use them as you experience consciousness both as an innie and and outie… and let me know what you think. @justinaharnish