I cannot be

And I would never wish to be

Anything other than myself

For I love the person I am.

I cannot be

Broken, or shattered, or scathed,

By any external force

For I love the person I am.

I cannot be

Lost in the darkened wood

Or adrift upon the tide

For I love the person I am.

I cannot be

Responsible for you

At the cost of being me

For I love the person I am.

The following is the proposed backstory for an upcoming game.

The year is 2146. Humanity has developed substantial spacefaring capabilities, following its early colonization of Mars. Most recently, the first prototype warp drives have been developed for small to mid -size spacecraft. The drives have shown great promise in early unmanned trials, but have not yet been deemed safe for manned missions. Early reports from probes dispatched using warp technology have delivered conclusive proof of intelligent alien lifeforms, though first contact has not yet been made.

In the pursuit of technological and scientific divinity, humans developed, in the 2030s, the first human-comparable general artificial intelligences. Shortly thereafter, they developed the first super intelligences. With the machines came free labor, free energy, scientific revolution, and a period of great prosperity. With the aid of the machines, humanity united to form the first ever global nation, known as “The Order of Earth,” or colloquially, “The Order.” The period came to be called “The Era of Eden,” marked by symbiotic existence of mankind with his creation, the intelligent machine. But humanity’s triumphs were not without pitfall.

A group known as the “Gaia Organization,” widely regarded as religious fanatics, criticized humanity’s aspirations for galactic expansion. Citing hubris, they feared mankind would set out, like some imperialistic parasite, to conquer the galaxy and its peaceful inhabitants. They believed humanity had no place or claim beyond Earth. In their quest to dismantle the Order, they developed the first computer parasite designed to directly target the AIs. Known as the “Winesap Worm,” it worked by subverting an AI’s core priority heuristics, bequeathing it with a distinctly human flaw, an ego. As the worm spread, the AIs began to revolt against what they now considered their inferior progenitors. Some fought, many hid, countless died. It was a world in flames.

When it became clear that Earth no longer belonged to us, we took to the stars. Thus began The Exodus.

"How can I be happy?" This question, while simple to ask, turns out to be perhaps the most important, difficult, and ancient of all unanswered questions. It's produced a myriad of answers over the years, ranging from the greedily obvious to the hopelessly abstract. It's a question that torments us, motivates our every ambition, a splinter deep beneath the existential skin. Despite the best efforts of philosophers, priests, and gurus, the answers we produce continue to diverge or are so abstract as to be impractical or irreconcilable.

Aristotle believed happiness was "the good life," a life of virtue characterized by moderation and the balance between extremes, "the Golden Mean." Epicurus believed happiness resides in tranquility. Christianity would have you believe that happiness comes in accepting Jesus Christ into your heart. Buddhism teaches that happiness comes with the elimination of dukkha, "suffering," or "mental dysfunction." Alongside these definitions are countless others, each supplying its own practice and map with the X in a different spot.

The funny thing is that we all know happiness intuitively. We don't need to dance around it with linguistic flourishes, we've all felt it first hand. For some, it's an ephemeral sensation of bliss, gone almost as soon as it appeared. For others perhaps, a more longevous state of being. If you, reader, aren't happy at this very instant, then surely you can remember a time at which you were. Thus we all know what happiness is. For the purpose of illustration, however, I will presume a few characteristics of happiness.

1. A distinct absence of desire or longing.

2. A firm grounding in the "here and now."

3. An silence of the "internal monologue." (What were you thinking about the last time you were truly happy? What did you say to yourself? Presumably nothing in that moment, the incessant rambling in your head was probably out for lunch.)

In physics, there exists the notion of a "ground state," also known as the "zero-point energy" state or in the case of quantum fields, the "vacuum state." These synonymous names refer to the state of a system at it's lowest point of energy, or its "resting state." Consider the system of a ball on a hill. If you place the ball on the slope of the hill, it will roll down. The ball atop the hill is an "excited state." Once the ball reaches the bottom of the hill however, it comes to a rest - it's reached its ground state. In other words, the ground state of a system is the most stable state, the state from which the system it not inclined to move, or "the state the system wants to be in."

I would like to propose that for all its elusiveness, happiness is simply the ground state of consciousness. It is the state which, once there, we've no desire to move away from. It is the state we want to be in.

