Cosmic Purgatory

It is hard to think of a day spent scrolling on the interwebs where you are not constantly reminded of some doomsday theory of how our planet is fucked, that our species is some kind of metaphorical virus that is devouring everything our "loving" mother Earth has bestowed upon us. Our ancestors who got butchered from fighting off wild animals 10x our size in forests, the ones who died to countless viruses before vaccines were ever a thing would now be rolling in their grave (if they could xD) in sheer disbelief at the audacity of our current generation to sit in well air-conditioned rooms and start a virtue signaling competition of how we are not doing enough for the planet and how we must "save" it.

Now, this is not a hit piece on our pro-environment movements, that is a story for another day but this is something even more meta. We keep saying how we must save it, but recently I've been thinking... What if it is us who needs to be saved from it? It's a fun thought experiment if nothing else but it opens up a whole new can of worms of what we think we know about our reality. Don't forget to grab your tin foil hats. Let's dive in.

It's always funny when atheists or self-proclaimed rationalists argue for simulation theory. Don't they realize that simulation theory is just what all religious textbooks have been arguing for with an extra dose of mysticism? Just because you put a computer scientist spin on it doesn't make it any more rational than the claims made by theists. But for a moment let's entertain the idea that there is a creator, if there was a creator why would they design a world like this for us?

You can say anything you want about the "creator" but try and say that he/him/her/they/why/how (Not sure what pronouns to use xD) is benevolent. The very words will stick in your mouth. So as a thought experiment let's imagine him as pure evil. And let's think of some of the reasons why this might be the case:

1. Asymmetry
2. Trilemmas
3. Dictatorless Dystopias
4. Lafzom ki Dhokebazi (aka Preference Falsification)
5. Gravity

1. Asymmetry

This beautiful scene from Margin call sums it up.

And there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers. Happy foxes and sad sacks. Fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Yeah, there may be more of us today than there's ever been. But the percentages-they stay exactly the same.

There are many different ways to say it. Pareto principle, Matthew effect, 80/20 rule, Price’s law. But the main point is that anything that is of importance to our species, anything of value, is always asymmetrically distributed. Power, status, money even quality of life is asymmetrically distributed. No, this is not EVIL CAPITALISM or Illuminati tinfoil hat theory. It is just the way it is. You find this also in sports, music, etc. Heck, Pareto discovered this while tending to his pea plants, he realized that about 80% of the harvest he received came from 20% of the plants. Now, no need to go keyboard warrior and argue it's not 80, it is 73-27. The point is not the numbers. The point is that it will never be 20-20-20-20-20% in a game played by 5 people. Price’s law says that 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work. So if 5 people play the game, there will be 2 that dominate it in any measurable metric of value. This asymmetry is wired into our world and it is not an engineering problem that can be solved.

Any attempts to solve it have gone catastrophically wrong. This prevents us from solving any real problems in society that involves human coordination. For example, we hear debates around democracy and dictatorship. It is a complete waste of time to debate between the two because, in both systems, the result is still that the minority will hold power over the majority. The entire world went into lockdowns because of the decision-making of a handful of scientists and politicians.

This is not just it, there are serious implications to this problem. We like to think that the world is becoming a better place. There are fewer wars, and less starvation compared to any time in history. So you can see people making the argument that quality of life is becoming better over time. This may or not may be true depending upon your biases and what periods you are comparing with. But the unfortunate nature of "quality of life" is that at any given moment in time, is also asymmetrically distributed. In today's age not having access to the internet and computers is equivalent to not having basic food and shelter. Of course, you won't die from starvation, that's a win but you have 0 chance of social upward mobility without exposure to these technologies. You might live longer but without the right financial opportunities, your quality of life will be miserable. So an overwhelming small minority of people will have access to a better quality of life than the majority.

When you see the asymmetry play out even in chords used in music, you know it is not a political/economic problem but something that is deeply embedded into the fabric of our reality.

2. Trilemmas

There is a simple version explaining this and the wordcel version of it. I'll start with the simple version so that the 2 people who read these don't get bored. Let me start with the engineer/startup/consumer version.

Everyone wants the project/product to be good, fast, and cheap... pick two.

This is the simplest version of a trilemma. There is a widely popular version of this in the crypto sphere. It is known as the blockchain trilemma:

The nature of trilemmas is such that you can only satisfy two cases. There is no such thing as a perfect solution. You will always end up sacrificing one of your metrics for the other two.

This is deeply rooted in our mathematics as well. To copypasta Wikipedia,

In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma, also commonly known as the Agrippan trilemma, is a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the theoretical impossibility of proving any truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics.

Let me give some simple examples of these:

Infinite Regress:

Q: Do you believe in god?

A: Yes.

Q: Who is he?

A: insert answer from whatever religion you subscribe to

Q: Who created that god?

A: insert answer from whatever religion you subscribe to

Q: Who created that god?

.... This goes on to infinity without there ever being a final answer.

Circular Reasoning:

This is the classic chicken and egg problem. What came first chicken or the egg? It is a loop that you cannot break.

Foundationalism or Unsupported belief:

These are fancy one-liners that can't be unproven nor proven on top of which we build the rest of our arguments. From ancient religions, all the way to modern-day religions like Crypto, Simulation Theory, Environmentalism, and Blank-slate theory are all based on Foundationalism. They all have one singular axiom which can neither be proven nor unproven and the rest of the arguments are built on top of that.

Ex: We live in a simulation, There is only one god and that is Insert your favorite God. etc.

3. Dictatorless Dystopias

I previously wrote an article on the game theory of dictatorless dystopias.

