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Communicating with an Alien Race

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Let’s assume that there exists other intelligent life somewhere in the Universe. I like to consider the various parameters of the properties of such a life, which would define commonalities between us and them (it), which would help define how we could communicate.

Unsurprisingly, as any topic that tickles our (I’m argue evolutionary!) desire to explore, there has been a lot of thought put into this problem. I’ll do what I do best — start with some of the context I’ve acquired over the years (the Pioneer message, the Arecibo message, a much longer one, or Carl Sagan’s Contact) to see where I can take the idea (a good test of how I’m thinking about it, and possibly a way to think outside the box), and would love to hear from those who know more, or have thought about it, especially if you have differing opinions.

Let’s start with a relatively simple model. An alien race that is based on similar biological mechanisms, thus consisting of individuals that have become intelligent through evolution, that have acquired inter-generational (institutional) memory and thus civilization through some method of communication between individuals. Note that I’m not necessarily assuming many of the aspects of such a life — language (imagine a species that can communicate through some form of telepathy), physical attributes (such a life may be non-carbon based and interact with the environment in wildly different ways than we — for example, be entirely gaseous and receive and generate arbitrary signals along a specific range of electromagnetic spectrum), motivations. Let’s assume, however, that the Universe behaves the same way locally to this alien life form as it does in our environment.

The most interesting aspect in such a case is the mode of communication. What can we assume is common? Nothing physical, for sure. For species that travel in the electromagnetic spectrum (just like light does), our highways and staircases and in general attraction to solid state objects would make very little sense. Instead of trying to start with something most concrete to us, it makes sense to start as broadly as possible. We need a medium and a message.

For the medium, we could use the electromagnetic spectrum. Really, anything we can generate that can travel far, fast, and be distinguishable from everything around us. Don’t be fooled by visible light! — although it’s possible that there is some cosmic law that makes visible light frequencies be a local maximum along some dimension — the energy required to receive it relative to its usefulness in the surrounding environment (seeing X-rays instead of “visible” light would not be all that helpful to early humans) — this is highly dependent on the initial conditions of life. Or maybe it’s a fluke. More generally, anything that generates a force field, though it’s harder to generate ripples in the gravitational field as easily as it is to blast electromagnetic messages. Quantum effects are likely too small to be noticed, although I don’t really know anymore, given all these spooky things happening.

The message? Non-random (non-chaotic), but not too regular (pulsars send out regular messages out in the space). Taking both together, it’s a pretty natural thing to mimic the universe around us — assuming that what we observe of distant stars from Earth, the aliens can also observe from their vantage point — but provide patterns whose complexity is a tad higher than the complexity of similar messages generated by the Universe itself. Prime numbers are good candidates — and in general, anything that is really fundamental and to do with mathematics, because it’s very likely that an alien race knows mathematics (as the study of patterns, totally abstracted from the source of these patterns). Unitless quantities are better than something with an intrinsic measure, because the fewer assumptions, the better.

Can an alien race be sophisticated enough to be able to receive our communication, and interesting enough to talk to, but not understand at least some form of mathematics? Could an alien special have developed (not been born with!) interstellar travel and not understood binary systems. Science fiction scenarios aside (an alien species is decimated along with its cultural heritage and ends up traveling across solar systems without the knowledge of how its machines take it thus far), I think there is universal consensus that the answer is no. And in fact, an ability to think abstractly is very likely a sign of intelligence. But this does not hold the other way — I can imagine a race that is either so sophisticated as to think of mathematics the same way we think about the pulses of Nature and simply ignore any such signal, or so intuitive that they don’t identify mathematics as a discipline. For the former, introducing some obvious and non-obvious error in the message might be a great solution. A race that can enumerate prime numbers is intelligent, but a race that makes a mistake early on must be much more street smart!

But even assuming an alien race does understand the concept of binary arithmetic, it may not be able to understand its encoding. Would a series of dots and dashes in a column corresponding to the numerals necessarily be informational? Not if the aliens don’t have spacial awareness. Would a series of beeps be a good encoding? Not if the aliens can’t hear or — more interestingly — don’t have a notion of time (or cause-and-effect).

Math aside, the fundamental laws of the Universe would probably be a common base, although one can imagine a less curious (or much more sophisticated and thus thinking of the laws of the Universe as irrelevant) life form, or a more precise one where our crude approximations of the Universe map to something incomprehensible to them. We can ask astronomy what quantities are pervasive and communicate their ratios. This is what Pioneer and the Arecibo messages were, and it is a great way to communicate our relative knowledge of the universe with the above assumptions in mind.