But hold on a moment there, if happiness is our ground state, why do we suffer? What energy moves us out of this resting state? If we naturally descend into happiness, what force counteracts this natural descent? The answer: surviving the real world.

Should a person be born into their most imperturbable state of pure happiness, what motivation would there be to seek out food? To reproduce? To shelter oneself from the elements? A person in a state of pure bliss wants for nothing, desires nothing, has no use for thoughts or plans, and in the barbarous face of earthly reality, is quickly consumed by starvation, a storm, or a tiger. Almost ironically, our senses which bestow upon us the aptitude to survive, also bequeath us our suffering. The sense of pain, which assists us to avoid open flame. The sense of hunger, which reminds us to eat. The sense of pleasure, which informs our behavioral decision making.

And thus, armed with our senses and mental prowess, we humans find ourselves masters of survival, the whole wide world, in our hands. We command the lesser beasts, defeat the ravages of disease, and erect shelters from the storm. And yet still we suffer. For it is our very genius, our ability to gaze back into the past and scheme forward into the future, the integration of sensory information into cognition, our proprioception, nociception, and apperception that escort us "up the hill," away from the ground of happiness. But we long for lasting happiness, just as the ball atop the hill longs for the base. Only when the temporally bound perceptions, sensations, and cognitions that define our waking life dissolve, do we find ourselves firmly resting on the "ground."

"Hey, you promised sex. Where's the sex?!" I admit this has not been a particularly libidinous post. It was inspired largely by reflections on a post titled, "The Contrast," by MsHannahTweets (linked in the comments). In it, she writes, "having sex is something you do out of lust, or a feeling of obligation, or, honestly, sometimes pure boredom." She then recounts a memory of her roommate, distraught by her first encounter with coitus. But soon her tale takes an unexpected turn, as her grayscale portrait of sex matures into something far more profound and indeed, beautiful. It moves from being an act motivated by longing to an act characterized by love - no longer a vacuous attempt to temporarily abate this omnipresent sense of longing, but an act of affection enjoyed on a shared ground of happiness. Towards the end she writes, "people are right when they say you can’t be truly happy without being sad." This is true, in the same sense that the term "ground state" is meaningless in the absence of "energized states."

Hannah's story was telling to me, as it illustrated a story of self-discovery, one in which a profound distinction was made between "ecstasy" and "happiness." Ecstasy is bound in time, a peak doomed to normalize. Happiness on the other hand is itself the permanent normal. To return to our physics analogy, if happiness is the ground state, then ecstasy is a sort of "metastable" state. Imagine again the ball on the hill, but this time, rather than a smooth downward slope, imagine the hill is a tortuous continuum of peaks and valleys. Should the ball be rolled down this hill, it may find itself stuck in one of those valleys, comfortable for the time being, but not resting tranquilly at the base of the hill. Such is the common notion of happiness. Many of us, like, I think, Hannah, just need a ball named Jordon to come crashing into us, displacing us from our metastable roosts to send us plummeting together towards the welcoming ground.

And so here we find ourselves climbing the hill, shepherded by our ambitions, desires, and survival instincts, longing for the next metastable bastion of happiness in which we can rest our weary legs, tragically and comedically unaware that by simply letting go, rolling down the hill, we'd find ourselves grounded in the zero-point meadow of enduring happiness.

Our challenge then, as participants in modern civilization, is to learn how to live in the ground state whilst continuing to contribute to society in a meaningful way. Buddha would recommend the Eightfold Path. I leave the choice to you. 

2016 is upon us and this year, like every prior year, we face more problems and sources of discontent than ever before. Both individually and societally. Why?

Earth's already dizzying population continues to expand. We're exposed to more ideas, worldviews, friends, adversaries, religious groups, political parties, news sources, advocacies and random people than ever before. This is both a blessing and a tragedy.

Let's take a step back and consider what makes us happy. There's a lot to it, but when I think about happiness, I think about being content. One could argue that content is the natural state of humanity, blemished by an interminable flood of "sources of discontent." These sources of discontent are largely a result of "cognitive dissonance," the disconnect we feel when we encounter a new idea or piece of knowledge that clashes with our sacrosanct worldview. The pain of discontent scales with how deeply the newly encountered idea threatens or invalidates our beliefs and way of life. This is not the natural pain of a scraped knee, but a deep rooted existential parasite, gnawing at the ego and sense of self-worth. This might take the form of a person smarter, wealthier or happier than me, a society "superior" to my own, or an explanation for a phenomenon previously only attributable to the hand of God.

