Philosophy and Me

At the suggestion of my friend, (the same friend who planted the idea of pursuing psychiatry into my head), I would like to start a blog where I can do some preliminary organization and broadcasting of some ideas that I’m chewing on. I tend to be chewing on ideas from time to time, and typically I seek out unsuspecting victims whom I rope into extended philosophical discussions. Alas, I don’t think I can always count on a live target when I want to organize my thoughts; it strikes me as prudent to develop a system for processing my thoughts that has few to no constraints, but can result in positive externalities (which I’m all about).

That being said, the topic I want to write on today is an idea that came up in that same conversation with my friend. Well, it would be disingenuous to say the idea just “came up”. My friend paid me a compliment. He said that one thing he admires about me is that I am always trying to learn from every situation. Now I’ll admit, the flattery I felt is definitely a contributing factor as to why this is the first topic I want to write about. But the fuller truth is that this sentiment dovetails with an intuition pump that I’ve recently been chewing on: the premise/cosmology of the story Mushoku Tensei (Jobless Reincarnation), and more specifically the character of Orsted.

Now I’m not particularly interested in recapping other people’s stories and doing a disservice to them in the process. And furthermore, I don’t think the details help this thought process; if anything, I think it muddles it. So I’m just going to take the story for what I want it to be for the sake of this discussion.

In this story, the character of Orsted is in a circumstance unique to him, not too unlike Groundhog day, in which he repeatedly experiences a resetting of the timeline back to the time of his birth, but with him retaining (imperfect) memory from his past lives. Now, the concept is rife with problems, and in my estimation the story takes some hand-wavy compatibilist approach to gel them over, which works for my purposes. Basically the memory isn’t really accessible when he’s a baby, because his brain is all smooth and not wrinkly enough yet to house the kinds of structures that his memories consist of (more on this later). As he grows into his adolescence, his memories start to return to him as some strange phenomena of both deja-vu as well as the ability to “see” the future.

Now, I can’t say I have a great model of how to think about all this, but there’s something about it that seems to resonate with a handful of different intuitions I have. Those intuitions have come from a number of different sources, and I hope to invoke them and tie them together in a way that gives you a glimpse of what I think I’m glimpsing, though it will likely not offer you any more sense of completed sense-making than I have currently.

I want to start with the idea of this ability to “see” the future. Now, in this story, this ability to see the future is described as a sort of ability to near perfectly predict the actions of agents in the world, agents meaning people, animals, etc. In essence, creatures that exhibit behavior. Now, this sense of a stable/structured animating spirit that manifests in the behavior of agents reminds me a lot of how Jordan Peterson describes the idea of the Holy Ghost ¹, that being the spirit that is the manifestation of the complex interplay between agents. One might think of it as the product of game theory embodied. Its as if Orsted is a master of game theory to the point where he can predict what everyone around him is going to a high degree of accuracy, at least over a short time horizon.

But here’s the deja-vu part of it. How can Orsted know what people will do? Well he can’t just be a deterministic predictor that uses all the information of the past to determine the future. That was a possibility that I had intuitions for a long time that it doesn’t quite work; however, I was further disavowed of this possibility by Jenann Ismael on a Theories of Everything podcast episode with Curt Jaimungal ², where she emphasized that there actually isn’t enough information content coming from the past to determine the future, or in other words, the future is under-determined. New information enters the world every moment, and that information is, in a sense, better “sourced” from the future than the past, though its probably best thought of as coming into existence in the moment that it arrives.

So in that way, Orsted couldn’t hope to develop this ability to “learn” the Holy Ghost to the point of useful prediction of peoples’ behaviors without actually experiencing the future/various futures to actually see what ends up happening, for him to then learn something about the principles governing the inter-agent dynamics that spawn/generate the new information that is coming into existence all the time. Like a deep-learning algorithm, he needs “labeled data” so to speak, so he can learn the underlying patterns that allow one to predict the future from the present. Thus, the role of the resetting timeline, and his many lives.

