Decompressing Cosmic Horseshit

Let’s be honest, we need a transition piece

A few months after my experience seeing God, my father’s mother passed away. Persistent decades spent smoking a pipe and sitting in a recliner finally put her back in the dirt. It was an ugly death by all accounts. After a stroke some twenty or so years prior, she had become paralyzed on the left half of her body. If you take life to mean “the capacity to do things you could be arrested for” then that paralysis had been the effective end of her life. Which, to be clear, was her definition. Being able to think and talk was only good for cussing out your children and grandchildren. The leftover part that could think and talk took a long while to give up the fight and did its best to make everyone miserable on the way out.

She was my grandmother, of course. I still don’t like to think of her that way which is why I refer to her as my father’s mother. A generous description would be that she was a miserable and cruel person with an ugly heart. An accurate description strikes me as too grotesque and profane to be worth writing. Suffice it to say that half the people who came to her funeral did so just to make sure she was finally, actually, dead. The other half, like myself, out of of a sense of obligation to others. If any there loved her, it was a love alloyed with other complicating emotions. Her funeral marked the first time I saw family since my experience by the canal.

Most everyone at the funeral took the chance to speak about how much they missed Eva, my great aunt and sister of the deceased. Eva had been born deaf and had lived as something of a slave to her sister’s family. My grandmother had forbid Eva to ever learn sign language —you’ll understand, I hope, why it is easy to dislike such a woman— other than for a few improvised gestures, one of which was to hold one hand flat and smear across it with the other. It meant “Make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” Other gestures meant “vacuum the carpet” or “wash the dishes.” Secret gestures shared with my father and his siblings meant things like “I love you” or “give me a hug.”

The prohibition against acquiring language kept Eva maximally useful, or at least useful to Betty. I’m afraid to report that it also successfully eliminated even the hope that some man would come along and marry Eva. So for decades, when Betty went off and did things like shake down local paper boys for protection money, or get into barroom brawls, Eva had been left home to act as mother to Betty’s children. As a result, no one thought of Betty as their mother. Not really. Still, you’re supposed to say nice things about people at their funeral. The nicest thing anyone could say about Betty was to say something nice about Eva.

No one made any mention of the changes in my appearance, but I wasn’t disappointed as I hadn’t expected them to notice. I’m not exactly popular among my family with what I now realize are varying degrees of deservedness… because I do things like write the above paragraphs.

My father spoke up to say he’d always had a difficult relationship with his mother, seeing as how he was the oldest. And then he choked up telling a story about Eva making him food when he was hungry and how he’d only later realized it was her own food because there hadn’t been any other food in the house. It remains one of only a handful of times I have ever seen him cry. He’d always done whatever he could to do good things for Eva in her golden years. His attempt to repay a debt no one else thought he owed.

I did not speak as I had nothing to good to say. I’d barely known Eva. My most positive memory of Betty was from back when I was a toddler. I’d written the alphabet in the thick nicotine resin stains on her walls with one finger and she’d screamed at me for hours for “ruining the house.” At one point she’d sobbed that she’d have to clean all the walls —by which she meant Eva would have to clean all the walls— and expressed this was a travesty. It is one of my very earliest memories and one of the few times my father ever found my intelligence to be funny rather than concerning. My interactions with my father at the funeral reception were brief, other than for him to invite me to breakfast the following morning.

So the next morning, I met my father at a local restaurant called Billy’s, which is named after a surprisingly prolific local serial killer. I don’t suppose most other towns have restaurants like this, and I mention it here as a bit of scene setting for the kind of lives people live in such a place. We may all have quibbles over erasing the past or white-washing history, but in most other places they’d agree that when you kill a bunch of people out of naked bloodlust and greed you don’t get to have a restaurant named after you for a hundred years.