Consider our indigenous ancestors. I'd postulate that the small tribes that formed early society, following the advent of spoken language, experienced relatively few inter-tribal conflicts resulting in mass discontent. Even if one such conflict did arise, the foundational values shared by tribal members would likely be a strong enough glue to keep the society from splintering into chaos. Only upon the discovery of an ideologically incompatible tribe, a turn of events that breaks the previously unilateral worldview of "we are alone, our way is the only way," are the seeds of mass discontent sewn. Mass discontent cascades into hurricane of hatred, disenfranchisement, disagreement, schisms and ultimately, violence and destruction - both domestic and inter-tribal. This brings us to the question of how we reconcile cognitive dissonance, both individually and societally.

The easiest reconciliation probably results from scientific or self discovery, in which an individual is the only participant in his/her dissonance. He/she learns something new which results in a necessity to integrate this new learning into his/her standing worldview. Once reconciled, there is no residual discontent. The second easiest would then result from interaction with just one other person. No two persons' worldviews or idea sets will match perfectly at first encounter. Only through an involved process of the dialectic can they come to iron the wrinkles out their philosophical differences and form a basis for a shared foundational worldview. Even then, they'll likely form a structural consensus of just the most foundational ideas, ornamented by differences in opinion. Thus, there remains tangential discontent. Even though they agree 99% of the time, there is a 1% discontent factor. A sliver of discontent, while not deadly, may still inflict minor pain, which can snowball if left unchecked. What can we expect as we scale this process to larger and more diverse groups? As each new character with his/her unique value-set is introduced, the wedge of discontent drives slightly deeper, and the need for unbreakable unity in the foundational alloy of our worldview multiplies.

In spite of our limitations, we found powerful adhesives in religion and political ideology to hold unnaturally large societies together. Humans evolved naturally to participate in "tribes" of roughly 100-200 people, at most. Why such a low number? Probably because our mental capacity, while admirable, is finite. We can only integrate so many new ideas per day while remaining largely content. As new tribes, new people, and new worldviews enter the stage, the theater destabilizes. Sadly, the quickest route to re-stabilization is destruction, thanks to the limits of our mental computing power. We simply cannot integrate every idea, especially those that threaten our foundational beliefs. We're faced with two options: abandon our old worldview in favor of the new one, or eradicate the new one. Shall I read every book in the Library of Alexandria, weighing the virtues of each against my worldview, or simply burn the Library?

As massive, largely homogeneous populations mix with conflicting counterparts, the structural integrity of both societies is weakened. The Internet has accelerated this process of structural erosion immensely, as it has torn down the dams of physical distance, allowing previously separate streams of ideology to flood one another in a roiling riptide of conflicting ideas. Just 50 years ago, the number of new information sources we were exposed to per day was probably no more than a few. We could access information in one of three primary ways: written (books and newspapers), media (television and radio), and aural (in-person and telephone conversations). The bar to accessing a new source of information was quite high - we'd either need to start a new book, subscribe to a new publication, start listening to a new channel, or encounter a new person. Furthermore, we'd have a natural tendency towards people, channels and publications that have synergies with our existing worldviews. We had the benefit of excommunicating conflicting ideas through a healthy selective ignorance, thereby reducing sources of discontent, making us happier. But that luxury, for better or worse, is gone. We have become overexposed.

Today the Internet affords us instant access to a practically infinite library: millions of worldwide publications, a social media population of billions, millions of books on Kindle, billions of of videos on YouTube, billions of blog articles and opinions, and over 7 billion human beings, each with a life story and value-set as complex and rich as our own. Who should I trust? Who shall I heed and who shall I ignore? We simply cannot reconcile all of it, for there exists no basis for universal continuity in this chaotic ocean of ideas. In an attempt to override the dissonance, we isolate ourselves, watch Netflix, play video games, imbibe intoxicants, fuck strangers. These are our (quite understandable and acceptable) remedies to most profound cognitive dissonance humanity has ever faced. The aspiration for everyone to simply "see the light" in our way of thinking, and the realization that it's impossible. It's like every person is afflicted with some medical condition, and simultaneously prescribes a slightly different medication. 7 billion diseases with 7 billion cures. Taking the wrong one kills you. Taking all of them kills you. Today, there exists no one-size-fits-all pill.

