Tag: Idiocracy

Idiocracy: Terrifyingly Accurate

crimson

After a long day of work, or even after returning from a nice vacation, my partner and I will sit down and turn on the television to watch a show. Our desire for the novel often finds us seeking out entertainment that we have not yet witnessed. Spectacle is certainly pervasive.

In seeking out our entertainment, we often take risks. The risk that a particular show or story will not be nearly as impressive or thought provoking as something we have seen in the past. Recently, our journey brought us to Snowflake Mountain.

Like any good train wreck, we had watched several episodes before my partner finally put her foot down. We simply could not watch this reality series any further after the disaster that ensued for the bit we did somehow tolerate. This show is so bad, we had to place it among such greats as Battlefield Earth.

Briefly, the show follows a group of rather entitled, very privileged, young adults who have been tricked into attending survival training in the wilderness. However, to say tricked may not entirely be accurate, as it seems clear after the opening episode, that these people are remaining entirely out of their own volition. In fact, it is almost as if they had decided to attend to try and better themselves.

Thus, the first major issue with this show is the inconsistent, often contradictory information the audience receives regarding the status of the contestants and what may or may not be going on. This is quickly followed up with the obvious issue with their alleged instructors, who themselves are equally entitled, privileged, and young. Of course, the instructors allegedly come from far more qualifying backgrounds, having allegedly served in the military.

I am by no means an expert at survival in the wilderness, but I confess an interest in such things. It started when my partner took a liking to the series Naked and Afraid. If you are not already aware, the level of fabrication in that show boggles the mind. When stacked against the likes of the History Channel’s Alone series, there is a great deal of wonder how inexperienced people with no clothing and the option of merely one object to take with them are able to survive longer than experienced survivalists with over 20 survival items as well as the clothes on their back.

The inconsistencies in Snowflake Mountain are hard enough to take, but the contestants themselves are somehow worse. Their inability to navigate basic social interactions with other people make me wonder how they have survived this long in an urban setting, never mind something more rustic. Are these people real? I am convinced they must be actors playing a part.

It is as if the definition the show offers, that a snowflake is “a young person who is considered overly emotional, easily offended, and dramatic,” was actually used in order to generate characters of appropriate stereotyping to meet the show’s requirements. If people like this actually exist in our modern world, God help us all.

Another noteworthy mention includes deciding that using a hachet to chop down a tree is reasonable (and safer) than using a proper axe. My god, the contestants hand is mere inches from the strike zone, and the instructors seem to find this acceptable. Of course, those with keen eyes may have noticed that the tree was prepared ahead of time, its upper trunk secured with ropes before they even begin. Whew, thank God they were keeping safety in mind for these poor snowflakes.

I am ranting. I apologize. Best to get to the point of all this.

There was a film that came out in 2006 entitled Idiocracy. It was a comedy, offering an extremely cynical view of what our future might hold. The premise is simple enough: consider that those in our society who seem to contribute the most are too busy to procreate, leaving those who are bleeding the social systems dry to fill the empty spaces with their offspring. Such a situation would seem to suggest that those genetically gifted with higher intelligence and greater innate abilities will be weeded out of the gene pool, given a sufficient amount of time, lowering the average global intelligence of all populations on this planet. Thus, the story spends most of its time about 500 years in our future, in a world that results from such circumstances.

When the audience is first introduced to one of these future people, we find him sitting in the laziest La-Z-Boy to have ever graced existence, complete with built in toilet, so one never has to miss their favorite show. And we find this person watching an incredibly large, 100 inch screen only a couple feet from his face. Sounds like at home IMAX, if not for the inhuman amount of advertising on the screen. There are so many ads surrounding the actual content, that the content itself is contained in a box smaller than most people’s modern laptop monitors.

And why stop there. The content is itself incredibly important. This man is watching his favorite show. It is actually most people’s favorite show we later find out. The title of this show is Ow! My Balls! A reality show where the protagonist is pummeled with an array of objects to his groin.

As the story progresses, the audience is provided many, many more examples of how the ethics and morality have degenerated over the centuries, suggesting that popular coffee shops, like Starbucks, now offer handjobs as part of their combination deals.

The show is meant to be funny. The story is entirely tongue in cheek. Anyone who thinks this show is even attempting to say anything serious ought to be drawn and quartered. And yet, here I am suggesting that it has something rather important to say.

When stacked up to the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even my dear Ghost in the Shell, it is immediately clear that the picture Idiocracy paints is far, far more likely to take place. In fact, as is indicated by the very title of the former, in 2001 we have barely left this planet, let alone colonized the moon or sent our first manned mission to Jupiter. In the latter, we are only a few years away from cyberbrains, allegedly to appear on the market as soon as 2029; that is less than 7 years from now.

I won’t go into the issues with mind/body dualism here. Only that I think Ghost in the Shell cannot be as a result of a misunderstanding regarding how human minds and bodies relate to one another. Nor will I dwell on the fact that many of the events taking place over the past two years would seem to suggest a complete reversal of the “progress” humans have achieve over the past hundred.