There are alternatives to this model that would work similarly in some aspects. Consider a species that is a single individual (instead of many individuals that communicate with one another and thus pass the knowledge). Such an individual may not comprehend the notion of individuality, but may still be able to communicate with us the same way, definitely remotely, where we can approximate mankind as a single individual, at least in the beginning of the dialogue. If their Universe doesn’t behave the same way as ours does (say, the speed of light, due to some quirkiness, is infinite in some valley of the Universe), if the alien race can perceive the different laws elsewhere, they can still compare our crazy patterns of high entropy to the surrounding comparative dead silence. Though such an alien race may not be particularly useful to talk with (if they have no insight that can be understood by us).

The concept of communicating with an alien race is a fascinating one. Clearly, there is no way to think about it in the most abstract way — there are always assumptions that we must accept. Let’s hope that we’ll get to tackle this problem at some point in the near future, and let’s hope that we get some of our assumptions right — we wouldn’t want to miss an alien race that happens to be intelligent in a different way. Or be trampled by one in search of intelligent life.

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The Afterlife

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

The best thing about the afterlife is that you can’t reason about it, because life after death is not pertinent to our domain of knowledge. Any “existence” after life would not be existence as we know it, and we wouldn’t be able to define it because it occupies a different realm (not in the supernatural sense, but in the sense of a knowledge base).

When we die, our physical manifestations – what we call our bodies (the physical medium that contains our consciousness and the vehicle that we can most precisely control) – cease to exist. The body disintegrates, and our earthly consciousness — which, I’m beginning to believe more and more strongly, is the recallable continuity of our interaction with the world that surrounds us — ends as well because we are no longer capable of interacting with the world or creating memories. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that there is nothing after death. We just can’t define what it is.

The way I like to think about the afterlife is an extrapolation of a feeling that sometimes overcomes me, a feeling so immense that I momentarily forget what I am supposed to be doing, where I am, even who I am. It’s just a flash, but in that moment I am pure existence.

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Adding More to the Sum

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

I recently read Sum and instinctively remarked to my friends that it’s probably fairly easy to come up with a large number of different afterlives, some better some worse. Well, I was called out on it. So here’s my pass.

