Ran Prieur

January 5.

2024-01-05T17:50:27Z

January 5. Another thing I'm optimistic about, in the near future, is creative work. Last week I saw Poor Things, and I can't believe something so weird and courageous came out of Hollywood -- although it's probably not going to make money, leaving The Witch (2015) as the only great and profitable film of this century.

And for music, Could we have found the best album of 2024 in the first few days of January? It's a review of Letter to Self by SPRINTS, self-described as "Garage noise from Dublin, Ireland". The singer has power in her voice that I haven't heard since the 90s. Favorite song: Up and Comer.

January 3.

2024-01-03T15:30:37Z

January 3. Moving on, this year I expect to write more about philosophy. A few weeks ago on the subreddit there was a short thread about physics without causality. There are more links in the thread, and when I looked into this subject, I was surprised to find out that professional physicists, in their papers and textbooks, avoid claiming causality at all, because they can't define it. At the same time, popular science is causally fundamentalist, believing there's no such thing as an uncaused event.

If I think really deeply about this, I can get into a mental space where causality is an illusion. Even in the obvious case of a domino knocking over another domino, really it's not one event causing another, but two aspects of one big event, which we view in terms of causality because we're inside the illusion of time and space.

The practical value of acausal metaphysics, is the ability to see and use correlations, which you would otherwise have to ignore because there's no mechanism for causality. For example, astrology. There's no realistic way that the positions of the planets can influence your life. But the course of your life, and the positions of the planets, could be two views of a deeper thing, where one can tell you something about the other.

I try to cultivate synchronicity in everyday life. For example, if I read or write a word, while hearing the same word, I don't dismiss it as meaningless, nor do I think it's a mind-blowing miracle, nor do I get paranoid about evil spirits. I just feel grateful that I've briefly tuned into the normal way that reality works. Related: my 2022 post about bibliomancy.

January 1, 2024.

2024-01-01T13:10:13Z

January 1, 2024. For the new year, some predictions. I'm very pessimistic about one category of the near future: events that are covered on the news. Climate disasters are going to get worse -- here's a short video of giant waves in California -- while climate change denial will not get any better.

Wealth inequality will get worse, while the political will to fix wealth inequality will not get better until our whole culture changes how it thinks about money, from "Poverty sucks but you can climb out of it if you're not lazy," to "We have to make poverty fun because we're stuck in it forever."

There will be more and more homeless people, but that will make the world of homelessness better, because more functional people will be pulled into it.

Worst of all, the world is entering a phase of authoritarian politics and military conflict, which will not end until the generations that have not experienced that stuff find out how shitty it is. Here's a depressing Reddit thread (removed because the internet is also getting worse), What would be the ramifications if Ukraine aid is stopped and Russia wins and takes over Ukraine? Basically, if international cooperation fails to keep the peace, every country will build up their military to try to stop invasions, or to do them. This is looking a lot like right before WWI.

Here's where I'm optimistic. If you add up the death tolls of WWI, WWII, and the Spanish flu, it was about seven percent of the world population at that time. Seven percent of the present world population is more than half a billion people. I don't expect that many deaths, because humans are no longer mean enough to do that many murders -- although nuclear war is still possible.

I'm confident that we will neither go extinct, nor colonize space. We're going to be stuck working shit out on Earth for a long time, without cheap resources, and I think when we get used to that, life could get pretty good.

Where I'm most optimistic, in my lifetime, is in the normalization of psychedelics, and the effect of all that tripping on culture. Posted to the subreddit, The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms.

I think western culture bottomed out in the 1700s, in terms of how little of reality we saw as alive. For a while after Descartes, you needed propositional cognition to even exist. Emotions weren't real again until Romanticism. The word "ecology" was not even invented until 1873. I predict that by 2200, the Pope will say that trees are people, as the old religions retool for bottom-up theology, and we rebuild participating consciousness from scratch.