INNER-BULLSHIT #2: DELIQUESCE TO THE EOF
"Lying on the couch in the cushions, thinking about the warmglow vitality of gentle cubensis amphetamine symbiosis; in walking through the humming shadow treepaths of the heath under a lilac sky."
The hum is the vibe of London and trafficenergy and wealth and struggle and privilege and serene nature manicured wild Wuthering in the centre of dense conurban sprawl. In my mind’s limbic memory I can walk through those humming shadowy treepaths and sometimes do, because comfortable pale fire is easier than going out to the heath as it exists in physical space (though it’s literally just outside my window).
To go out would mean shoes and outdoor clothes, what an effort. I mean if I hadn’t done the walkabout a hundred times or if it was less magical, maybe I’d get off my couch. This is perverse, I’m well aware. Shouldn’t the magic be an attractor? Shouldn't the hundred affirmations eventually become a source of conviction?
My sister sometimes refers to me as an indolent splat, which is probably a fair description of most human beings myself included. Many a true word spoken in jest.
I remember this character from a Douglas Adams1 book. In it he'd characterized Odin, the Norse deity, as an old man bored by complicated omnipotence, fascinated instead by the perfect simplicity lovely clean linen. Bed linen especially. As the crazy world roiled and raged, Odin fretted only about the next change of bedding in his hospice hermitage. And it was very little fretting, which was the part of the appeal.
Here was a veritable god, who could go anywhere and do anything, content to range no further than between his bed, his bathroom and his couch. Harming no-one. When I first read this book I was in my teens and I didn’t empathise with the Odin character at all. I’d glossed over his parts in the novel. I’d wanted the action of real plot with the heroine and Thor and Dirk Gently the holistic detective. I couldn't appreciate why the chapters about Odin were the most introspective, why Douglas Adams was such an Odin sympathiser. I guess I’ve come to understand why.
I don’t think old man Odin was simply supposed to be a satire on getting old and comfortable and disconnected from the vanity fair maelstrom of People Doing Something in the world. Was it a criticism? Didn’t the novel end with Odin reluctantly acting all-powerful one last time, to save civilisation, and then returning to his clean linen, comfort and obscurity?
I should probably read the book again. I know it was good and of course memory is imperfect, pale fire as I say, so who knows how much I'm missing? I’m recalling the book fairly well decades later so it must've been worth the time, right? And perhaps, having matured into an empathy with Odin, there's good reason to figure on getting a lot more from reading as an adult.
I won’t be reading the Douglas Adams book again. I’ve got my cushions stacked just how it’s most nestlingly snug and the book is in another room altogether, in a bookcase full of books. Physical space isn't indexed. Locating the novel would take energy, like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
(While we're here, full disclosure… I won’t be going out into the beautiful magical woods or reading the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul by Douglas Adams.)
Remembering the Odin character got me thinking about my own situation, enlivening ambition the way great works of art often do. I am going to move off the couch. That's official. I’m going to move myself into a freshly made bed…
Because Life finds a way through. Life finds a way, though. Life finds a way through, though.
II
Words, on the other hand, struggle.
Let’s see now.
I’ll try to lay words on a sentiment that's percolating in my nothing-much noggin.
(drumroll…)
By the time of birth there’s already been an enormous weight of microcosm natural selections, iterations and multiplying iterating run cycles from – let’s call it – the zygote metagenesis launch.2 It’s an oft-ignored application of the Darwinian natural selection model, but let’s call a spade a spade: zygotes build humans, and the simplest explanation for such magic is the same one we see in macro for life on Earth, an unconstrained lifegreed algorithm that’s evolved to select for intelligence; and imagination; and homo sapiens minds.
It’s worth taking a moment to try to conceive this zygote algorithm playing out in real-time. Drawing energies from the womb, its expansion is exponential and its complex build iterates across at least five dimensions: its own generational lineage, its exponentially accumulating cellgrowth, genetic homo sapiens heritage, intracellular and intercellular network, continuous de facto symbiosis refinement. The zygote becomes an embryo blob becomes a foetus blur becomes a baby in distinct delineated focus.
Snap to the first breath: in – rude awakening (but not of YOU, yet) – first breath – out cry – and what’s unleashed in the world is a living force, an organism will, that’s insatiable while it’s resolving through self-assembly stages.
“What the fuck is this world, where is the titmilk, what is all this air in my belly and my arse, what is an arse, why am I bleeding poo, what is this home smelling leviathan and why is some of it making me clean, feeding me energy, creating warm like it used to be in the fading beforetime. More energy, yay!”
Neurogenesis is not a free lunch and this Darwin shit is far from over.3
III
“Consciousness – self-awareness, personality - may have evolved out of a Darwinian competition for space and energy, in the time between zygote and memory. The ‘you in your own mind’ may itself be a brutal expression of construction by natural selection.”