We are actually immortal. When a near-death event occurs, the universe splits in two — you continue in one branch, alive. To everyone in the other, you are dead. That’s why you see others die in your universe. The rules of the universe are constructed in such a way that it never appears as if people lived forever (that would raise some eyebrows!). Instead, as you get older, people around you also get older, but by the time you’re 90, you don’t notice the strangeness.
When you die, time simply stops. You find yourself being able to control it entirely; you can rewind to your favorite life moment, and play it over and over again. Since everything already happened, unfortunately you can’t change your past. You’re confined to forever be a perfect spectator
When you die, you move into Nothingness. It’s precisely what you can imagine it is — a bunch of white and nothing else. You don’t exist physically, but you can perceive the whiteness. It’s a particularly boring existence, because you can reminisce and think of new things, but you can’t make anything happen. After years of such confinement everyone wishes they could move on, or die, or something — ANYTHING — but they can’t
When you die, your consciousness merges with that of other people who died. It’s hard to explain exactly what it feels like, because while we’re alive we never feel that, but I can explain a few benefits. (a) You can communicate with people instantaneously, (b) You feel their presence which is similar to physically being near them, (c) You share your feelings and thoughts more precisely than you ever could. I can also explain a few drawbacks. (a) You communicate with people instantaneously, whether or not you want to, (b) You feel their presence all the time. (c) You always share your feelings and thoughts
Life is actually already an afterlife, a very special one. It’s Purgatory — a test of whether you can become a better person so you can go to Heaven. You invariably find out that you have failed
It turns out that while nobody ever came back from an afterlife, we all know what it feels like, because our scientists have been able to digitally simulate “life” and let you experience it, and thus let you experience “moving on” from the digital life back to the real one. It’s believed that the actual afterlife feels the same way
The afterlife is a shadow of your life. You’ve lost the recollection of your death, so you relive moments of your life. But something isn’t quite right — you get this strange feeling that you may sometimes get when dreaming, maybe thinking that it’s a different kind of reality, a work of fiction. However, the feeling never goes away
As you lose your consciousness dying, time slows down to a crawl since with your life your perception of time dies. Your consciousness can perceive the time slowing down, and eventually time stops and your consciousness becomes stuck in one moment in time, being able to perceive but with no sense of cause and effect, or sequencing (since that would require a notion of time). While it sounds depressing, it’s actually a wonderful feeling, since once memory is gone, all is life is pure consciousness. And it’s wonderful
After you die, you relive the entire universe’s existence, synesthesized in your brain to make the early events make sense to you. At first, all you can hear is a strange buzzing. Then flashes of lightning appear. You watch the first particles form, chatty, confused, clinging to others fearing aloneness. You watch planets form in a symphony of. You witness stars die in spectacular dramas surpassing anything you saw when you were alive (by then, of course, you don’t remember your life anymore). By the time you witness your own birth, you have such wonderful perspective on everything around you that your birth has both a mystical significance and no significance at all
When you die, you get in a time loop. Usually it’s about 10 seconds leading up to your death. You don’t remember that you’re in a time loop, of course, so you happily relive your death, gruesome though it may be, over and over again
We all die young. When we die, we wake up in an afterlife, as an old, sick man who can never die. The afterlife rules have allowed every resident of the afterlife one journey — but only one — to live another life in a world far away, as a young, healthy person. Now that your trip is complete, you can only reminisce of good, young times
There is a constant number of souls in the universe. This means that when you die, you respawn as something else — unlikely a human or even anything on Earth. You may think that the number of conscious creates has been increasing on Earth, but the Universe is so vast, and so many quintillions of conscious creatures die in planetary implosions every minute, that the balance is kept pretty well. You may have to wait up to twenty seconds after you die, but don’t worry, time passes by quickly
Everyone leads two lives. In your first life, you are you. In your second life, you are simultaneously every other person except for you. In your second life, you get a perfect notion of what others think about you, but you do miss your own self a little bit. Particularly, when everyone around you thinks something that you know is simply not true. You are so misunderstood
When you die, you realize that your life was a computer simulation, just like in the Matrix. It turns out that in the actual life, technology solves every problem, there is no disease, famine, but there is also no emotion. Is so incredibly boring that people built life simulations that they periodically subject themselves to, choosing not to know that they live in a fake world for the duration of their simulated lives
In an afterlife, you can relive your life, but you can change a few crucial moments. To your surprise (and despite your hard efforts), your life always ends up being the sam
The afterlife is spent waiting in line. Eventually you forget why you’re standing, or what you were doing befor
This life is our first life. Each subsequent life is recycled from your prior life. So each subsequent life is a little worse, a little less stable. The scenes are the same, but your accomplishments are lesser. Still, you live each life happier than any previous life, embracing it, knowing that the life after will be even wors
There are several tiers of afterlife. The High tier is wonderful. The afterlife is warm and sunny, you hang out with your friends, drink a lot but never get a hangover. The Middle tier is so-so. It’s cloudy all the time, you feel a little bit miserable most of the time. The Low tier is shitty, it rains all the time, you have no friends, no money, and poor health. Which tier you go into depends solely on your SAT score (or an equivalent, computed with an incredibly complicated formula from your life’s achievements, if never took the SATs)