A quick summary:

Here is the game theory for a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered :

Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced. So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on.

It is deeply depressing that almost everything in our organized society produces similar situations. Our politics, education systems, economy, all the drama around the pandemic, etc can all be explained with this game theory. Not going to copypasta that whole article again here, feel free to go and read it. I digress.

Others who have talked about this

MEDITATIONS ON MOLOCH

4. Lafzom ki Dhokebazi (aka Preference Falsification)

Had to use a reference to one of my favorite Hindi songs to make it sound fancy.

The idea of "Freedom of Speech", is like an adult version of Santa Claus. It doesn't exist and it has never existed in the history of the world. In any given conversation whether that is public or private, there are things that you can and cannot say without getting into verbal or physical conflict. Go to a religious country and try saying their gods are fake or go to a college in the US and try saying there are only two genders (I'm not saying these statements are factual, it's just an example xD), it is not gonna go well for you. So there is constant pressure to perform the act of "Preference Falsification". Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. So people pretend to agree to ideas acceptable socially while internally disagreeing with them and acting in a contradictory manner as long as no one's watching.

What this leads to is a set of Private truths and public lies. Private truths are known by the few that can never be spoken out in public at scale. At best they can be spoken in small groups and public lies which are necessary to maintain order in society.

There is no better way to understand this concept than to watch the HBO show Succession. It is a political satire.

There is a scene where one of the main leads uses this idea in one of their dialogues:

“Words are just, what? Nothing. Complicated air flow.”

Words/ Language for the people in this show doesn't mean a direct mapping to the truth or what they feel at the moment. They are nothing but complicated airflow whose meaning only holds if it continues to be in their self-interest.

Here is a scene from the show where one of the characters who want to join politics and run for president is asked to speak in the eulogy of a family member named Lester who was ousted as a molester and found guilty of human trafficking. There are journalists waiting for the character to say something that can be used against him. So his girlfriend writes him a script for his eulogy.

Hello. I'm here as a fellow human to acknowledge that Lester has, as we know, passed on. Lester was a man. Also, Lester was an employee of the Waystar company for 40 years. And when a man dies, it is sad. All of us will die one day. In this case, it is Lester who has done so. Lester was alive for 78 years. But no more. Now he is dead. Lester's wife is Maria. They were married for 15 years. Now she is sad.

This is a hilarious scene where there was no way of speaking the truth. So words of the speech are nothing but complicated airflow. This is the case with all the Entrepreneurs, Writers, Directors, and Politicians in real life as well. They cannot speak the truth. It is not that all politicians are liars, it is just that lying is the name of the game. It is the No.1 Rule of the game. Use language and words as complicated airflow or resort to esoterism.

Esoterism is the method of hiding deeper meanings for the minority amidst socially acceptable forms of communication. This is also the reason why all religious books have voodoo mysticism along with deeply hidden private truths meant for people who are capable of reading between the lines. This is why writers have to hide their real message within socially acceptable stories. There is this Hindi movie Tamasha (The title of the session is from the lyrics of a song in the movie) which is from the outside a love story but within it are songs and dialogues which call out the BS of the mainstream concept of love. The love story is to sell tickets, and the hidden dialogues and song lyrics are for people who can read between the lines.

This problem applies not just in the public sphere but also in the private sphere in your personal relationships. You don't tell your friends, spouse, partner, or family members what you really feel, you tell them things that are socially acceptable of saying using words that are limited and nothing but complicated airflow.

Our entire species is forced to use language that can never be mapped directly to what we want to say and this prevents us from ever resolving extremely complex problems in our personal and public lives.

5. Gravity

Yeah, this is a bit of a weird one. Gravity bounds us to the surface of the earth and allows us to run around and move across the planet. But it also stops us from ever escaping it. The non-rocket scientist version of it is that the Earth's gravity is such that it demands a huge amount of energy for an object to move out of it and stay out of it for a sustained period of time. This video does a great job of explaining it.

When you burn fuel to get into orbit you lose lots of energy to heat the exhaust and atmospheric drag so you actually need much more than what is just needed to lift the rocket into orbit. You can't put your energy source close to the payload because you risk detonating it. To quote the video:

You need a controlled burn which is complicated and makes your rocket very heavy which means it has more mass. The more mass something has the more energy you need to convince it to move so you need more fuel to lift up your rocket. If you need more fuel that means you need more rockets to carry that fuel but this makes your rocket heavier thus requiring more fuel which requires more rockets to carry that new fuel and so on.

Gravity ensures that space flight will never become easy, so maybe it is better to assume it as a trap that keeps us bound to our planet rather than some kind of gift unique to Earth.

Long story short, the creator who designed a world with asymmetries and trilemmas, A species whose society is defined by Dictatorless Dystopias and is forced to communicate through Lafzom ki Dhokebazi (aka Preference Falsification), who then finally gave us an almost inescapable Gravity doesn't seem like an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god, more like a psychopathic Machiavellian who has meticulously designed the best cosmic purgatory ever imaginable.

Our current episteme and culture are extremely based on ideas that Earth is to be protected from us, humans are bad for the planet, and that god either doesn't exist or is benevolent. This tweet is a great reminder that our culturally informed views are almost always proven wrong every 100 years:

Our day-to-day culture wars around "saving the planet", economy, politics, religion, and science are nothing but distractions from the real problems that we have as a species and we will never really solve them unless we find the right "complicated airflow" to talk about them.

I'll end this with a quote from Nier Automata, one of the games I recently played:

Everything that lives is designed to end. We are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. Is this a curse? Or some kind of punishment? I often think about the god who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle...and wonder if we'll ever get the chance to kill him