About Venkatesh Rao

This week is probably the closest we’ve ever gotten in my lifetime to the brink of nuclear-powered World War 3, yet people seem strangely indifferent to the developments. I share in this under-reaction. Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, have a stronger collective reaction?

There’s of course other stuff going on–a potentially extreme climate-change-amplified hurricane, the UK economy collapsing, and so on–but all that does seem to be categorically of a lower order. Visa shared this meme that gets at this feeling of curious under-reaction.

As Steve Walsh said in a reply, “I suspect this is actually how people in 2022 would receive UFO’s.” I agree with that assessment. Aliens landing would be at least a couple of levels of weird past nuclear World War 3, but I don’t think we have it in us anymore to generate reactions a couple of levels more intense. There is something exhausted about the collective human psyche right now. It’s been battered so relentlessly for so long with things calling for reactions (either practical, or in the form of futile derangement syndromes) that we’re at saturation. We can’t respond any more strongly. We can’t get any more deranged than we already are.

Hunter S. Thompson famously remarked that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Well, we can’t turn any more pro at this point.

The word tangle is generally used pejoratively in the English language, as in Walter Scott’s line, Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Or at least disapprovingly, as in tangled mess. Darwin’s usage, in the last passage of The Origin of the Species, is the only famous example I know of where the word is used in an approving way:

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”

The Darwinian notion of a tangle can be understood as a snapshot of a robust, open, evolutionary process, with all the optimality and efficiency properties that entails or doesn’t (I would summarize it as “a mediocre slouching towards continued existence”). Darwin goes on to link his evocative observation directly to his theory of natural selection, but I think the idea of a tangle is more general, and has roots in the fundamental mathematical structure of reality. Take for instance, this picture of various optimal packings from a great thread of many such examples by Daniel Piker (thanks to all who responded to my twitter prompt looking for this sort of thing):

These are very simple examples of a large class of things I define to be proper tangles: complex things that are efficient but not orderly. And you know what these pictures remind me of? Traffic in India.

We live in a world shaped by, and highly conducive to, discrete or 0/1 thinking. But not so long ago, we lived in a world shaped by, and highly conducive to, a kind of thinking you could call continuous, or ε/δ (epsilon/delta) thinking.

The basic idea behind ε/δ thinking is to think of the world primarily in terms of change, and secondarily in terms of extremely smooth, in fact infinitely smooth types of change. The symbols ε and δ are known as infinitesimals — quantities that can approach zero arbitrarily closely. The δ refers to an arbitrarily small input, while the ε refers to the corresponding arbitrarily small output.

The discrete, or 0/1 view of the world is fundamentally built around the fiction of being. Things either are or aren’t. Change is an illusion. “Things” merely get “created” and “destroyed.” 0s turn into 1s and 1s turn into 0s. There are no gray areas, merely insufficient bits of precision. There is no smoothness, merely ontologies beyond resolution limits. Reality is quantized.

The continuous, or ε/δ view of the world is fundamentally built around the fiction of becoming. Things always are (or equivalently, never are; in a becoming-centric view, it doesn’t really matter). There is no creation or destruction. Things just become more or less beingy.

Thinking about this stuff always reminds me of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, which goes from being a 0/1 cat to being an ε/δ cat:

“Did you say pig, or fig?” said the Cat.

“I said pig,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.”

“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

I suspect Carrol intended this as commentary on discrete/continuous mathematics, including the little bit of wordplay about pig/fig (which reads to me like a joke about ε/δ adjacency ambiguities exposed by comprehension noise in a notionally discrete symbol space). There’s a world of philosophical fun in this one passage.

I haven’t been in a creative blogging mood for a month, thanks to oven-like conditions in Los Angeles these past few weeks, and of course the general Augustiness of August, the Armpit of the year. August gets Augustier every year thanks to climate change. Even the less demanding kind of writing I now reserve for my newsletter (periodic reminder — I have a paid substack called Ribbonfarm Studio that is stylistically downstream of the R&D mode of this blog) has been hard to do.

Anyhow, the funk seems to be lifting a bit now. I just landed in India for a long-overdue visit with my parents, and in what feels like a sign of the times, it’s actually much cooler and pleasanter here. California is enduring mega droughts on a millennial scale, while South Asia is experiencing extreme rain and flooding. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Anthropocene is here in earnest now. If I had to pick a poison, I’d definitely pick too much rain over too little.

Though the trip here was not exactly fun (post-Covid international travel has its burdens), I’m already feeling productively knocked out of the claustrophobic uncreative rut I’d gotten myself into over the last few years. For starters, the view from my parents’ balcony (the one on the left) is a refreshing change from the view from my own back in LA.

Anyhow, just dropping this quick note here to keep the lights on here at ribbonfarm while I proceed to Seek Inspiration and get at least one of several experimental drafts across the finish line.

This week, my inventory of scavenged cardboard tubes increased from 9 to 36, grew 6x in total length (from 13′ to 84′), and 23x in total volume (0.36 cf to 8.5 cf), thanks to a job lot of free tubes my wife happened to find for me. Here’s the current hoard — the 7 large and 20 medium size tubes are from the new find.

And here’s a spreadsheet view:

Why, you ask, have I been building up a hoard of scavenged cardboard tubing for years? Fair question. And the answer is: because the tubes are there to be scavenged.

But I finally know what I am going to do with it. I’m going to build a Tubeworld!

Elon is building hyperloops and tunnels under LA. Mohammad bin Salman is building The Line, an arcology that’s part of his Neom Ozymandias project, so why can’t I have a Tubeworld? Huh?

So what is a Tubeworld?

It’s an odd question, but what is a life?

A good scoping definition to start with is: life is the objectively observable and subjectively experienceable existence of a living being over its lifetime. While helpful, this is a bit like saying a liquid is the contents of a tank that can hold that liquid.

But it’s a start.

Clearly, any answer must rest on particular understandings of objective observation, subjective experience, and time, but without getting into the philosophical intricacies of those three entangled phenomena, or into the question of life itself as a general phenomenon distinct from non-life, what can we say about the contents of a specific life? Specifically, a specific human life?