Ran Prieur

April 5.

2024-04-05T17:50:00Z

April 5. I often wish for more overlap between what I feel like doing and what's good for me to do, and this week I got a win. I've been obsessively playing a browser game called Guess My RGB. You move three color sliders to try to match the background color of the screen. Not only is it compelling in the sense that I always want to play one more game, it also has a really satisfying learning curve. At first it was taking me more than ten tries every time, and now I'm usually getting it in five or six. Just by following a compulsion, I've gained more color awareness and color intelligence. I used to think raising the saturation of an image somehow magically added more color. Now I know that it's just spreading out the sliders, moving the high ones higher and the low ones lower. Now, walking around the city, I'll think, that green has some red in it, or that's a really pure blue.

Posted to the subreddit, 'We need to accept the weeds', about a trend in the Netherlands to tear up paving tiles around houses. I'm thinking, why were the tiles put there in the first place? Western aesthetics are shifting, from appreciating human-made cleanness, to appreciating the rough beauty of the non-human-made world.

And To Keyi Toko Zonga is a pretty good new album of psychedelic world music.

April 3.

2024-04-03T15:30:06Z

April 3. Continuing on the afterlife, Matt comments: "What if there are alien metaphysical versions of Libertarian seasteads? Pirate enclaves? Zealous empires? The Borg Collective? Societies that convince you they have all the answers and that their rules should be followed. All between physicality and ultimate unity."

Heraclitus wrote, "After death, nothing expected, nor imagined." That doesn't change my strategy. Even if you don't believe in an afterlife, you can say the same thing about the ordinary future: It's unpredictable, but it's still going to work with what I give it.

Related: a Skunk Ledger post imagining bots making supervirtual speculations about Servers. And a Reddit thread, What is the most profound realization that you have come to while on a psychedelic trip?

April 1.

2024-04-01T13:10:22Z

April 1. Continuing on indigenous metaphysics, lately I've been thinking about the afterlife. I don't plan on dying soon, but neither of my parents made it to 80, despite healthy lifestyles. If I have 20 years left, 2004 was yesterday.

Here's my question. To what extent is the afterlife influenced by culture? According to western metaphysics, not at all. Under materialism, nobody gets an afterlife, and under Christianity, it's the same heaven or hell for everyone. But Sahlins' book is full of examples of hunter-gatherers who continue to maintain empirical relationships with dead ancestors. A dying Walbiri will expect to hang around the living Walbiri, and it would not even occur to them to say that the Mianmin also get the Walbiri afterlife and not the Mianmin afterlife. The idea that other cultures get your culture's afterlife is unusual, presumptuous, and recent.

If we accept that the afterlife is influenced by culture, it opens a really interesting can of worms. Reports of a world beyond this world, from NDEs to psychedelic trips to mathematics, are wildly divergent. We have a lot more options than our ancestors.

That doesn't mean it's a blank slate. If this world is contained in some other world, then probably my story in this world is contained in a story in that world. But in that case, what is the story that contains the story of billions of us being rootless, generations removed from a land-and-ancestor metaphysical context?

My guess is, being a modern human is like being in an airport terminal for consciousness. Probably a lot of people are going straight back to the void, especially if that's what they believe in and wish for. They may be surprised to find that awareness survives nonexistence. A Christian who dies expecting hell might go to a hell-like place, but it won't be eternal, because the fundamental reality is flux.

If you want a Harry Potter afterlife, I doubt you can get it exactly, but there should be a way to at least get the same vibe. I'd love to be a Roger Zelazny landscape-shifting walker, and my attitude is a lot like Pascal's wager. Pascal said, I'm going to believe in a God who will reward or punish me based on that belief, just in case. I'm thinking, I'm going to act as if I'm training for a certain next stage of being, and see how it goes.