After you die, if you weren’t a good person, you are given one more chance. You are brought back to Earth with an explicit mission. At some time in your thirties, you will need to save a life of someone who dies tragically. If you fail, you are gone for good. As you grow older in your last-chance-life, you muse over the poor soul who failed to save you
Some time ago, scientists proved what happens when we die. It’s nothing spectacular; describing it would be a waste of ink. It’s just good enough for people to look forward to, but not too good for people to start committing suicide. Unsurprisingly, while the religious leaders accepted the undeniable proof, they still insist on parallels between the proven afterlife and whatever their religions promise. Life goes on the same way as it was before we knew what the afterlife was
In an afterlife, you retain most of your memories of your previous life. Sadly, nobody believes you. You try to prove it to people by describing events from your previous life, but they say you just read it in history books. You try recalling facts that only you know about, but you don’t quite remember all the details; you often get them wrong and so people just think you’re crazy. You’re likely to spend the rest of your life in a mental institution, together with people who remember not one, but a hundred afterlives. All the memories blend to them so even to you, what they say is just one unrecognizable jumble
The afterlife features actual Greek gods. The first thing you find out is that they exist — the whole mythology. The second thing you find out is that all the gods got tired of humans and stopped messing with their lives. They had other, less petty, things to deal with, such as their own love triangles, betrayals, and murders
You become the representative of the people you left behind. You have to defend them in front of God who is angry with mankind and wants to wipe the entire human race out with some germ or a meteorite
When you die, you just float out there above the universe. You watch the universe die and restart itself. It turns out that the probability of life in the Universe is astonishingly low, about 1e-159. You patiently wait until you see something familiar, something biological, something you simply took for granted. You could give up your immortality just for a glimpse of even the most despicable human behavior, even the most boring gesture, anything at all. Watching a bacterium divide would make you ecstatic. Instead, you traverse universe after universe, in search of something that is less likely to happen than a Universe filled with gold
You are respawn as a molecule, an electron with consciousness. You perceive everything around you, and can affect the environment you’re in. Unfortunately, your signals are too weak to be accurately detected by most instruments and so scientists who study you and your fellow Afterlifers puzzle over seemingly random effects you cause. They even gave the name to a whole branch of physics that studies these phenomena. They call it “Quantum Mechanics”
When you die, you find yourself in a hallway with an infinite number of doors. You can’t open any of the doors, but each door has a note on it. The notes say you’re really close, the further you go the closer you are. And so you wander in an infinite hallway, passing closed doors, hoping for an end that never happens
When you die, your consciousness scatters throughout the environment that surrounded you. Consciousness, it turns out, if just the network of particles that makes up your body, the more connected the cells and particles are, the stronger your consciousness. After your mind begins to decay, you still exist, but are much more spread out
When you die, you meet your family and friends who died before you. They have all been watching over you. They have seen everything; they know your every secret. They judge you. You are first confused, then angry, then resigned over the unfairness: you never saw their secrets. So, even though at first you resolve not to sink to that level, you begin judging those that come after you just as those who came before you do to you
The Afterlife is actually pretty simply. You are reincarnated, with the memory of your prior life, but not just after you die. You come back to Earth exactly •••100,000 years later. As you walk around Earth, you meet other people who were respawned and mingle with the contemporary humans. You compare your notes on the world you left behind, and, to nobody’s surprise, pretty much recreate what you were familiar with. You realize that when you were first alive, there were other humans roaming the Earth alongside you, who had died around 100,000 BC. Unfortunately, their consciousness had not developed sufficiently well for them to be able to tell you what those memories they are having are
When you die, you become a particle of light. You see what it is like to travel with the speed of light. It’s actually a humongous disco show, a blur. You are born in one of the suns, and •••four weeks later you enjoy taking a walk to Earth. You may bounce off the atmosphere and spiral in a particular direction, maybe encountering another planet, maybe getting sucked into a black hole (which is, suffice it to say, really boring), maybe traveling for the rest of the universe’s existence, until you slow down and head back crashing with all other particles
When you die, you become the creator of new souls. Everyone who’s ever died gives up a bit of their soul to create a new one for a newborn baby. You can decide what part of your soul you give up. Maybe it’s a dark part, and if enough people choose to do that, the man is a conflicted, evil man
When you die, you find yourself back on Earth, exactly the same as when you left. However, the only thing missing is other people. The Afterlife is completely devoid of other people or any other beings with a soul
When you die, you become a bit in a massive computer system. You work hard, getting flipped, sometimes many hundred times a second, sometimes not at all for months. You kind of like this afterlife. The demand for bits is always growing, and the system upgrades itself, so you’ll never get bored. If you’re lucky, you may be a part of a computer algorithm that uses you to draw an entire image, and so you get a glimpse of what the user may be looking at. You can chat with other bits but not too much — the computer hardware is built not to tolerate interference between bits. You are amazed at the complexity of software being built, and at the wonders that the system’s users are given access to. In fact, you learn quite a lot about the users simply by getting flipped around