I attempted to order something light. I think a salad and a fruit juice. Something that fit in with my new diet in any case. Repulsed, my father lowered the newspaper he’d been reading and interrupted to tell the waitress that what I really wanted was steak and eggs and a Bloody Mary. He didn’t even pause to make sure that she had listened to him over me before he returned to his newspaper. He’d been going there long enough to know everyone intimately. I didn’t bother to object. He’d been correcting such acts of “femininity” on my part more or less since I could talk.¹

I believe it had been something like a year since our last meeting as I lived out of state. Once, I had deliberately gone no contact with him for five years. Since my parents divorced we had always been like two moose meeting in the wild, where the first thing we had to do upon sighting one another was to begin some kind of primitive dominance display. He usually did something like override my restaurant order. I usually responded by doing something insufferable like working the phrase “Le Chatelier’s Principle” into conversation. It was exhausting and I’d grown tired of the game and tired of him and everything else. The five year streak had been broken, against my will, at a wedding. He’d seen me, paused to give me some money, and then asked if I could use the money to go get a tank of propane refilled and then left to attend to other matters. I’d since made peace with the fact that he was himself, the same way that I am myself, and there was no use crying about it or trying to change his nature. My five year silence was never even noticed let alone remarked upon.

He continued reading his paper until I made some comment inquiring as to why he had invited me to breakfast if he was this behind on sports scores.

“Your aunt told me you don’t fucking write no more,” he said, snapping his fingers, not in response to my question but because it was something he had just remembered.

I agreed that I didn’t write anymore but added that he should be happy because it meant I wouldn’t be making fun of him on the internet. One of my stories about him trying to dredge a pond with a tarp to catch some koi fish had gone semi-viral. Commenters had especially enjoyed the way my complaints, that what we were attempting was impossible, that you couldn’t just move tens of thousands of pounds of water with a plastic tarp, had gone ignored. Calculating the weight of the water was another of my many nascent acts of “homosexuality” and after explaining the problem to my father he had responded only “I didn’t know I raised a quitter.”

Anyway, I was done with the writing. It was juvenile. I apologized. I’d been angry and bitter, so for years I’d written about everyone using everyone’s actual real names. At its zenith, my blog had hundreds of thousands of readers every month. It was so audacious and outrageous that nothing ever came of it because my sheer uncaring honesty meant everyone half-assumed the stories were fake anyway.

“Guys at work thought that was funny as shit.”

I shrugged.

Looking back now, I realized I’d been hoping to make him angry or ashamed and should have known better. He was impervious to such injuries.

“Was it that Canadian broad that did it?”

It still hurt to talk about it then because I couldn’t imagine anything other future for myself.

“Yeah. I guess so,” I managed.

He mercifully dropped the subject.

I’d been in something like love only one other time, in high school. I’d never said anything for various reasons most of which involved self-loathing. Our junior year she’d been in a terrible car accident and come back quadriplegic. She’d needed a friend without complications. And also, she was a lesbian. Given the trajectory of my love-life to that point, I wasn’t optimistic about my future prospects.

“You need to go to Home Depot. They got these classes on the weekend. You’ll meet new people. Get some bitch that’s good with tile. You need it. You don’t have the right mindset for tile.”

I was so downtrodden that I didn’t even rise to the insult, or mention that the one occasion he was speaking to was the only occasion on which I had ever laid tile of any sort. This was also only one of many times he gave me the advice to “go and find bitch who is good at tile.”

“Sorry about your mom,” I said.

He snorted.

“It happens.”

He yelled something back to the waitress and took a few more minutes to look at some of the scores in the newspaper. Writing this now, I’ve just realized he probably had some bets he was checking on. He’s not a man afraid to take chances.

We commiserated over some recent set-backs he’d experienced. The woman who would one day be his fifth wife had broken up with him again right after he’d used all his money to buy her a new set of fake-tits.² The old fake-tits had expired and we speculated that the expiration date had been the entire impetus for the relationship. This my dad tried to brush off as a joke, saying he “never even got to use ‘em” but it obviously still rankled him. He was also due to have his hip replaced, but it was okay since he’d figured out a system where he laid his boots out every night with the laces untied and then made his boss tie his shoes the next day.³ My sister had also kicked him out of his house —that’s not a typo, but too complicated to go into even in a footnote— after he’d almost got into a fist fight with her husband. He was now living in a trailer park in a fifth wheel that had something like a dozen owners before finding its way to him.

“How are you getting through the night?” I asked, and realized this was the most vulnerable question I had ever asked my father. In asking it, I revealed something of my own struggles without intention.

It’s the question we all have for our parents. How are we mere mortals supposed to face the darkness?