Were I to take a moment and try to predict the future as I think it would unfold, considering that I was a child during a time when there were no laptops, no cellular phones (never mind smartphones), no iPods, barely tone phones, no CDs, no DVDs, barely home computers, no Internet, etc… I would suggest that the next hundred years will look much like the previous, except for there being a much grander illusion of change. That is, human activity will, I think, continue to behave in much the same fashion as it has for the past two millennia, with the wealthy and powerful continuing to oppress and exploit the majority of people, utilizing the tools of mass manipulation (such as marketing and propaganda and religion and government), in order to get what they want. The technology will change, sure. It will appear that things get easier, though the reverse will be the case.

There is only one thing that I think can stop the engine of humanity dead in its tracks, and that will be the Earth itself. Mother Nature. Maybe. As we clearly do not understand it as well as we might like or think that we do, it is hard to say whether the world is really coming to an end right now. Hard to say whether the amount of damage we have caused will really end all life, or even simply human life, or whether the former or the latter will simply continue in some evolved form or another.

I am reminded of a book I read as a child: The Last Gasp. Trevor Hoyle suggests that when the end comes, though the Earth will be unable to sustain human life, and probably many others, life itself will find a way and another species better adapted to the new environment will gain dominance. As Charles Darwin suggested, it will truly be survival of the fittest.

The Rarity of Free Will

crimson

What could possess me to make another post so quickly? An epiphany. A revelation. Many years in the making. The adjusted belief that perhaps freedom does exist, but it is simply so very rare.

In the beginning, about when I was in high school, I started to doubt the ideas of free will. More specifically, the idea of an effect without a cause. I would play Dungeons & Dragons with my friends, and I considered the randomness of rolling a die. When one throws the cube, it bounces around before settling down with one of its six faces showing up toward the person. The epitome of random. But is it really?

In high school, I took physics classes, and perhaps it was due to my novel education that I considered the situation carefully. Were I to know the precise velocity that the die was released, the effects of the atmosphere on the cube as it flew through the air, the imperfections in the surface as it struck down, the coefficients of friction, and all of the various minutia of the events, using a bit of math I could probably predict which face would end up showing. Sure, to know all of these details may not be feasible; I am merely human with limited capacities. But if I could have somehow acquired all of this knowledge, I feel quite confident I could do it. I could predict this random event.

But that becomes a contradiction, does it not? Part of what is baked into the definition of random is that it is unpredictable. To be truly random, no amount of knowledge should ever be sufficient to perform such a calculation. Certainly there is a conflict here. Either my idea is incorrect, or there are not as many random events in our universe as I believed. In fact, what if there are no random events at all?

I’ve been working on computers for most of my life. Computers can generate random numbers, can’t they? Well, as it turns out, no they cannot. The algorithms used by computers to provide seemingly random information can be exceedingly creative, running up against the feasibility concern I’ve raised above. But the results are still not truly or purely random. The use of seemingly unpredictable events from the outside environment (the passage of time, the manner in which I move my mouse, the choice and patterns I employ when utilizing my keyboard, etc) are called entropy and are used to seed the random number generators in our favorite electronic devices. It’s random, but really, it’s not.

There is a marked difference between something that is entirely unpredictable because no amount of knowledge could ever be acquired to predict a result, and something that could be predicted given enough time and effort. The question I posed to a philosophy group this past summer was to suggest that were I God, with an omniscient and omnipotent nature, the feasibility issue might be overlooked. God, I said, could predict these unpredictable events. Unfortunately for me, the suggestion of being God simply overshadowed any attempt at a reasonable discussion after that point.

However, this is the point I am making. For something to be truly random, even God would not be able to predict the outcome. If God could predict the outcome, then it isn’t truly random. Does true randomness exist in our universe? Or does everything bow down to the law of causality, with every single effect being caused by some other event? It seems impossible for us to ever determine such a thing.

If I exist in a hard deterministic universe, where all things follow causality, then there seems to be another very serious problem. There are other things I cherish and value that seem impossible. True creativity seems impossible as well; anything I may want to call creative is simply the reorganization and reassembly of other past things. Perhaps I might want to include the idea of accidents promoting creativity, but as with the previous discussion of randomness, accidents are simply expected events that may not feasibly be predicted either.

Freedom is another such thing. I am speaking of the sort of freedom that includes unpredictability as part of its description. The sort of freedom that I assume God would have, and that I hope I too have. The free will that allows me to break out of a purely deterministic universe by injecting something like an uncaused cause into the mix. If true randomness and true creativity cannot be, then neither can true freedom it seems.

I told my own mother my discovery one day, telling her that I could not believe in free will. Fate, I said, must be how things operate (using the term as I wasn’t aware of the term deterministic at the time). Her response was both passionate and quite surprising to me. “Go step in front of a moving bus,” she said, “if what you say is true, then you will not be harmed.” I was shocked. Of course I would be harmed I told her, but the discussion simply became ridiculous. I could not, for the longest time, understand why she had suggested such a thing.