In an afterlife, everyone ends up making their immoral life look just like what they are used to — their regular life. At first, you want to start anew, maybe pick up a hobby. But eventually you give up, too. It’s just too much effort
In an afterlife, you are granted an unlimited number of wishes, but whenever you make one, you forget something from your past. You ask for money and other personal goods. Quickly you realize the futility of such selfish wishes and turn to your family, ensuring they are healthy, have good jobs and are happy. If they get into an accident, you wish them to get better. You also start wishing good things upon mankind. Unfortunately, by the time your loved ones arrive to the afterworld, you’ve forgotten them
When you die, you find a book that contains the precise descriptions of millions of lives that you have to live through, sequentially. When you are respawned, you forget about the book’s existence, so you don’t end up valuing the most precious lives
The rules of the afterlife allow you to go back on earth, as an invisible observer, as a form of tourism. You see all the other Afterlifers, though. You wish you didn’t, because this means that it’s way too crowded around the big events, like Jesus’s birth or JFK’s assassination. You keep going back and back again, but you simply position yourself anywhere near where the action is. You much prefer random times in the past where you may run into one, maybe two other people
The afterlife is a Vermont village
There is a curious connection between the afterlife and the earthly life. From the afterlife, you can affect things in the earthly life, but very subtly. You try to leave messages, by carefully arranging grains of sand (you can’t really lift any heavier objects that grains of sand), or letting the wind blow in the right way into a window during rain to reveal a hidden message. To your great disappointment, nobody can see the messages. You keep trying, though
You get to choose your afterlife from a list of several thousand. Naturally, some afterlives are more popular than others, so there is a fairly convoluted application process. Some afterlives are incredibly selective, allowing in only the more noble of people. Others require internships in other afterlives first. Others make you take a test. It’s very competitive out there
Once you die, an extra-dimensional being pulls you from the aether, demanding to know what life is like. It turns out that crossing all dimensions, there is an entity that has always been and will always be, is omnipresent, and all-knowing. However, it can’t create anything, let alone life
Once you die and gain some perspective, you realize that the passage of time is not nearly as much of a problem as the fact that the space shrinks. It gets more and more crowded, which is annoying given that all these new souls keep arriving but the real estate gets more and more pricey
Just after you die, you realize you have been incredibly close to discovering what afterlife was while you were alive. Your intuition, bolstered by irrefutable proof, was right. If only you had just a few hours of life left. But then you realize that some complex law of the universe, a kind of exclusion principle, prevented you from revealing the facts of the afterlife, and resulted in your death
WHen you die, you are randomly assigned a color, blue or green. There are two identical afterlives, and you end up in one of the two based on your assigned color. You never mix with the people of the other afterlife, and because you were never given the context, you (and everyone in each afterlife) is convinced that they are in hell and the other afterlife is heaven
The afterlife is run by a corporation. It strives to maximize profits, which is strange because it’s unclear what good money is for in an afterlife. Because it’s pretty much a monopoly, you don’t feel like you’re treated well at all. In fact, you feel you’re only a statistic that the corporation uses to convince more investors to contribute, a kind of “look how many people we can efficiently handle” and “there will always be an increasing demand for our services”
You get quizzed on your life. If you fail, you repeat your life. As you are about to take the test, you realize that you really don’t want to go back to your miserable, aching life. In fact, nobody wants to do that. But the quiz is very hard. Some even think it’s rigged, to make it impossible to pass. It’s almost as if there was no afterlife but nobody had the guts to tell you
When you die, you find yourself sitting in front of a TV screen, watching another person’s life. After that person dies, they end up watching someone but still watch them so now you watch two people — the person watching the TV and the person being watched. This repeats forever, which is quote fun, because you keep watching new lives. You begin to wonder who is watching you. You try sending them signals by zooming in an out in a kind of cipher, but you realize that there is no way for your watcher to ever communicate to you anything about themselves. You decide to send signals periodically hoping that someone in the chain above you can communicate back to you, because you feel lonely. Then, one day, when the person being watched hundreds of thousands lives away dies, and you decide to zoom onto the person they start watching in their afterlife, you realize that the person is you
When you die, you stay in the same physical universe you were in. You are finally truly happy. But one thing gnaws at you. Entropy keeps increasing. One day this universe will die. And then what? What will happen to your lifetime? Will you cease to exist? Or will you more to another afterlife? You can’t imagine being just as blissful there
It turns out that anyone can control the afterlife here, from Earth. Politicians have seized this opportunity to test alternate histories to determine which of their actions will have the more desirable result. They shape the afterlife to look exactly like the one on Earth including the decision they are about to make, and then let it play out and see what would happen tens of years later (time is just one of the things that can be controlled). Recently a faction began advocating for the rights of the afterlifers. After all, we’re all going to be one of them at some point, and we wouldn’t appreciate being guinea pigs being experimented on with stupid political decisions. For now, however, people prefer to live their earthly life better than have a better afterlife