This question had the rare effect of causing my father to stop and think. He stuck his tongue in the corner of his mouth and chewed a moment before speaking. And I wonder now, would he have told me anything at all if I was still writing?

“Sometimes I feel so cold in that trailer, y’know? Walls aren’t much better than cardboard. Even the good trailers are built like shit. So I’m in there huddled up under the blankets and just shivering, thinking about all the bad stuff in my life. Hip is all fucked up. Hands are starting to hurt and that’s not good because that’s how I make money.⁴ I don’t have anything in my retirement that someone hasn’t made me put there. Been married four times. And yeah, the last one left me broke after I bought her some new tits. Probably ain’t gonna get much better than that for my love life. Now my mom is dead and I’m living in a trailer because my own daughter hates me and I can’t go home. So the other day, I’m laying there, and it was like I felt this… I don’t fucking know. This warmth. This light.”

You can imagine why this immediately piqued my interest.

“Yeah?” I asked, encouraging him.

If it surprised him that I didn’t immediately deny his experience, he didn’t show it. Prior to that point it had been common for me to shove atheism at every vaguely supernatural direction. He didn’t seem to take note of my sudden eagerness.

“So yeah, it was like this warm fucking light, or whatever. It brings me close. Then there’s this presence. I don’t, maybe God or some fucking bullshit. And I’m bitching, telling him all the fucking things wrong with my life. My hip. The tits. Being broke. Daughter hates me and I can’t go home. I feel something fill me up and give me strength. And then there’s this voice and it tells me…”

My dad had trouble speaking, choked with emotion like he had been at the funeral. I knew whatever it was had struck him as profoundly as “I sent you” had struck me. And I think now about a little boy who had Betty for a mom, who lived before people even had a term for childhood trauma let alone overused it. Who was raised by a deaf slave who only had the smallest capacity for language but used it to tell him she loved him. A little boy whose crazy mother did things like lock herself in her bedroom and threaten to commit suicide, all so that she’d feel loved and appreciated when her tearful son kicked down the door to wrestle the scissors from her hands. And now there was that same little boy, now my own father, and if he’d made mistakes it was all because he didn’t know better. When you raise a little boy in such a manner, then my father is the inevitable outcome. And it hadn’t all been bad. When he’d found out his son was taking a girl in a wheelchair to prom, hadn’t he come home staggering drunk that same night and laid a bunch of money on my chest? Yes, maybe he’d asked for most of it back the next day but he’d tried. He’d always tried.

“What did He say?” I asked, encouraging him again.

There was a smile of strange contentment on his face. The smile of a man at peace. And he relayed the words that he had heard from on high, the same words that he had relayed so often to me for almost as long as I could walk.

“So this voice… He says, ‘Gary, don’t be such a fucking pussy.’”

He laughed but there was no joke in his manner. Only the satisfaction of unarticulated question having finally been answered. However profane, it had been exactly what he’d needed to hear. In the ten or so years that have passed, I still have no choice but to conclude that it is somehow the same message, from the same message giver, translated to the characters of two very different men.

How are we to face the darkness?

With courage.

MORE FAQ I’M GUESSING PEOPLE WERE TOO SHY TO ASK

No, I don’t believe in any quantum physics woo or something where I think wave-function collapse means that whatever I want to be true about the universe is, or if you think the right thoughts then you’ll get a pot of gold. Except maybe in the sense if your thoughts help you do things that produce economic value then in that specific case then thinking the right things gets you money. I know that didn’t start with a question but anytime I broach the topic with people this tends to be the disappointing exchange:

“Oh, you believe in God? So you mean that you think everything you want to be true is just true and you should get to do whatever you want?”

The God I believe in doesn’t help you win the lottery. The God I believe in is there precisely to limit what is possible and to even more strictly limit what you should do out of that range of possibilities. More Spinoza and Aquinas than Tammy Faye, although she seems like a nice enough person at the end of the day even if she’s terrible with money.

I believe a lot of “spiritual questions” start with bad premises that resolve if you think about them for a long, long while. Like Free Will. You can argue back and forth about that all day, but I’m more interested in questions like: “You go into a room with a perfect computer that can predict the future exactly five seconds from now. You turn it on and view yourself five seconds in the future. What would have to be true of the images you were shown if the universe is deterministic?”