Later, I realized that what she was suggesting wasn’t quite the same thing as I am discussing here. For her, I think I sounded pompous and arrogant. Like perhaps I felt I had divine protection and influence, or some other equally unlikely blessing. I think I understood the reactions Joe Bauers in Idiocracy was receiving from people after having been frozen for 500 years. Like Joe, I was not trying to impress or sound special. I was simply stating things as I understood them. Communications can be quite challenging at times.

As a result of that interaction with my own mother, I decided it would be best to broach the subject differently going forward. I would say that I don’t believe in free will, but I am open to the possibility. If ever someone was able to convince me of the possibility, I would take the argument seriously.

Fast forward now to the years of the pandemic. Marvel releases the television show Loki. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there is a multiverse. That is, there is not one universe but many. There is not one me, but many, each just a little bit different than the others. In each case, the differences are typically caused by my exercising of my free will. When an event occurs whereby I can choose between more than one option, in truth I actually choose ALL options. Each option I choose forks the universe into another parallel universe. In one of these universes I chose the vanilla ice cream, but in another I chose chocolate.

One issue I found with the show was that there seemed not to be as many Nexus events (these free will events that fork the timeline) as I would have expected. After all, I am faced with numerous free will choices every day. Possibly each hour, minute, or even second. The administration of the timeline, trying to address the multitude of Nexus events caused by me alone would be untenable, let along that there are literally billions upon billions of other individuals with free will causing as many other Nexus events across time and space. So, in the show, why are there only a few at a time? The Time Variance Authority (TVA) seems pretty calm, simply sending out their teams occasionally to address these problem events.

The show never addresses my concern, but I have a theory: perhaps the reason Nexus events are so rare is that free will is not so prevalent as I would like to think. What if I am not expressing a free will when selecting between ice cream flavours, as my selection perhaps follows a more predictable structure due to my preferences and past experiences. If this is true, it may even be possible that not all individuals are even capable of expressing a free will. Perhaps free will is an extremely rare occurrence.

The Loki television show may have sparked this thought process, but it has been the immanent release of The Matrix Resurrections that has truly pushed my mind to think about this outside the box. Specifically, not the upcoming film itself, but rethinking about the previous films.

In particular, a person on Reddit posted a question regarding what would happen if two people inside the Matrix were to mate and have offspring. They wondered whether the offspring would be a computer program or somehow connected to a physical human outside the Matrix. Initially I laughed, but then I thought about it, and the question is absolutely brilliant. The answer is both surprising and depressing at the same time.

The Matrix is a simulation. Any individual who connects to the simulation will experience their own personal perspective of the simulation. While the simulation can offer the opportunity for individuals to interact with other individuals within the simulation, ultimately the bulk of any one person’s experience is being provided by the simulation itself. The simulation is what controls the environment and all things that the individual can interact with. If a bird flies by, the simulation will control that bird (unless the bird is an occupant jacked into the simulation, which is likely not occurring very often, especially in the storyline of The Matrix).

The answer to the above question is that any offspring would be a product of the simulation. The offspring would be a program, or part of the simulation’s program. Simply code. Similarly, if a physical baby human is born and immediately connected to the simulation, the simulation itself will have to provide virtual parents and all the other necessary elements to attend to the new life. Even if one thinks for a moment that those running the simulation might decide to take a moment to try and find appropriately similar parents or children to connect to the strange virtual relationship, aside from the most ridiculously complicated procedure that would render the simulation untenable, they would be mistaken. If the point of the Matrix is to sedate the occupants of the simulation in order to facilitate leaching energy off those occupants, a process attempting to maintain the connections between the occupants in this manner would use up all the available energy acquired in the process. It wouldn’t make any sense, because it is unreasonable. It isn’t feasible.

In other words, most of the “players” in the simulation must necessarily be controlled by the simulation and not be occupants. What is often refereed to in games as Non Player Characters or NPCs. There would be far more NPCs in any simulation than individuals connected to it. In fact, it would even make sense for there to be only one individual to be in simulation, with ALL other individuals being NPCs. To be in simulation is to enter into a sort of solipsism.

To further expand on this situation, consider the possibility that I am in simulation presently. It has been suggested that if a civilization develops the capacity to perform ultra realistic simulations, they are likely to run many, many such simulations. And if there are so many simulations in existence, the likelihood is quite high that I am within one of these simulations. To have so many simulations seems quite similar to the description of a multiverse.

If the probability is high that I am in simulation, then it is similarly high that any individual I encounter is an NPC. In fact, yes, it is also possible I am such an NPC as well. In any case, even if I am not an NPC, there are still going to be an incredibly high number of NPCs in this universe I find myself in. I could possibly be the only non NPC as well.

Finally, if I make the assumption that an NPC will NOT have free will, then I can now explain why free will would be so incredibly rare. With so few non NPCs in existence, even across so many simulated universes, the number of Nexus events in the Loki television show would be quite small and very manageable. And in my “real world” that I occupy right this moment, I can provide a reasonable explanation as to why free will itself would be so incredibly rare, to the point that it may not even exist.