The way I see it, Orsted developed his ability to see the future/predict peoples’ behaviors and the immediate results through his repeat “runs” at his life, and his growing dataset of actions and their consequences to learn from.

Which brings us to that question I promised we’d return back to of the neural architecture that’s supporting all of this. How can Orsted efficiently encode the principles governing the dynamic interactions of agents? How does one capture an image of the holy ghost?

Well, it seems he took a page out of that movie/story “Arrival”, where at the end they reveal how the creatures they are trying to communicate with experience time cyclically (whatever that means in the context of that story), and thus they have developed a language that captures information in a way that is most relevant to a creature that “experiences time cyclically” (again, whatever that means. As confusing as Mushoku Tensei’s cosmology can be, it gives me more to work with than Arrival did to understand what they mean).

So as my reference suggests, Orsted develops/invents a language/information storage technology that takes the form of looping poems. Like poetry in our world, the form of poetry is meant to aid memory, through inlayed structure that provides subtle feedback and error correction. For instance, if one’s recounting of a poem breaks pentameter in exactly one place, then that break in the rhythm of the poem is likely an error in the recounting, a “flipped bit”, a corruption/perversion of the information that it was meant to convey. So in this way, Orsted uses his cyclical poems as a sort of error-correcting code, in which he can detect subtle drifts in these poems over the millennia by noticing deviations from the inlayed/constitutive patterns of the poems.

Okay, so, if the poems are so constrained, how does he store/add information to them? Well, fractally of course. The poem as a whole does not need to be scrapped when new information is to be incorporated, rather, the poem is to be deepened and expanded: to more closely resemble its ultimate form than it did prior to the complexification, though never losing its global structure. Some time ago, I heard similar sentiments as an account for how memory is implemented in our own brains; the things we learn at the beginning of our lives serve as the foundational structures, and we add further detail as we age and learn more as further complexifications of those foundational structures, not replacement of them. The wrinkles in our brain get more wrinkly, but the brain does not liquify and obliterate its structure to do so (though seemingly liquification does not preclude continuity as evidenced by the persistence of learning from caterpillar to butterfly, though that’s a story for another blog post). So in this way, Orsted is able to layer more and more insights into the way of things into his knowledge base, which extends the reach of his ability to anticipate the future through his exploration of the implications of the knowledge he has brought within the scope of his awareness and mastery.

Moreover, the idea of this “deep learning” way of thinking about what Orsted is doing suggests that futures/outcomes he experiences define (or at least correspond to) the principles/structure that governs the interactions that unfold in real time. And given that the future is under-determined, the principles that come to be/reveal themselves are in a way determined by which potential futures are able to compel us future-divining creatures that try to decide what to do in the here and now by contemplating potential futures. Hang onto that idea, we’ll return to it in a moment.

So, here we have Orsted, innocent little boy that slowly “remembers” what he knows about the world, ala Plato and his concept of anamnesis, where all that we learn is simply our souls recollecting what we already knew before birth. But what does it mean to “know” in this context? It means to understand the dynamics that govern. And for Orsted, with each lifetime, he furthers his understanding with each “run” or “playthrough” (the matter of how to term these things is a bit of a tricky one that we’ll return back to), which speeds up his learning with each subsequent pass, and extends the reach/depth of his perception and insightfulness as he learns.

Now who does that innocent boy grow into? He grows into a man with a mission; to undermine the influence of Hitogami (Man God), a mysterious spiritual being that seems to indirectly manipulate events in the world by speaking to people in their dreams.

Now, dreams are an interesting thing. I conceptualize them as a sort of wrestling with/exploring these subtle and peculiar dynamics of causality that govern both inanimate and animate/agential objects. And in that way, by Hitogami talking to people in their dreams, he represents conceptions of possible futures influencing people in the here and now to take certain courses of actions, based on those visions of the future. In a sense, Hitogami is like that anxiety-provoking nightmare of that test you might fail, that gives you the drive to take an action in the here and now to steer the course of the future, be it study for the test or plan how you’re going to cheat on it. Taken to its most cynical conception, Hitogami is the paranoia that controls (or strongly compels) what futures us agents choose to explore/allow/bring into being. Now why is Hitogami manifesting paranoia and not hope or inspiration? I don’t know. That’s just not the character/force of nature in this particular story.

