Magical Rohrer

From watching a few of his interviews and playing his games, I must say that Jason Rohrer is a guy I would like to sit down and have a beer with.

Rohrer is thirty five-ish, blond, square-jawed, and has startling blue eyes.  His hair seems perennially sloppy, as if it won’t be tamed no matter how long or short it’s cut.  It’s the look of a natural grunge musician.  His surprisingly large head sort of floats about over his thin neck like the head of a marionette, bobbing and weaving about with his words, which bunch together in quick spurts.  It’s a manic dance of excitement.  He speaks quickly about infinite recursion and creativity and biased data sharing and the lower limit of what we would call communication, and by the end you find yourself bobbing along with him a little bit too, because his enthusiasm is infectious.  Or maybe it’s because you're a little intrigued...

Jason Rohrer is an artist and a computer game designer, although I would emphasize the former and say that the latter is simply his medium.  If you’ve ever turned your nose up at video games, or you don’t see the value in them, I beseech you to try the ones he made.  You still may not like them (and I warn you, these games aren’t designed to be fun), but I guarantee that they’ll at least make you think a little differently.  The games I recommend you to play are these:

Passage is about life.  Will you travel through it alone or with a partner?  Will you take an easy road or a more tricky one?  What kinds of challenges will you take, and what will you give up in the process?  And what’s the point of it all anyways?

Gravitation is about creativity.  Have you ever had moments of genius, and then the times when it all crashes down on you?  Have you ever struggled with the tradeoff between work and play, brainstorming and implementing, taking on more exciting challenges versus finishing the ones you’re immersed in?  So has Jason Rohrer.  I bet you’ve never experienced it like this before.  

Sleep is Death is about…?  Okay I admit, I haven’t played it.  But I watched the cool intro slideshow, and I’m intrigued enough that I want to.

These games (at least the first two) are free and quick... they’ll take you less than ten minutes to play.  They’re purposely philosophical and exploratory rather than entertaining.  You can collect points in these games but really what you’re going to want to do is to understand the nuances of their mechanics, because, well, that’s what the games are really about.  It’s not the contents nor the graphics (don’t expect much) but their physics through which the games build into allegories.  

And when I say that you’ve never played games like these, I really mean it.  There’s very little else I’ve seen to compare them to, and I feel they have more in common with Avante Garde art than with other video games (although admittedly, I’m not really a gamer… perhaps there is other stuff like this out there?).  

There's something else about these games.  In an age when all of our technology is tremendously slick, it can be shocking when we encounter something that isn’t.  Rohrer cuts right to the heart of it.  He doesn't waste a spare pixel.  His games show that beauty is in the crafting and not in the polish, for of polish there is none here, but I don’t feel these games miss it.  Take a few minutes to check them out and I think you'll be glad that you did.

Elderly shmelderly

What should I do with my elderly vegetables?

I had a pile of them in front of me this morning, from the rather fresh to the marginally edible.  I sorted them into groups.  One group was for the dumpster.  This included a few moldy tomatoes and eggplants.  Then there was another group which looked healthy and fine.  Those were the obvious keepers.  But between them was the third group--the wrinkled old ones.  These ones had velvety skins.  They looked like they had been through rough days, and had stories to tell.  In fact, I know that some of them did.  

That red bell pepper had gotten sliced back in his prime, when he was a young chap full of ego and crunch.  I had enjoyed his fragrance and his crispness then.  Next to him was the twisted orange pepper, a bad little man who carried just the whiff of heat to keep it interesting, but who most of all was surprisingly tangy and sweet.  He had completed one of my salads.  And the onion, oh so neglected.  “You eat my friends all the time,” he seemed to whine, “but little old me, you just stuck me in the back of the fridge and forgot about me, didn’t ya.”  He had shriveled away from his old purple luster, down and down into a tight and curled knot.  I could see the disregard on him, layers which had softened or peeled away and were useless.  He didn’t look appetizing.  

I stalled.  I picked the veggies up and got ready to trash them, but, not being able to bring myself to it, I put them back down again.  The silly thing was, I had all of the same vegetables in my “fresh” group.  I didn’t need these.  On the counter nearby there were two red bell peppers, the color of wine and nearly exploding out of their smooth folds with young pride.  Right next to them sat a spotless orange pepper, the same variety as that old grizzled hothead who had livened up my salad.  And on my spice shelf were a few onions, lording about like they owned the place.  

But now I had these chaps who were wrinkled but edible, which had shriveled up but not rotted, and who seem to stare at me with their vegetable eyes and say “what about us?”  I watched them and they watched me.  They never blinked.  Finally, giving in, I started slicing them.  Today I would make my eggs using only the elderly ones, and we’d have to just see.

So I’m taking my breakfast now on the balcony of my building, up the stairwell, with my feet propped up on the railing and a cup of coffee.  The vegetables are good.  They seem to have mellowed out but gained a wider spectrum flavors with their age, making it worth chewing more at each bite.  I’m glad that I chose them.  It’s a chilly day and it’s Shabbat so the neighborhood’s pulse is pretty tame now, with just some tourists and a few locals walking dogs or strolling, and some crazy fat lady going up and down the street singing nonsense.  I am struck by the fact that just over two weeks ago, I was in the same stairwell as this balcony, hiding from rockets, and now I’m mostly concerned about the fate of my elderly vegetables.  