We’re launched into adulthood – once the construction algorithms have mostly reached their exit() – full of fuel and greed; a second metagenesis that’s as much complicated by nature, nurture, an inheritance peculiarly ourselves – for good or ill – with its operating system of layers and substrates and interrupts and events and creative energies to not only keep the life-organism plates spinning but (for a while) find more to spin.
The energies seem inexhaustible but, although it’s a generous overabundance thanks to natural selection winnowing most successful genetic delivery in multivariate environments, the fuel is finite. In a life given longevity the energies may not last as long as the lineage intercellular symbiosis pact to which conscious human minds owe their existence.
The overabundance plays out in a consciousness that inevitably sees itself and sees the power gradually lost each cycle, though it’s tiny, imperceptible, ignorable-ish; sees it and feels it but like Canute4 at the oceanside, must command the tide not to recede and be shown impotent.
“Rage rage against the dying of the night?”
Maybe that works as a desperate invocation if you’re a middle aged drunk but good luck finding that sort of life-affirming vigour in old age. The tide is going out; and the night is coming in. Whatever your consciousness might do to hold itself together, it won’t hold itself together. Death is the description others who are alive give, to depict what they observe, but for the dying-to-dead organism itself, the future isn’t going to be a neat, storybook binary.
IV
Neuroscience consensus on consciousness is there’s no moment the lights switch on; and yet it’s just as unanimously asserted the lights are switched on and consciousness is evident because it’s its own evidence. “Something seems to be happening…” The same will be true at the end of life.
There won’t be a moment the lights go out; an instant of being and the next instant unbeing. End of life won’t be experienced as death but deliquesce.
And what will that feel like?
Imagine the light at the end of a tunnel. The one often used in religion and spiritualism to represent a point of focused light and bliss. Afterlife, rebirth, heaven, whatever. With good reason this notion appeals to the not-dying-right-now human being. Even for an atheist, for whom the light at the end of the tunnel is the end of being, there’s a comfort in the life-coda aspiration: live your life and face your moment of death, a blinding reunion as your consciousness transitions back into the universe’s potentialities yadda yadda yadda. It’s an enticing story; or would be if it weren’t complete bullshit.
In fact the light at the end of the tunnel is a compelling misdirection. 180 degrees of misdirection. Imagine looking the other way from the light at the end of the tunnel, towards the antithesis of focus, light and bliss. That’s the trajectory of life and consciousness. That’s the direction we all go, eventually. Away from the light, blurring out of focus, flickering framerate lost fidelity, feeble reassertions of conscious selfhood against the irresistible entropy as more and more executions of the neural functionality fail. It won’t be death, but pathetic apathetic bemused confused staccato deliquesce that’s not instant but closer to a distilled Alzheimers disintegration. Where, what, how, why, who am I (goodbye) EOF.5
What does it matter if we’re living in a simulation?
What does it matter if, under all the inscrutable layers of codex abstraction, the human mind – consciousness itself – disassembles to a machine code base-layer that bootstraps from the zygote and ends in the same EOF?6
It takes energy to care. It squanders energy to feel.
Some speculate there may be a safe shutdown process written into life-mind substrate, a calming anaesthetic that’ll only execute when – let’s say – consciousness packet loss (deliquesce) exceeds a certain level… But I can’t think why natural selection pressure would’ve evolved such a thing. Fight or flight is the antithesis of safe shutdown.
Perhaps, as stoics and existentialists suggest, the most sensible “added” purpose of the middle years through to old age is the coding of a safe shutdown tailored to the peculiarities of an individual mind. And who better than you, to do this coding? Who else could even be capable this coding than the only authority on the particular consciousness scheduled for shutdown?
Let me be human (for once) and say – while I’ve still got energy to say it loud enough – fuck you, fuck you future EOF, fuck you future me. You know I love you, I don’t need caveats, but fuck coding safe shutdown against the deliquesce to the EOF. If for no other reason than simple disagreeable perversity.
Feel free to call that hope.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001). The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (1988) | Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
A zygote is a eukaryotic cell formed by a fertilisation event between two gametes. We all begin as humble zygotes.
See article titled Consciousness Builder Algorithm on zygote to memory evolution of neurological networks and the prisoners of our alt-conscious Omdurman’s four-walled House of Stone
Canute “ealles Engla landes cyning” was King of England, Denmark and Norway (1016-1035). Flattered by courtiers his power was so great he could command the very wave to obedience. Canute’s response to this bullshit is proverbial in The Story of Cnut and the Waves
EOF: End Of File
Simulation theory or simulated reality has become popular since the proliferation of the internet and the ubiquity of cloud computing Moore’s Law upscaling in processing power etc etc.