The answer to that question, in my mind, is that the only futures you will be shown are ones you overwhelmingly desire to move into so that you will always act to make them happen. There are other less cheerful alternatives as well to preserve causality.⁵ So yes, you have free will because you’re choosing to do things that you want to do. Yes, the universe has deterministic properties because it can show those things to you. Your choices being baked in doesn’t make them not your choices. In fact, if nothing at all was set you wouldn’t even have a consistent identity to be free or not free. Those two things aren’t as at odds as you might at first suppose. If you believe that then by my definitions you believe in Free Will.

Do you believe there’s some moral music to the universe that wasn’t put there by humankind and that we aren’t free to just change? Can you tell if someone is dancing to that tune or if they are not? Some people will say they don’t believe this but then act exactly as if it is true. By my definition of belief, this is close enough to belief in God that I don’t sweat a lot of the details. As long as you believe in something that asks something of you, other than just for you to get everything you want, all the time, and no one and nothing else matters, it’s the same thing. There is Timeless and Transcendent Moral Law that as Moses said “We are not free to break, only to break ourselves against.” I differ only in thinking that at the end of your life that you’ll be in for one hell of a surprise when you discover that it is sort of weirdly alive.

Stuff I do believe that’s borderline… well, are you conscious? I mean, experiencing something that seems ineffable to fully describe? Are you, physically, made of inert matter that’s just passing information back and forth? Well, in that case then probably other things are alive too, at least in some sense. We know of at least one case where inert chemical processes produce something that feels quite magical from the inside. It’s us. If that’s true for us, it likely holds true for some other things. I won’t share my craziest thoughts on this because they can be quite jarring but it does seem like this has strange implications.

I believe consciousnesses arises specifically from modeling external reality and that the particular sort of consciousness we have arises from predicting the actions of other world-modelers/predictors. There’s some magic in that infinite chain of suspicion and trust that makes us spark alive. I think that’s why ChatGPT works as well as it does. It is trained to answer the question “What do you mean?” and the magical meta-modeler prediction comes along for the ride. I also find that to be totally compatible with the idea that separately, on the outside of those processes, it’s all describable and consistent patterns of causality unfolding across atoms.

Crazier stuff I believe: in some sense, the inscrutable magic on the inside of these processes is the highest reality and the physicality is just something like bits of dust floating through a sunbeam. It lets you see the light, but the light is something else entirely. If a pattern recurs again and again, such that you could look at two life forms, in two different parts of the world, but somehow by the pressures which formed them they have converged to the same shape, then in some sense the pattern produced by those pressures is more real than the biology. You wouldn’t be able to see that pattern without the biology but to my perspective it was always there, simply waiting for something to reveal it.

Patterns are above matter and energy, immortal, and timeless. We are so used to this we don’t even think about it but you can’t “use up” the number seven the same way you can “use up” a lump of coal or a glass of water. Patterns like that are infinite. Patterns are also everywhere all at once, because you can blow out seven candles on your seventh birthday with seven of your best friends who got you seven presents and at no point does the number seven bow out and say “too much, not for me, try using some eight instead.” Patterns don’t have to worry about conservation or locality. So obvious we don’t think about it.

I believe the universe is made up of matter, energy, and information. Maybe at the end of the day the information is the only “real” part. If we discover, as I suspect we will one day, that you could write a simple equation that explains the nature of the interactions between everything in the universe then that means anything in the universe could be represented perfectly with some numbers written down somewhere.⁶ Some people take this idea to mean that we probably live in a simulation, to which I say: yes, but not the way that you think.

Most people take the idea of a simulation to mean that there’s an alien named Bob Johnson sitting by a computer somewhere, but I think it’s even stranger than that. Suppose nested deeply within all the simulations that Bob Johnson is running on his computer that there exists a simulation of Bob Johnson doing exactly all the things Bob Johnson is doing in the “top simulation.” Further suppose that these universes have the same internal limits as one another and neither can truly, fully verify which of them is the “real universe.” Who then is simulating who?

I hear you smirk and say “whoever gets to turn the other person off.”