You wake up in front of a book you are writing. It turns out that every one of us has been dreamt up by an immortal writer, trying to capture the essence of mortality
Due to strangeness of physics, the afterlife is at a precise location in space, about eighty light years away from Earth. You spend your after-lifetime conflicted whether you want mankind to ever discover this location or not. There are many people here who think they should start communicating out to the human race some facts that are known here, such as the location of buried treasures or solutions to mysteries. Ultimately, you decide that it will do more bad than good and sit quietly, hoping that you are never discovered, trying to minimize your celestial footprint so that scientists on Earth with their ever-improving instruments can never detect you
The afterlife is an infinite escalator. Most people just stand on it, but you can walk up and down if you’d like. You pass people every so often (either by walking up or down or by them walking up or down) but in the long run everyone is just going up at a fairly uniform rate. You just hope you don’t meet that really annoying guy who may want to spend the rest of his life here talking to you
Your life has been a simulation. It’s a pretty low-fidelity simulation, actually. You could compare it to the videogames of the 70s. Imagine what the afterlife life must be like! (Well, nobody can
In the future, humans discover what causes people to die and become capable of reversing the process, thus making mankind immortal. To deal with population growth, however, everyone on Earth decides to create a synthetic afterlife, a place where all people are “sent” when they “die”. Over time, we decide that it’s better if the afterlifers don’t mix with the humans, and, in fact, if nobody really knows what an afterlife is. That uncertainty creates a more stable population (and makes possible some large organizations that claim without any scientific evidence that the afterlife is exactly the way they envisioned it)
In the afterlife, we are given a chance to carefully construct a world for our new life. One thing we’re not told, though, is that as soon as we start our new life in our beautifully designed world, we lose all memory of having created it in the first place. Most times, then, we end up not taking advantage of the wonders left in the world by our immortal selves
In the afterlife, we awake as librarians. We have been dreaming a life described by a book we just finished reading. It turns out that the afterlife is all about classification, and the only way to classify a book is to live out a life and see what the protagonist was really feeling
There is no God. God liked His creation so much that he decided to start living as a mortal on Earth, lifetime after lifetime. It’s addictive, being mortal is. But we who die and go to the afterlife, don’t know that. We pass by one opportunity to go back to Earth after another in fear that God comes back when we’re not there and we’ll miss out
It turns out people can, and in fact do, come back from the afterlife. All they remember is that it was worse than the earthly life
After you die, you are put in an interrogation room and asked one question. This is a simple yes or no question. It is, “Do you believe in God?”. Answering correctly grants you an afterlife; answering incorrectly makes you perish forever. Nobody has answered this question correctly yet
God is an accidental God who just happened to mix some life in a test tube. He doesn’t understand the significance of it all, and in fact, he doesn’t care about it. He just experiments with matter to get cool visual effects
God is himself looking for an afterlife. He sees all these people arrive in his world, claiming it to be their afterlife. He doesn’t understand why that can be; after all, his world is pretty normal. It’s as if some humanlike forms started appearing on Earth claiming it was their afterlife. That makes him very uncomfortable about his own afterlife
You are given a choice between the red pill and the blue pill, just like in the Matrix, but for the life of it you can’t remember which one was which in the movie. IF you take the wrong pill, you live the entire afterlife in the Matrix. But regardless of which pill you took, you keep doubting whether you are in the Matrix or not. There is simply no way to find out
Everything is familiar in the afterlife. It’s as if you’ve lived it before. That’s because you have: the afterlife is an infinite permutation of the moments you’ve lived in your mortal life
After you die, you find yourself in a lavatory of a plane, on an infinitely long flight. The flight is so boring (and it’s unclear whether it actually leads to anywhere fun), but the lavatory has a cool feature in that it allows you to relive and entire lifetime. You just wish there were more lavatories on the plane; whenever someone comes in, they stay there until their entire earthly life is over
After you die, you can pick the time period you get respawned in. The overwhelming majority of people pick the future, for example the year 2150, only to discover to their shock that they are the only person alive. It turns out that there was a biological disaster that wiped human life from Earth in 2012
The afterlife is precisely what you want it to be just before you die. Every effort is made to accommodate everyone’s wish, and ideally everyone would just be happy that way, but of course there are many incompatible wishes, so we had to build multiple different afterlives, based on who people don’t want to hang out with. The biggest haters get the smallest afterlives. Over time, they no longer remember why they hated all these other people, and just feel lonely
As you die, your consciousness fades slowly, and your perception of time changes. You feel weaker consciousness-wise, like moving from a dream to a deeper dream. First you lose the conception of death, then of yourself. Finally, you lose the conception of anything
There is no such thing as an afterlife. Instead, there is a beforelife. The day you are born, you have already gone through a long lifetime of comfort and serenity. Some of us remember it, and are thus deeply saddened, knowing that they will never achieve what they had
Consciousness is not a complex process in the brain, it’s a particular arrangement of particles, a fingerprint. You share this fingerprint with other beings, but you only perceive the strongest manifestation of the consciousness as you, and your human instance overpowers all others. When you die, the next strongest instance could be in some insect, or a flower, or a bacterium

this pattern lives overwhelmingly in your brain, in a very concentrated fashion, which is why you think of yourself as having your body. When you die, the consciousness It flips back to a less strong one, like a flower or a bee

Afterlife is one example where Communism worked out. It’s all that Lenin could have wished for. However, it still sucks. You’re fed but never taste, you find yourself unable to form an opinion because nobody is interested in it, every day is the same as the day before
In an afterlife, everyone has a pass at creating their own idea of a life, and then everyone lives that life out. There are no rules, no limitations, anything is possible. However, you’re approximately #100-billionth in line so you have to live through some pretty terrible designs first
In an afterlife, you are paired with an alternative version of you for whom everything in life went better. It’s pretty depressing. But then someone whole life went worse than yours was paired with you. They look up to you the same way you look up to your role model. That makes you feel better

Posted in art, comparisons, fiction, lists, reductions | No Comments »

What do you do?

Friday, August 19th, 2011

I imagine, some time in the future, my child asking me a very simple question.

What do you do, daddy?

How will I answer this question? How do I want to answer this question? Will I be comfortable explaining (and if so, will I be able to explain) the financial services industry, how it makes people in this world better?

Maybe that’s how we should decide what to do with our lives — if we can explain it to our children, it’s a good thing to do.

Posted in for reflection, purpose, reductions, things everyone should do | No Comments »

Pedestrians vs Bikes

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Ever since I started biking in Central Park, I’ve been formulating my opinion of pedestrians.

For one–I’m just going to get this off my chest–I am increasingly frustrated by pedestrians who think they are entitled to just cross the street and bikers will slow down for them. I think it has to do with the sense of entitlement mostly because of the mixture of stubbornness and madness displayed on their faces; but also–let’s face it–surely they wouldn’t have done the same for a large ass truck heading their way.

In general, I found myself being less and less patient with pedestrians (I do, however, try to differentiate between those who just don’t pay attention and those who jaywalk to spite me). I used to slow down, later just swerve to avoid them. Now I’m pushing it more and more, engaging in this terrible game of chicken. I think, deeply, nobody wants to be run over by a cyclist (while the cyclist would definitely be injured and the bike damaged, the damage to the pedestrian is greater by simple laws of physics and the pedestrians must–let’s hope–understand that intuitively).

Crosswalks are interesting in Central Park. While they are accompanied by traffic lights, both pedestrians and cyclists seem to ignore them by and large. My take on this is very simple: a crosswalk gives the cyclists the obligation to be more careful (it’s like a flashing amber light for regular traffic). A crosswalk with the walk signal for pedestrians gives the pedestrians right of way, by which I mean a pedestrian should feel to be in control of his or her pace in crossing the intersection in order to cross safely. In other words, a pedestrian should not have to hurry half way through the intersection because otherwise a racing cyclist hits him or her; a pedestrian should be allowed to slow down or speed up. The pedestrian is in control. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the cyclist needs to stop at the crosswalk. So long as the cyclist ensures he or she is not on a collision course (with adequate buffer to account for a reasonable change in the pedestrian’s behavior), he or she can cycle through the intersection even when the pedestrian has a walk signal.

This rule is symmetric, of course. A cross with the don’t walk signal for pedestrians gives cyclists the right of way. A cyclist should not have to swerve or slow down in order to avoid hitting a pedestrian, but a pedestrian is welcome to cross if he or she is careful not to get in the way of a cyclist, taking into account a reasonable change in the cyclist’s behavior.

I like this rule because it’s unambiguous and efficient (it’s impractical for all cyclists and pedestrians alike to stop at all such crosswalks). Similarly, it does give the pedestrian a slight edge (cyclists must be careful around crosswalks) which seems fair given the prevalent opinion about relative rights of pedestrians, cyclists, and motor vehicle operators.

Now, if only I got everyone to listen to me and actually behave accordingly…

Posted in The Daily Badness, human nature, reductions, things everyone should do | 1 Comment »

Which Number are You?

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Go down the list and stop once your answer is “no”.

I would want to do something that would then save mankind from total destruction.
I would want to devote a month of my life completely to something that would then save mankind from total destruction.
I would want to devote a year of my life completely to something that would then save mankind from total destruction.
I would want to devote twenty years of my life completely to something that would then save mankind from total destruction.
I would want to do something that save mankind from total destruction but as I save mankind, I would need to die.
I would want to die saving mankind even if people didn’t find out I did it until a hundred years later.
I would want to die saving mankind even if there was a 50% chance that nobody would ever know I did it.
I would want to die saving mankind even if nobody ever found out I did it.
I would want to die saving mankind even if nobody ever knew mankind was in peril.
I would want to die saving mankind even if everybody was convinced that a person Y did it.
I would want to die saving mankind even if everybody was convinced that instead of saving mankind, I was the one that put it in peril.
I would want to die saving mankind in all circumstances.

Posted in for reflection, human nature, lists, purpose, reductions | 2 Comments »

Evolution of Systems

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

Looking at any system, any process, or anything that can be described as a black box with inputs and outputs, I can’t help but notice a distinct, linear progression, directed with a profound and powerful underlying idea that systems tend to increase in complexity naturally.

When a system is born, it is small and vulnerable. It makes many mistakes and may fail easily, but if it doesn’t, it adapts and quickly becomes better and grows in its capabilities. It remains easy to grasp mostly because of its size.

Over time it increases the number of degrees of freedom it can handle.

At some point the mechanics of the system become more like an art — it has enough degrees of freedom, and is stable enough to experiment with its controls. In this highly creative stage, it truly defines itself.

Size is the primary enemy of art so as the system becomes more complex and bigger, its systemization begins. The experimentation gives way to proceduralization, and as some of its outputs are deemed more valuable than others, they are commoditized.

After systemization, these systems focus narrowly on maximizing efficiency of these designated outputs.

The final stage is a natural consequence of specialization and optimization — the system begins to rely on its optimizations. Small deviations in output become costly, as are small deviations in input. Since no system exists in a vacuum, eventually every system becomes irrelevant as the world around it changes. The system dies (a death of explosion if its construction or attrition).

You have seen this evolution everywhere — companies begin their life as small startups that can likely fail but are also agile and productive. As they gain confidence in their status and stability, they begin their creative phase — a killer feature, or a risky but profitable expansion into an unlikely market. Once they turn into corporations, ad hoc work becomes proceduralized, the company is too large to quickly adapt so it focuses on what it does best. Once that’s defined, it minimizes costs. But the industry changes and the corporation, too large to change its operating models, becomes irrelevant. Just think of what happened to Blockbuster’s.

We can expand this to TV shows. A new show much catch the eye. It’s simple and has a small base of supporters. It can change rapidly based on early feedback, but it also plays with its characters to gauge viewers’ reactions. As it gets big, it is doomed to repeat the same tricks, the same lines, the same plot twists, because that’s what the viewers are used to, and it’s difficult to change in a way that doesn’t turn a large portion of the audience off. It becomes formulaic — it has its distinctive style, and it’s no longer creative. As the viewers change their tastes (or as one generation is replaced by another), the show becomes irrelevant and eventually gets cancelled.

This is also true with people, though with some parallels (for example, death means irrelevance to society; systemization means having a daily routine, having a rigid set of preferences).

The best systems can resist this progression for a long time — by remaining agile, maintaining its growth through compartmentalization and appropriate scaling, and maintaining a careful equilibrium between death of attrition (irrelevance) and death of destruction.

Posted in changes/cyclical, origins, reductions | 1 Comment »

On Information

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

We live in an age of information hoarding. Data never gets deleted, and every year it gets more and more easy to replicate. What used to take six months, a literate monk and a heavy volume now takes a fraction of a second, a child and a drive the size of a pin.

How will this information be used by future societies? For anything other than pure speculation, we should refer to history to see themes and patterns from the past.

The Romans–one of several civilizations whose society was probably as sophisticated as ours is today before its decline–were capable of recording information, even though it was more expensive. Then why do we know so little about them, relatively to what we would hope to know? Were the Romans one of the cultures that decided to reduce the amount of information they generate for some reason (I could imagine in the near future that our society would have a culture of information reticence, where larger and larger hard drives are simply not needed just like more than one computer mouse is useless to us now)? Is this information simply irrelevant to us because it happened so long ago so over time we chose to obliterate it? Does information naturally degrade regardless of the society’s attempts to preserve it?

Posted in for reflection, puzzle, reductions, retrospective | No Comments »

Maps

Monday, May 9th, 2011

Perhaps I inherited the love of them from my seafaring father. Perhaps my precise, visual, mathematical mind picked up on their usefulness. Perhaps I am OCD. No matter what the reason, I’ve been fascinated with maps every since I was little. I just finished preparing for my trip to Spain and–in what has become an obligatory part of any preparation–I saved the maps for each of the places I’ll be visiting.

I love the fact that reality can be represented in such an intuitive, instantly valuable way. I can look at the map and quickly orient myself, figure out the direction in which I should go. A good map doesn’t need a lot of detail to be informative — all it takes to understand a map is some simple pattern matching, at least one (well, arguably, two) piece of information to match the real life. Maps are, in my view, the original virtual reality.

I have some strong opinions about maps. First, a map should always point in some invariant direction, ideally north. Our minds can pattern match much more easily if they are presented with the same image each time. Maps must not be too cluttered — one of the most painful features in the iPhone 3G version of Google Maps is the Traffic overlay which completely covers all information about the road underneath the overlay. Good maps should be visually pleasing, which is one reason I feel in love with the beautiful Google maps in contrast with the ugly alternative. A good map also uses a number of tricks to present the many dimensions that a map usually has to reflect — colors, labels, symbols and overlays are just some of them.

There is probably also something about how maps easily provide comfort. When I have a map on me, I never feel lost. I feel in control, and in command — after all, I have the territory charted so it cannot surprise me. This is also why having maps on my mobile phone is one of the most valuable aspects of it.

Did you notice how everyone has their favorite map? Either of a real place, or some treasure map they drew when they were little. In fact, having thought about it, it’s not just me: a little bit of map-worship is probably in all of us.

Posted in My Favorite Things, art, comparisons, feeling, reductions, technology, whatilike | No Comments »

What is Love

Monday, May 9th, 2011

The best definition I could think of is that love is the realization that the other person’s unhappiness makes us unhappy as well.

It’s not the linking of happiness, but unhappiness — it’s easy for our happiness to increase when others around us are happy, too — participation in one’s good fortune is just a regular, human thing. Love manifests itself when something is lost and we feel the loss also.

Posted in comparisons, for reflection, reductions, whatis | No Comments »