unscriptured

Life is hard.

Well, not my life, but other people’s. I’ve actually done a lot of things to streamline my life and keep it, for me, easy. Of course there’re little complications here and there, things that I could get rid of to make my life even easier, but somewhere in there you have to strike a balance between easy and interesting. I suppose, in that way, I try to keep my life at about the difficulty of a kid’s book, and well short of something for young adults.

For instance, Unscriptured itself is something I don’t really need, but having something that I’m supposed to produce for a weekly deadline is, I suppose, enriching. Enriching in the same way that hiding snacks around an animal’s enclosure at the zoo is enriching for them. So here I get to complain about all the little things that God and I notice in the world that make life hard, but I can’t complain too much, because, in reality I’ve got it pretty good. I’ve got a job that is interesting and pays well. I’ve got no boyfriend, but really that’s at least as much a blessing as a curse. And I’ve got good friends to spend time with.

So for me, what’s hardest about life is just that there’s not enough time for everything that I want to do. There’s piles of books unread, there’s piles of movies unseen, there’s tons of projects that I’ve only barely outlined and a few that are further along but still not there yet.

So this week I’d just like to take a moment and say this: Life is good, and when it comes down to it, that’s enough.

We all know the warning against painting ourselves into the corner. In simple terms it means don’t get yourself into a situation that you can’t get out of if you can avoid it, but more specifically it means to think about the consequences of what you’re doing and try to avoid the ones that are undesirable.

But when you’ve already laid down the paint, there’s nothing to do but try to find some way to get out of the corner without messing things up.

According to God, that’s what led to suicide being raised to the level of mortal sin in the Catholic teachings. They had done such a good job of telling people how wonderful Heaven was, how it was a paradise where your every whim was fulfilled beyond your expectations, that they began to fear their true believers would find ways to try and gain early admission. Now one thing that pretty much all religions have in common is that they’re always trying to increase their numbers. They want market share. And having their followers start to kill themselves is bad for that in two ways… First, when someone has killed themself, they may still technically be one of your followers, but they don’t contribute much. Second it makes it harder to get new members. I mean think about it, if you were considering changing religions (or getting one for the first time), would you look for one where people are killing themselves or would you look for one where they weren’t? I think the answer’s pretty clear.

I’m in the midst of a week of spending all of my non-working, waking hours, sitting in the dark. I’ve been attending Frameline, San Francisco’s International LGBT Film Festival. I’ve been steeping in documentaries about the struggles of queers the world over, in love stories of an alternative nature, and in meditations on what it means to be gay.

In that spirit I’ve got a message from God to everyone about the difference between natural rights and “special” rights.

Natural rights are those rights that support living in our natural state. “Special” rights are rights that support living with things we choose or which are chosen for us before we are able to choose.

God and I would just like to make this clear: Gay rights are not special, religious rights are special.

That’s why freedom of religion is mentioned in the constitution and freedom to love, even to love someone of the same sex, is not

I sometimes feel guilty at not having been an active participant in the great civil rights struggles from which I’ve clearly benefited. It’s why I wish I could believe that the Occupy Wall Street movement is something more than just an unorganized circus; so I could contribute in some way without feeling like I’m wasting my time.

God tells me I’m fooling myself, that I would still find some excuse to not take part. He says I’m too lazy and selfish, and I don’t really disagree.

And what are some of those benefits that I’ve accrued? Well, in the early twentieth century, workers were killed by government and business thugs as they fought for safe working conditions and a shorter work week, leading eventually to today’s standard forty hours. In the sixties, part of the struggle was just to not have to drown our inner selves in an ocean of conformist mediocrity, and that certainly made my life better. Another part of that mid-century civil rights movement was for the right of mixed race couples to marry, which helped pave the way for today’s struggle for gay marriage. It makes me feel almost guilty for not having a boyfriend, for not having someone who would make the gay marriage fight really my own, not just figuratively my own.

In 1969, when the hippies gave us the Summer of Love and Judy Garland gave us the Stonewall Riots, I was only nine. I was too young to take part, and now it feels like I’m too old for the fight for marriage. So what’s my point? I’m not sure I have one. And I suppose then that that’s the point. I’ve happily ridden along on the shoulders of giants, I’ve gone down roads that are wide and clearly marked, blazed no trails of my own, made no mark upon the world. Thousands of souls made it possible for me to live a comfortable, almost hedonistic life.

So to all of them, “Thanks.”

Humans are a cooperative species. That is the very essence and basis of society.

We’re not unique in this. In fact we’re not even the most extreme example. Take bees for instance; you never see a bee strike out on it’s own, off to live a solitary existence free to wander from flower to flower and never you mind about going back to the hive. But you do see people that live alone, interacting with society only enough to meet their physical needs. Sometimes people manage to do this even while living within a city.

According to God, one of the prime contributors to society is empathy. We have an inborn habit of imagining each other’s feelings, be it happiness or pain. We get a “contact high” from being around someone exuberant. We cry at sad movies.

I say ouch on behalf of inanimate objects.

