Crash Early, Crash Often (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 3)

by Venkatesh G. Rao

But how much you seek to see, versus how much you seek to do, represents a real trade-off. You choose based on your preferred mix of meaning extraction and direct experience.

What keeps the snowflake in check is the act of creating in the external world. If staring in a mirror strengthens and feeds the snowflake’s larger-than-life identity, the act of external creation dissolves it.

Time, of course, is the merciless slaughterer of all these infinitely qualified anchors of the meaning of life. Wait long enough, and every truth will crumble. Wait long enough, and every value will dissolve into moral ambiguity. Wait long enough, and every habit will decay, first into ritual, then into farce. Wait long enough, and every slain demon will rise again. And then you will be free. Something almost nobody wants, but almost everyone is forced to endure past 40.

Forty years is not enough to specifically undermine every truth, value, and habit, but it is long enough to generally undermine the idea that there are non-transient truths, values, and habits. You’ve seen too many business cycles, too many political cycles, too many cultural cycles, too many saints and sinners trading places, to believe that this time a source of meaning will endure.

Being exactly wrong is actually a useful thing to be. It’s the next best thing to being right. You can get to right by flipping exactly wrong. Flipping somewhat wrong merely makes you somewhat wrong in a new way. To seek meaning is to believe in truth before virtue, virtue before beauty, beauty before creation, creation before victory. This is the honor code of meaning-seeking. If you follow this code perfectly, you will make exactly no money.

This means, incidentally, that you should avoid the temptation to figure life out completely. Because the great risk is you’ll simplify your life until it can be completely figured out. In fact, if you sense that happening, you must immediately do something pointlessly confusing and complicate your life so it gets back to the edge of incoherence.

Fortunately, the lessons you can easily generalize and share are typically not original, and the lessons that are original typically cannot be generalized and shared.

Imagine though, that you want to structure the encoding of your memories for transplanting in the

most open-ended manner possible. A manner that amplifies the generative potential of lives it is attached to in the future, rather than constraining it to something like golf or Asimov’s laws of robotics. You’d approach the design very differently.

Googling Past Lives If the goal of an afterlife mechanism is to perpetuate an evolving body of memories (that serve as prior lives to the future vessel), you get an infinite-game afterlife agent. In designing such an agent, you’d ignore most proceduralized skill memories completely. Instead, you’d go for a Big Data approach: store as much raw memory as possible, in as unprocessed (or organically pr...

Your uploaded brain at death would ideally be zero percent code, 100% data. Messy, varied, redundant data. Data that exists in various stages of digestion, from raw sensory memories to half-formed stories to settled long-term memories with canonical narratives attached. There would be abstractions weak and strong, well-worn and unfinished too. Code might exist too, but in bracketed, dormant form, rather than as ac...

sensory memory. Note that you would make no particular attempt to “finish” your memory within your lifetime or put your memory affairs in order. Any state you stop at is a good enough state to be transplanted. An interface to such a memory is not actually that hard to imagine....

Imagine such a living memory being given to the transplant recipient simply as a searchable collection. You could evolve the interface for the transplant recipient as follows. Let’s call this recipient YouTwo, and the donor YouOne. Version 1 would simply be a Google-like searchable app on a smart phone. If YouTwo sees a cat, he/she/it searches for “cat” and sees a reverse chronological stream of cat images and associations from YouOne’s life. YouTwo can edit anything from YouOne’s past that comes up. Version 2 would automate the linkage as a sort of soft memory surgery. Anything YouTwo experiences would trigger a search whose results could be reviewed in p...

them (for instance) into an augmented reality (AR) headset that juxtaposes YouOne memories onto YouTwo experiences in a seamless way. This would not be organic though. If YouTwo meets a friend of YouOne whom he has never seen before, there would be no recognition as such. Just an explicit cue that “you knew this guy in a past life.” You might edit your experience by hitting like and dislike ...

Version 4 would achieve a certain degree of coarse and organic temporal integration, and start to blur the two memories. YouTwo would interleave living his own life with reliving YouOne’s life. Perhaps for an hour every day, YouTwo simply lays back in an armchair with an AR headset on, and “remembers” random memories pulled up via association with recent experiences of his own, forming weak links in an evolving temporal memory graph over time. In this scenario, the AR headset might flash a pair of images: YouOne’s friend from the past life, and a random stranger encountered that day by YouTwo, juxtaposed in order to form an association. This association would be pur...

and present in YouTwo’s mind. If he/she sees the friend later, he/she would begin to have doubts: “Is this somebody I’ve seen before, or is this a YouOne memory?” That blurring would be a feature rather than a bug. Version 5 and beyond would use neurosurgical implants to create ongoing subconscious temporal integration, and might even try to piggyback on dreaming past lives into current living memory. The grafting code would also attempt to integrate narratives rather than just sensory memories. I won’t go into this, but there are some obvious and non-mysterious ways to blur present and past stories, so you start dissolving the distinction between stories that happened to YouTwo and stories that happened to YouOne. You would also eventually have actuation of things like “gut feelings” (perhaps machine recognition of a face from YouOne’s life would trigger a little squirt of stomach acid ...

a 2-month-old’s (pre-verbal) brain with the prior-life memories of a sixty year old. Or a famous mathematician’s memories into an idiot’s brain. You’d want to achieve some synchronization within a life, bringing up age-appropriate memories through life (creating a sort of continuity and smoothing effect). You’d also attempt to do some matching of personality traits. An introvert’s memories transplanted to an extrovert host would probably just result in incoherence and poor integration. This whole category of engineering detail could be considered a case of handling impedance mismatches.

Possibly, you could test out an entire library of stored memories against a new host and transplant the best match in some sense. And of course, there are other wild possibilities such as implanting the memories of multiple people into one host, or achieving a trading-places sort of memory switch between two living people. But those don’t add much philosophical fodder to the base case. The base case of splicing the end of one living memory into the beginning of another, smoothly and with preservation of rewrite capabilities across the junction, captures much of the challenge.

The infinite game brings with it the moral imperative to do anything that keeps the game going in a more generative way, and I think seeking memory immortality qualifies. I’d certainly like the memories of some interesting person who died the day I was born grafted onto my mind. The human body, being a product of evolution, is not perfectly designed. Some parts of our body are under-designed: our teeth and bones aren’t really meant to last more than about 40 years, so we have to start taking strange measures to life-extend those parts. But some parts of the human body are also over-designed. In particular, I think our memory capacity is far higher than our lifespans. Our brains seem to be designed to store and use memories for perhaps several hundred years. Perhaps thousands.

Humans don’t really seek eternal bliss or or try to avoid eternal pain. Instead, we really seek eternal interestingness.

But at higher levels, imagination is necessary for tackling life. This is because, at higher levels of the hierarchy, the problem is surplus freedom: what do you do when there is nothing specific you have to do? Where there are many sufficient paths forward, but no necessary ones?

Whatever you do, it turns out that being imaginative in dealing with the challenge of surplus freedom amounts to what Steve Jobs called putting a dent in the universe. Wanting to put a dent in the universe is not a matter of first-world entrepreneurial self-aggrandizement. It is a matter of life and death for everybody who is not killed by something else first.

Lack of imagination can be a problem for the 99%, but is potentially fatal for the rich, because they have the resources to ignore the challenge of self-actualization long enough for it to become insurmountable.

If you’re luckier, there is a harsh, but non-deterministic constraint: lower-level needs dictate that you can do anything so long as it is of a certain complexity above “nothing.” At lower levels of the hierarchy, there are many areas of behavior that exhibit such a probabilistic link between doing an indeterminate something and survival.

The human fear of self-actualization necessitates structures that enable imitation and conformity. There would be riots demanding such structures if they didn’t exist.

No government in history has ever had to deal with the problem of too many of its citizens wanting to live so imaginatively that institutions based on conformity and imitation become unsustainable. If anything, the problem has always been the reverse one: getting enough of the population to act with enough imagination to keep the institutions alive.

Equally, choosing a non-imaginative path even when an imaginative path opens up is a symptom of the natural fear of self-actualization. The fear is based on the unconscious (and correct) belief that awakening dormant needs might kill you, and the (incorrect) assumption that not doing so will ensure that they remain asleep indefinitely.

Unlike imagination-optional life problems, self-actualization is a problem which requires imagination because it is about facing up to the part of you that is unique, whether or not you actually want to be different. The part that is one-in-seven-billion-unique. That part that can turn into a psychological cancer and kill you if you repress it too strongly.

The claim that imagination is a survival skill at higher Maslow levels is implicitly the claim that self-actualization is an imperative: something you must do and something you cannot choose to not do.

You might have your ups and downs, but if you’re not royally screwing up, chances are you’ll gradually take care of the lower layers and hit diminishing returns with each, causing the bottleneck to shift upwards slowly. The self actualization imperative will grow from an occasional pinprick that you only notice on unsatisfying vacations after the third pina colada, to a stab of misery every weekend, to a daily bout of angst, and ultimately into a continuously growing sense of dissatisfaction that prevents you from functioning at all. If you’re really lucky, you might get away with just a short mid-life crisis before the health concerns of an aging body drag you down to the physiological layer again. If you enjoy robust good health, financial security and satisfying relationships, you’re likely headed for a kind of psychological trouble our technologically less-advanced forebears never had to deal with in their less imaginative times.

But by the time you hit your mid-thirties, the self-actualization imperative turns into an urgent and unavoidable concern, where continued neglect can be fatal. If current efforts to extend the average human lifespan to beyond a century succeed, I suspect failure-to-self-actualize will become the leading cause of death (or madness) in the developed world.