But what if Bob Johnson turns off all his simulations and then another person in his universe named Carl Konstantinos turns them back on again? Or two people are running all these simulations at the same time? What if a simulation gets taken down multiple different strange paths starting from the same original seed? What if multiple “universes” in this simulation are still running versions of the “simulation” that was turned off? I call this Simulation Theory Voodoo Doll Mexican Stand-Off.

I think the universe is a type of pattern, unfolding in a certain state, and maybe you could “look” at the pattern for a bit of time but in some higher sense the pattern is more real than any particular instantiation. If I calculate that two and two make four have I captured the two-ness and four-ness of that statement, eternally? The pattern is above, unalterable, not to be tarnished. So, obviously not. I certainly think our descendants will one day have the ability to feel like they have done some things that are really, really messed up. In the ultimate sense, however, we will never be able to alter the patterns themselves. Only shift the bits of dust to illuminate other sunbeams. The original sunbeam will still be there, just harder to see for that particular person. And it will still be immoral to deliberately illuminate some of those sunbeams.

There are other things that I believe without much justification, which I still suspect are true. I think the universe is the type of pattern where each state depends on the state before and that this makes it “chaotic” in some sense where you must flip through each page of the book, in exact order without skipping pages, before you can arrive at the end. That has powerful implications for what even an all powerful being could do with a “simulated universe.” I suspect the uncertainty principle is there in order to make it impossible for us to do things like perfectly simulate our own future and that something like this would be true for any simulation you care to imagine. If there are Superintelligence, then I suspect that given these limits that they make “moves” in support and against each other only over timescales that are incredibly, cosmologically, long because that’s where the errors in their world-models produces practical uncertainty. I suspect causality, the linkage of after to before, also means you can’t “edit” the present or future states of the simulation in the truest sense and you would more or less be rebuilding an entirely different simulation if you tried to do something like that. I also think that you do things a bit like that when you just imagine something and I do wonder if it places moral limits on the kinds of things God can imagine. Or else that you’d cause something like a black hole to spontaneously appear when you attempted to write a jet pack into existence out of nothing. The universe shields itself against things that cannot happen. And I suppose all of this was put there to a purpose.

But yeah, I also think someone could probably take the pattern that is “me” and do some pretty terrible things to it. Lots of terrible things are possible. That’s the price of existence. What interests me is that some large class of terrible things, to my understanding, cannot happen. As if some grand designer knew what might one day become possible and moved to intervene. Horrors, yes. But no eternal, forever horrors.

This is what I mean by spiritual questions ultimately resolving when you think about them for a very long time.

I think the ultimate source of our “simulation” is something like what I think I saw that day by the canal, the place outside of time and space where things simply are. Call it the Platonic realm or whatever you want. The place of pure being and patterns. The best name for such a simulation is just “reality” because where else would that come from?

So, anyhow, down from the high back to the low. How do make this place better and prove that it was a good idea to create us?

1. For newer readers, I am not gay. Just better at math and science than my dad.

2. She appeared some years later right after he received an insurance payout from a car accident. She married him, either upgraded her tits or had them taken out, I can’t remember, bought a new car, and disappeared with $70,000.

3. Too amusing to not share. My dad’s “interviewing style” generally consists of him going to some construction project somewhere and either getting in due to union rules or personal connections. If he doesn’t have these he talks to a foreman and gives the following speech. “Any job you have here, I can do. I don’t care what it is, I’ll do whatever you want. There’s only two things I won’t do.” And then he waits for them to ask what those things are and he deliberately counts on his fingers “One, I won’t suck cock. Two, I won’t take it up the fucking ass.” And then there’s laughter and shoulder pats and he has a job. I also don’t think he has ever not been the boss of some place he has worked in practice.

4. My father has cut off the tip of his thumb twice, by trying to impress a woman on each occasion. Each time, he attempted to put the tip of his thumb in his pocket and keep working. He claims that this is not one of the reasons his hands hurt.

5. Say you were the type of person who cannot be motivated by wanting to do something good. I think in that case you’d “spontaneously” have a brain aneurism or something to preserve causality because that would be the only “option” left to the universe to make sure that the future you saw happened. So, really, what kind of person you are has a lot of impact on what that perfect computer can show you.

6. We won’t be able to simulate our own universe perfectly, ever, for practical reasons.