So how might we understand the quest of Orsted? To open your heart, of course *cue Sonic Adventure soundtrack* ³. Meaning, to undermine this paranoia’s seeming efforts to sew distrust and hostility amongst agents in the world. To what end? Even Orsted doesn’t know. But he personally suffers from the distrust and hostility that Hitogami has fostered in the world against Orsted and his people, so if he knows just one thing, it’s that Hitogami sucks, and his influence should be opposed as much as possible, maybe even completely eliminated from the world someday. What a fascinating dream, no?

Which brings us back to the premise of this blog post in the first place: always trying to learn from every situation. Well, in short, I do think I try to learn from every situation, and I believe I do so in the same spirit as my man Orsted. Now, I don’t have the luxury (or curse) of living many lifetimes. Interestingly, the way the story goes (spoilers), every time Orsted manages to somehow enter into the realm in which Hitogami resides and he is able to confront him directly, he finds himself unable to defeat/eliminate him, and it is always precisely in that moment of unstoppable force meets an immovable object that the timeline resets (for natural, cosmological reasons, not at anyone’s behest), and that he has to start all over (starting as a wee baby, no less). However, not all is lost, because every time Orsted confronts Hitogami, he learns something from Hitogami, by virtue of Hitogami’s involuntary reactions to the things Orsted does/says when he confronts him. I find that really interesting, that every direct encounter with the spirit of paranoia/distrust shows another crack in its “efforts” to influence the events of the world (trust that I do not personify disembodied forces lightly. Rather, I am using the “spirit of paranoia” framing to try to describe its features/consequences in that is as intuitive/accessible as possible).

In my own lived experience, I believe this to be true. It is nigh impossible to simply snuff out the spirit of distrust/mistrust/paranoia. However, these fears are not reflective of the most potent dynamics that govern the unfolding of the world. I believe those factors to be truth, love, truth in the spirit of love, take your pick, but your specific choice of conception is neither here nor there; I do not believe mistrust/distrust to be the most potent force. I am convinced by the idea that interpersonal trust is the only true natural resource (yet another idea I first heard espoused by Jordan Peterson, though I am sure it has a philosophical tradition). I believe distrust/mistrust ultimately melts in the face of love and courage, which are fueled by the resource that is trust.

I wish I had more of a conclusion/wrap up to this blog post, but I don’t. This was my attempt to tie together a bunch of intuitions I’ve been chewing on. However, I can broadly couch this discussion in the project of the Symbolic World, ala Jonathan Pagaeu (and his brother Mathew). I have been convinced that narratives are the deepest ontological structures of reality, and as such, it makes perfect sense to me when there is a character that can somehow piece together the ability to predict the future simply by having lived many lives and having explored the space of possible narratives he may participate in/bring about. That clicks with me in a deep way, and I think his mission (in the way that I am interpreting/understanding it) resonates strongly with my values in life. That is a wonderful thing, because it’s been a long time since I’ve adopted a new, unique role model. When I try to think of the other characters that have filled that role for me, most are versions of Sun Wukong (Goku, Naruto, Luffy) in their respective Journeys to the West. However, Orsted strikes me as something a little different, fueled by different motivations, and in a way, I related to Orsted more. I don’t think I was simply born with main-protagonist energy and a seemingly unfounded faith in others and goodness; I think I came to this calling in a similar way as Orsted; I have (1/3^rd of a) lifetime’s worth of firsthand experiences of how much distrust/mistrust mucks things up and sucks, and I simply want to quit that shit, and start fostering more trust and goodwill amongst men (in the all-inclusive use of the term).

1.          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-wWBGo6a2w

2.          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvXihDAOi0

3.          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fo__Sh0nIg