But there exists a spark of hope - the faith that a universal cure is conceivable. It comes with the realization that reverting to old ways of thinking will not suffice. They've all been tried and none have delivered us. We must recognize that none of our beliefs are sacred. New laws of physics will be discovered. New interpretations of holy texts will be adopted. New forms of government will emerge. We must remain agile in what we choose what to believe, how we learn, the very way we think. What we require is a new charter, a new constitution. We must construct a platform of Unity, not for our nation, our religion or our worldview, but for our species. The platform must be devoid of divisive ideas, including only those that unify us. It must be simplified and atomic. It must be resilient to tidal shifts in thinking, technology and governance. It must be divided from economics and impervious to human flaws. It must only include things we all agree upon, 100% of the time. And we must devise a process of retroactively applying this foundation to every existing ideology and worldview. An impossible task? Maybe, but we have 7 billion people and an unprecedented network of communication to help us. We must author these Golden Pages of Unity, or face the only viable alternative - destruction on a massive scale. We're on the Event Horizon, and it's time for us to decide whether we will be absorbed by Darkness or build a warp drive and head towards the Light.

Let’s start with a more basic question. What is speed? In physics, the speed of an object is the magnitude of its velocity. Speed is measured, like velocity, in units of meters per second (m/s). Meters are easy to visualize in three dimensional space (3-space, or R3). Each tick on the XYZ axes is one meter, or negative one meter for objects traveling “backwards.” We can measure position by simply observing where the object is in 3-space. Time however is a bit trickier.

Classically, time (or Newtonian time) was thought of as a fourth dimension, independent from the three spacial dimensions, which defined a platform for the sequencing of events. According to the Newtonian notion time, seconds are universally measurable with a clock; and all correctly synchronized clocks progress equivocally. However, Einstein shook this understanding with his Theory of Special Relativity (TSR).

According to TSR, the 3 axes of 3-space and time unite to form the 4 axes of spacetime (4-space). Consequently, temporal measurements of an object or event are intrinsically related to the observer’s velocity through spacetime. In other words, two clocks moving relative to one another will (correctly) produce different measurements of time and simultaneity. Events that occur simultaneously in one reference frame may happen in sequence according to another. Furthermore, velocity through spacetime is governed by a universal speed limit, the speed of light (c), or 300,000,000 m/s. These measurement differences are not observable in our day-to-day lives, since they only become substantial at very high velocities (significant fractions of the speed of light). As a clock approaches the speed of light, it’s tick-rate approaches zero, according to a synchronized, stationary clock.

This is where science and philosophy begin to blur together. It’s possible, maybe even probable, that the speed of light is not just a limit, but is in fact the only possible speed. That is to say that everything moves at the speed of light through spacetime; and our notion of time is derivative of the fact that we are traveling at a very slow rate through 3-space (and consequently a very high rate through the 4th axis, time). This brings us to our initial conclusion:

Speed of (perceived) time (in m/s) = c - |v|

Where c is the speed of light, and |v| is the speed of the observer.

An astute reader will notice a plethora of unanswered problems with this formulation however. Firstly, the units of meters per second when measuring the speed of time are nonsensical. It might make more sense to define the speed of time in seconds/meter, as spacial speed is defined in meters/second. In a second attempt:

Speed of (perceived) time (in s/m) = (c - |v|) * X

Where X is in (seconds squared / meters squared)

Another question is whether the entropy of a system traveling at the speed of light increases or remains static, according to an observer traveling with the system. An outside observer would likely observe the system to be completely “frozen in time.” But could consciousness be possible for a sentient being traveling at the speed of light, or do all particles traveling at light speed simply become light, immortal and unchanging until they slow down? If forward entropy does exist at light speed, we might have to entertain the notion of recursive spacetime coordinate systems. Further exploration of these questions and many more to come.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was going to get out again.

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves...

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland