It has been more than two weeks since my last post. As I’ve said in the past, I do not wish to write unless I have something to say. These past two weeks haven’t entirely fallen into this situation. Not that I did not have something to say, but perhaps more that I didn’t want to blindly rant with no focus or end goal to my post. Honestly, this post may still be similarly unfocused and random, but I feel like writing at least.
So much has happened in the past two weeks. Probably the most noteworthy item is the acquittal of Donald Trump from his impeachment trial. This particular item has been quite taxing on me personally. It is very difficult for me to resolve what I “know” about the situation and the results of the situation. To be very specific, it seemed to me that the impeachment was unquestionable; there was no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump was guilty of inciting violence against his own government. What’s more, I also agree that his choices and actions are not restricted to the events of January 6, but to his choices and actions for several months previous. I would even agree that his actions and choices from as far back as four years ago also played their part, and even beyond that.
To be quite frank, I find Donald Trump to be a very disreputable individual. If I had to describe what sort of person he was, I would begin by suggesting he was a textbook narcissist and egoist. That is, his world view is focused like a laser on his own life and immediate environment. Not necessarily that he is choosing to harm other individuals in the world, but that he is mostly unconcerned with other individuals in the world. Given the opportunity to speak with him in person, I would not be surprised if I found him to be a solipsist. If I am correct, it would certainly go a long way to explaining his choices and actions throughout the time that I’ve been aware of his existence.
So why might all this be important to you? It certainly is important to me, mostly because I choose to value this situation in and among all the circumstances I find myself in. But you are not me, I’m pretty sure. So you might not decide this is as important to you as it seems to be for me. I do not believe I am a solipsist. In fact, as per Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, I would not only like to believe that you exist as your own conscious entity with similar freedoms and projects to my own, but I would like to cooperate with you in realizing your freedoms and projects. If I didn’t, I do not think I would have much reason to write this post at all.
When I was younger, I did sometimes think and feel as though I was the only being in the universe. Like Rene Decartes, I would look out the window and see hats and coats moving about like strange automations without an internal “soul.” Even to this day, I cannot find a significant amount of compelling evidence to justify a belief in other consciousnesses, as I am unable to access those consciousnesses directly. And, as I find more disturbing, I cannot share my consciousness with others either. For a period of time in my youth, I actively sought out a telepathic individual, simply so that they could hear my thoughts and could then validate my own existence. I have since realized that it might be best if I never find such a telepath, as I’d be dooming them with the exposure to my inner world, a punishment that I believe might be an incredible harm.
It was my choice to believe in a world outside myself. It was faith, in the truest sense of the word. I need to believe that others exist in this world. For others not to exist, for me to be truly alone, would suggest that I should kill myself right at this moment. I have absolutely no reason for being if I am to exist entirely alone. I serve absolutely no purpose in the grand scheme of the universe. At least, that is how I feel. I know of a great many people out there who would passionately argue otherwise.
Thus, even without sufficient evidence, I choose to believe that there are other consciousnesses in the world beyond my own. They may not be precisely or exactly the same as mine, but they are similar enough that I ought to treat them as their own, with freedom and projects of their own. For me, it is this very fact that has overshadowed all my choices and decisions in my life. It is very much the reason that virtually every job I have accepted has been one where I support or assist others in realizing their projects. I am at my most comfortable when helping others, even sometimes at my own expense.
It has gotten to the point that I don’t really have my own projects. Not really. All my projects are extensions of other people’s projects. Those things I try to accomplish are really just parts and pieces of other people’s projects. I don’t mind this fact at all; I even cherish it. For I see no reason to quibble over the things in my own life. Would I like to live a life of luxury and ease? Perhaps, but I’m just as happy not to. I don’t need excessive things. At this very moment, I am actually rather cold and uncomfortable. My home is a bit drafty and old. Where I lived before this was much nicer and so much warmer. I admit, there are days (like today) where I regret having moved.
However, I moved with a purpose. My wife. My partner. She is the most important person to me. I love her, as is my choice to do so. And so I moved with her so that she might pursue a project that she had. To help her realize a dream she once had. I do everything I do for her. Ultimately I do. Because anything I do for myself serves no real purpose. Sometimes, I wonder if there is something that is the reverse of solipsism; a situation where perhaps I am the only being that does NOT exist in this world.
This idea of reverse solipsism is not new to me. After reading Immanuel Kant’s first critique, when he suggests that time and space may simply be forms of our intuitions, I took some time to consider whether the world itself might exist without such things. That is, could space and time be simply descriptive concepts, where they themselves do not exist in themselves. Of course, to truly make any headway with such things, it is best to consider the alternative. What would a world without space or time be like?
As you may already realize, I’ve been pursuing the question of whether time exists as a thing in itself since I began this blog. I even ran across another incredible YouTube video that further pursues this question: “When Is Now?” by “It’s Okay To Be Smart” (https://youtu.be/3WRgikuVZpQ). To be fair, the video is focused more on the existence of “now” than of time, but his analysis is still quite compelling and I enjoyed watching it very much. Time is still very much up in the air for me, but what about space?
For an essay I wrote about Kant, I realized that there existed a world that used space as a descriptive element, but that space was not a fundamental feature of that world. I admit, when I brought this to the attention of my professor, it became the point of a heated debate, but I believe I am correct in this. Consider the idea of simulated reality, similar to the world that existed inside the Matrix (from the movie series of the same name). That simulated reality is described using space, but itself does not exist in space. Sure, we might argue that the memory storage devices that “contain” the information regarding the Matrix themselves necessarily exist in space, but the information itself does not exist in space. Or, to look at it in another way, the information that describes the world of the Matrix is not itself organized spatially. As the films are very fond of expressing, the Matrix “code” looks like this:
As you can see, putting aside how this “code” is presented to the viewer, the code itself that is describing the Matrix is itself not spatially organized. If anything, it might possibly be more closely related to time, in that there will be code that comes before, and code that comes after, but otherwise the code does not subsist next to itself. Like a typical computer program, a fact that is often obfuscated by many people fond of discussing Object Oriented Programming.
To clarify my last point, in the case of most popular programming languages presently, where you generate a window and a bunch of widgets that each cause something to happen, the program is still running linearly. There is the main loop, a routine who’s purpose is to simply repeatedly watch for events to take place. Did the user press that button just now? How about now? No? I will then check again in a moment. Over and over and over again. It is still a linear program, it’s true nature hidden from us by libraries and other bits of code that we use, so we don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” each time.
As I am fond of reminding people on a regular basis, computers are simply machines that are very, very good at doing very, very simple computations (such as addition and subtraction), very, very fast, and that is all. It is tempting to think that a computer is much more than this when, by performing millions upon millions of these computations each second, it appears that the computer has generated a beautiful piece of art or shown us a complicated video of a film, or even by generating that magnificent 3D video game environment which we enjoy playing in. In the end, by doing a tremendous amount of calculations on simply numbers, the computers have shown the result. It is not that dissimilar to how Deep Thought, Douglas Adams famous super computer, determined that “the answer to life, the universe, and everything,” was simply 42.
It is tempting to apply meaning and value to things simply because they are complicated, especially when that complexity reached a level that we are unable to explain. Like modern neural networks, using thousandth order polynomials with thousands of coefficients in order to seemingly interpret handwritten numbers into their equivalently intended numerals, we humans do not actually understand what those polynomials are “doing” in order to accomplish the task. In the case of neural networks, does our lack of understanding suggest that the polynomial has gained sentience, and will soon start expressing a freedom and pursuing its own projects?
This finally brings us back to my original point. There is no more evidence to suggest that humans actually have freedom or free will than the case of the neural network I present above. For all we know, we are simply the most complicated machines that we have encountered, performing incredible amounts of computations and other operations each second, giving us the illusory appearance of consciousness and sentience. We want to believe in souls, the unmeasurable part of the human being, likely responsible for the free will we “must” possess that provides for us an escape from the hard deterministic structures that our science not only suggests is the only thing that exists, but cannot do otherwise.
If I bow down to the actual evidence, I must conclude that I am the only being in existence, for it is only my own consciousness that I have access to. Mine is the only consciousness that I can “feel” or “know.” I have no access to any others. For all I can determine, all other seemingly free beings are simply incredibly complicated, deterministically following organic machines going about their preprogrammed tasks each and everyday. I can “inject” something out of the deterministic order, or so I want to believe, but the evidence does not support this. My choice to write this blog and share this with you was predetermined in my youth when my father purchased a Texas Instruments TI99/4A for me. And, to be fair, even his decision to do that was further predetermined by events from his past as well.
My only real recourse in this situation is to have faith that others exist. That, despite my not feeling or experiencing other consciousnesses, I will choose to believe they still exist. I choose to believe my wife has a consciousness similar to my own, with the same sorts of freedom and projects I have. And it is beholden to me to cooperate with her in the pursuit of those projects. It is beholden to me to do this for everyone around me, as much as I am able to. For that at least is something like a purpose. That is something like a value.