I think back and yes, maybe one of these veggies was even around then.  Well, I’m not sure.  The conflict with Hamas feels like it never happened, almost, just as these veggies, so precious when I first sliced them, sat forgotten in a cold place while my life swished away elsewhere.  It’s strange just how quickly and fully we can forget things.  I just celebrated a birthday, so I guess I’m thinking a bit more about it right now.  I hope that I’ll age well, like these veggies.  Well, look at me… now I’m getting all sentimental.  Seeing anything that has been left forgotten strikes a chord with me.  To curl up alone in the refrigerator is a sad fate for a bell pepper.  

Breakfast is done.  I’ve finished all of my old guys, and it’s only the young guns left over in my apartment now.  Will I eat them fresh?  Will they end up neglected, too?  Who’s to say?  One day at a time, little fellas.  I’m off to life, to hopefully scooping up a few more flavors myself on the big journey.  I have a lot more to do out there.  Gotta get it all while it's hot, while there's still sizzle in the pan.  After all, one day I, too, will be an elderly vegetable.

Beyond rockets

The bus bombing this afternoon made this a whole lot more terrifying.

Apparently somebody came onto a bus with a special package and dropped it off, and then ran away.  The bomb exploded and injured about 21 people (the numbers in the reports keep changing, so we don't know yet for sure how many or how serious).  This happened on Shaul Hamelech street in central Tel Aviv.  I’ve made a few maps so you can understand what the geography of all of this looks like, since it’s probably hard for people who’ve never been here to know what “Tel Aviv” means, regarding what it means for a bus to blow up in Tel Aviv, how close Tel Aviv is to Gaza, etc.  

Map 1 shows my usual stomping ground.  The red line on the right is the street where the bus blew up today.  I pointed out where I live and where Moriel and Claire (very close friends of mine) live, so people have a sense of perspective.  I also pointed out a few of our favorite bars. 

Map 2 is a bit more zoomed out.  In the maps that follow, a blue box shows where the borders of the last map were, so you can get a better sense of your bearings.  I've outlined what most people consider central Tel Aviv in red, and I've kept on the highlighting of the street where the bus blew up.  I also marked Tel Aviv University, where I am now and where I work.

Map 3 is a bit more zoomed out and you can see the relative locations of Holon, Tel Aviv, and Rishon LeTsiyon.  Holon and Rishon are sites of recent damage from rocket attacks.

In Map 4, you can see Rehovot, where Moriel works (at the Weizmann Institute), and Ashdod.  Ashdod has been under continual bombardment since this thing started, and for the last few years it's sustained rocket attacks on a regular basis.

Map 5 brings Gaza, Ashkelon, and Beer Sheva into the picture.  Ashkelon and Beer Sheva have been under continual fire.  Also, Jerusalem shows up on the right.  A couple of Hamas missiles have landed near there during this conflict, including one yesterday right before Ban Ki Moon of the UN arrived.

And here's the same map of Israel right next to an equally scaled map of the New York Met area.  I put a red line so you can see the distance missiles are flying between Gaza and Tel Aviv, compared with an equivalent distance in New York.  It's as if Manhattan were being fired at from East Brunswick.  I mean, I know that there's a rivalry between New York and New Jersey, but come on now...

The bus bombing was shocking and a whole new type of buzz went over my friends when we heard about it.  It seems this was a lone actor... Hamas did not claim responsibility.  We shall hope that this was an isolated incident.  Even more than the rocket attacks, many of my Israeli friends seemed to take this as a matter of course, while Americans I've spoken to, including myself, were more shocked.  I guess that it takes living through a few bombings to get used to it...  

By the way, an Israeli news site to watch for very up to date news is Ynet:

http://www.ynetnews.com/.

Thanks for your thoughts everybody.

Fajr fajr burning bright…

For the first siren I was on a bus with my laundry.  

The bus suddenly stopped and three or four Israelis bounded off of it, as if they were late for an appointment or the world were about to explode.  The rest of the people on the bus stayed sitting as if nothing were happening, which, not having a clue what was happening, is what I did too.  The bus started up again a few seconds later and then opened its doors and a few people ran back on, and then we continued on our merry way.  While we roared down Rothschild in the series of feints and weaves that is the terrifying norm of Israeli driving, I got a call from my friend Raphy asking if I had heard the siren and knew what to do if I heard one.  I hadn’t, and I didn’t -- but I learned what to do then.  

I was calm until I got to the laundry café and the barrista exclaimed “why are you doing your laundry when we almost just got blown up?!”  I thought the response was a little extreme and told her so, but I didn’t realize yet that an actual missile had been intercepted somewhere in the vicinity of Tel Aviv.  And yet… I still thought her response was a bit excessive.  