It’s an involuntary thing. I’ll see a minor accident, or even just a particularly nastily crumbled fender and wince. I’ll be putting on an old shirt and the seam of the armpit will tear, and I’ll say ouch. It’s a little thing but it’s part of the glue that holds us together. It’s part of why we enjoy cartoons where “things” come alive, we already imagine them alive, so there’s a sort of “I knew it” aspect to watching these shows. So empathy is the basis of anthropomorphication. We even carry this up to the grandest of scales, we empathize with the entire universe and call that God, and instead of saying “ouch” we say that we sin.

So after God and I had discussed, as some physicists propose, the possibility that the universe we live in is a three-dimensional projection of a two-dimensional description, we decided to take this dimensional duality and use it to inform our take on another universal description. It didn’t originate with the movie The Matrix, but that film and its sequels did a lot to popularize the notion that the universe we live in is actually just a computer simulation.

Certainly computer sims have come a long way towards being able to portray the world around us, pathetically short of the reality mind you, but getting close enough to whet the imagination with the potential. I pointed out that for all the touting of 3D graphics, the actual display of them is 2D. Even 3D movies are merely two slightly different 2D images displayed in a way that engages our stereoscopic view of the world. We don’t get to change our focal depth the way we would with something that actually was presented to us in three dimensions. But my point was that a computer’s presentation of a 2D image, calculated from a description of three dimensions, matches fairly well to the notion of the universe as a holographic projection.

God then pointed out that the very language we use to effect our transfer into cyberspace, such as it currently is, confuses the interpretation of the space as being either 2D or 3D. She suggested that if the universe really were a 3D projection from a 2D description that maybe our subconscious knowledge of this would inform our choice of terms and lead to that very confusion. When we “log in” to a computer system, it suggests that the cyberspace we are entering is three-dimensional, that it is a space we enter into the inside of. When we “log on” however, we just admit to a surface. Cyberspace is then like that two-dimensional plane that holds the description of the holographic universe just at the edge of a black hole, just outside its event horizon.

So maybe Timothy Leary was anticipating what the physicists have enshrined as String Theory, when he told us to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” We might suppose the “tune in” part was like the tuning of a guitar; we tune the guitar to match the frequencies of our musical scale, but we tune ourselves to match the oscillating strings that make up the universe. Then maybe the new catch phrase could be “log in or log out” meaning that we can choose to join the universe-as-simulation or to separate ourselves from it and by making it a conscious choice, we make the universe our own.

And when it becomes our own, maybe it’s 2D when we log “on”, and maybe it’s 3D when we log “in.” Or maybe it’s just that English speakers like having more than one way to say things.

I was reading this week about a new view of the universe that some physicists are, oh, I don’t know, exploring? Debating? Imagining? Or maybe just using as a masturbation fantasy. But let me not be the first to cast stones here, lest God take me to task for any of my own private thoughts.

So this view comes from thinking too much about black holes and about the laws of the universe. One of those laws, and one that the physicists take very seriously, is that information can’t be destroyed. I’m not sure they mean the same thing by information that normal people do, but I’m not sure they don’t either. One of the other fundamentals of the universe is that nothing can come out of a black hole; after all, the inability of even light to come out is what gives black holes their name. So the thought then comes that if a thing falls into a black hole and can never come back out, is that not the same as that thing being destroyed? Thus a thing that falls into a black hole is truly destroyed, made to cease to exist, as opposed to being merely destroyed, where “mere” destruction really just changes the thing’s description. But that thing that was destroyed can be considered to consist in part of the information that describes it, but we “know” that information can’t be destroyed, so there must be some way that the thing can be destroyed but not its information, and that “way” is that some physicists now theorize that while the physical thing is destroyed, its information, its description, gets spread out upon the surface of the black hole.

And here again, let me caution that I’m not sure all of these terms are being used by the physicists in the usual way, and based on God’s pitiful efforts to try and help me understand this, I’m not sure that even he really knows what the terms mean to the physicists. So by “surface of the black hole” I think they mean the infinitely thin space just beyond the event horizon, the breaking point between what can be considered “inside” the event horizon and what can be considered “outside.” When they say “information” or “description” I think they mean “everything that is the thing except the thing itself,” but that’s far too close to the sound of one hand clapping for my tastes. Also let me caution that they didn’t actually use the term “infinitely thin” to describe this “surface,” that’s my somewhat poetic interpretation of what they did say; what they did say was that the surface is two dimensional.

At this point they’ve come up with the notion that anything in our three-dimensional reality can be described by two-dimensional information. Some of them then claim that from there it’s really not much of a leap to suggest that maybe the whole universe is really a hologram, by which they mean a three-dimensional projection of two-dimensional information. I think some of them are claiming only that it’s not that big of a leap to think that we’re living in a hologram, and that some of them are actually claiming that we really are living in a hologram.

At this point, even God agreed with me that serious recreational drugs were probably in order. I’m just not sure if the drugs are to help understand what the physicists are thinking or if they’re meant to help me forget the whole thing.