When the mask wins, you are treated like a person, but don’t feel like one (what I called gollumization is a special extreme case). When the daemon wins, you feel like a person but are treated as less than one by others. Either zero-sum outcome is the beginning of the end. The only way out is to integrate the mask and the daemon in a non-zero-sum way. This is self-actualization

actualization and it takes imagination.

I’ll offer a definition: imagination is the ability to create unpredictable new meaning while generating more freedom than you consume. The experience of being imaginative is simply the experience of being alive to possibilities, in an open-ended way. The experience of seeing many possible meanings and futures in any given fragment of external reality (and not just the ones your shadow has chosen to inhabit).

Self-expression and increasing uniqueness of identity are results of such use, but are not the objective of it. You can tell self-actualizing apart from shadowyak shaving because the consumers of the output are often very different from the producers, and often read very different meanings into it. Meanings that often surprise the creator. What is created during self-actualization is free in a sense: it is not owned by the creator’s shadow or identified with it. Others have the ability to read or project their own, highly dissimilar meanings into it. That ultimately is the sine qua non of self-actualization: the creation of a net return on invested freedom, or what is usually called generativity

Let’s try an ambitious definition: Self-actualization is the imaginative embodiment of internal realities (what the daemon feels) in the form of a dent in the universe: a surprising and free external reality that actualizes a new possibility for all.

Unlike creative projection, the process o...

the mask instead of sneaking past it, and the new external realities are recognizable as being authored by the integrated part of the self, but not exclusively claimed by it. Such a surprising, new and free reality is a dent in the universe. An example is a new technological artifact that might be put to wildly different...

An unmistakeable sign is that you are able to make money off such creation from strangers who share no tribal affinities with you, without investing significant effort in signalling shared priceless values

The mask operates in either an impressionist mode (letting more information in than out) or expressionist mode (putting out more information than it is letting in). Generativity is lost by letting one mode dominate. The impressionist mode can be fatal if the external environment is too chaotic for the daemon to process — this is why we seek out familiarity and beauty when the daemon is weak. If we fail to take such restorative actions, the mask deadens and the light starts to visibly go out behind the eyes. That is one kind of death of generativity. The expressionist mode operates in exactly the reverse way. It seeks to create unfamiliar new beauty. When the outflow of imaginative creativity is not strong enough to conquer the chaos in the environment with a sufficiently large dent, it backslides into projective authoritarianism. If we fail to rein in ambition when such overreach happens, the mask of authority turns cruel, demanding and grasping. The eyes turn a cartoon-villain red. That is the other kind of death of generativity.

When outflow and inflow are in a dynamic balance, harmonizing mask and daemon continuously, in an environment with just enough surplus chaos to occupy surplus freedom and drive the process, you get sustained generativity: the process of manufacturing more freedom than you consume through the act of living. The mask comes alive and the daemon shines through.

The key is to freak out early and freak out often (FEFO) in an agile way, and work towards a lifestyle that (ideally) feels like one continuously integrated and deployed mid-life crisis. There is actually good intellectual justification for approaching life this way. It’s called the Lindy effect, which says you’ll live as long

again as you already have, until you don’t. Which means you’re always at mid-life. Until you’re not.

See, that’s a negative mindset. It’s not that you have to do it all over again, but that you get to. A crisis is too good a thing to waste. Not only should you have as

many as you have time for, you should succumb to each as quickly and completely as possible, and then bounce back as quickly as you can so you can have another one. Resistance is not just futile, it is counter-productive.

A pro-tip is important to note here: the size of the crisis has nothing to do with the size of the crash. Not only will every crash not be a Magnitude 9.5 monster on the Mahayana-Richter scale, leading to a major You n.0 release, but you can’t even predict the size based on the size of the crisis. A major life event might only cause a minor crash, and a minor case of barista-rudeness might provoke a major crash.

How, you might wonder, do urgent conversations help design buildings, user interfaces and corporate strategies? I wondered that too, but some architect friends I recently acquired have assured me that all these activities are actually well within the scope of the field, which is really about using Design to render visible the invisible nature of your place in the universe.

On the other hand, the pale blue dot is a somewhat impractical source of inspiration for ambitions of astronomical grandeur. You can’t easily write a personal growth tract titled How to Pale-Blue-Dot the Shit Out of Your Dent-in-the-Universe Unicorn with Evernote, though I suspect emerging productivity star Tiago Forte could pull it off.

You see, history has historically been how we choose what data to forget. Our brains work that way too. We don’t form memories to write our stories. We write our stories to suppress inconvenient memories. If you ever go spelunking in the Big Data dump that is your subconscious, you will find a spaghetti landscape of crime-scene tape. History is the technology of forgetting, not the technology of remembering.

Because if you’re cursed with the inability to not pay attention to what’s going on, it is the best way to sufficiently distort your perspective to find passion for life. It’s the next best thing after a true passionate blindness.