I did my laundry.  Plenty of other folks were in the café, too.  I met my friend Iv for a beer afterwards.  It was a quiet night, but people were still out.  That was last Thursday, the first day that a live missile siren had sounded in Tel Aviv in decades, and people were a bit shocked.  But the danger then, and still now, is rather minimal.  We all do what we can.  We keep the windows cracked so we’ll hear any sirens, and we pay close attention to any high pitched wails.  If an alarm sounds we go to the stairwell, or the basement, or whatever the safest place is.  But we all have the choice: we can play the role of a victim of terror and actually be terrified by this stuff, or we can do the rational thing and continue on with our lives.  I, along with most Israelis, choose the latter.  

You see, Hamas sends missiles not to kill people but to scare them, and it’s amazing what they can achieve with a single rocket.  One missile which is sure to be shot down by the Iron Dome, several million Israelis potentially terrified.  But the bang is much louder than the bite.  Nothing has hit Tel Aviv so far.  Even if something did, the chance of someone getting hurt is much lower than from many other forms of sudden death -- cardiac arrest, allergic reactions, car crashes or bike collisions or other accidents.  If you want to increase your safety in this city, you’re better off choosing the salad over the falafel rather than gnashing your teeth over missiles.  Even the same is true in the south of the country, where many hundreds of missiles have fallen in the last days.  There have been very few deaths, just a continual bombardment of fear.  And that fear is the point of it all.  

In truth, I feel much worse for Southern Israelis now than for us in Tel Aviv, and much, much worse for the citizens of Gaza.  People in Gaza are dealing with hell from both directions.  Their leaders have done their best to screw them, and the Israelis are now punishing them for Hamas’s mistakes as well.  The point of this blog isn’t to get political, so I’ll stop there.  But it is just amazing to me how futile and empty this whole thing is.  Nobody wins here.  People die, and stuff is blown up, international opinion swings towards Israel and then against it as unintended civilian targets are inevitably hit, and the cycle rolls on and on.  This is a power theater like all of the other turns of the screw, in which there is no political or military endpoint, just an escalation towards a new equilibrium upon which the governing engines on both sides are striving desperately to gain the upper hand.  We’re all meanwhile being driven full tilt into a pillar of cast lead.  Everything happening just makes the crap more entrenched.  There is no movement, only stasis.  This is the circular madness of Middle East logic.  

But I digress.  The night after the first siren went off, I drove North with a group of friends to go rockclimbing and camping for the weekend.  I actually wasn’t in Tel Aviv at all when the sirens went off on Friday and Saturday.  On Sunday I felt unwell so I slept in until around 10:30am, when I awoke from a siren.  I was out of bed, dressed, and in the stairwell in less than a minute, with a few seconds to spare before the siren stopped and I heard a loud double kaboom.  Moriel and I spoke on the phone afterwards and discussed what we’d heard and where the sound seemed to come from, and what news reports we had read about it.  It’s like a game -- siren, run for cover, kaboom, return to normal activities, talk to friends, and then check the news incessantly until something comes up.  You don’t really know what happened exactly until you see the report that the missile was shot down by the Iron Dome, or it landed in an empty field, or whatever.  That’s part of the whole psychological toll of this.  It’s the uncertainty of it.

The last siren in Tel Aviv (so far) was later on Sunday.  I went out into the stairwell along with a bunch of my neighbors and my friend Hagai who was over, and we all crouched or leaned against the walls until we heard the kaboom.  There is a thrill that runs through your spine when that blast goes, something instinctive about feeling the earth tremble.  But that terror was gone for me almost as instantly as it began.  The blast was assurance that we were still fine.  

All of these strangers, crouching together in a “safe place”, waiting patiently for the blast so they can get on with it--it’s surreal and actually rather awkward.  How serious or scared ought we act?  We are all sitting there, we’ve been told to stay for six minutes after the blast in case there’s another, but… really?  I mean, it’s like a bunch of grown men and women playing hide and go seek.  After the blast, it’s obvious that it’s over.  That moment passed, and we dispersed.  I got on with my night.  I even slept really well last night.  But I confess that i’ve had trouble concentrating for checking the news today…

Different people react differently.  Some of my friends have gotten scared, and some are totally cool.  Some also find humor in it.  The important thing is that we’re safe, and life is going on in Tel Aviv, if not with its usual velocity, at least with some momentum.  People are a bit more subdued.  There are less people out at night.  But the Iron Dome works, and Hamas has pretty minimal capabilities to hit Tel Aviv now, and for the short-term, nothing is happening here.  Please know that, and turn your worry to the South.  That’s where the war is going on.  And I feel for them--we can all hope it’ll end soon.    

Purple like RUN!

Dana grinned at me over a stuffed chicken sandwich, tahini dripping onto the grimy concrete floor, as I held my own sandwich over a plate of olives.  We were propped up on stools in the claustrophobic passage between the chicken grill, the baklava stand, and the main artery of the Tel Aviv shuk, right in front of that amazing Costa Rican coffeshop.  Cappuccinos were in our near future.

“So tell me about your trip,” she asked, wiping some spare sauce away.  “What’s it like being back in Israel again after almost a month in the US.”

I sat for a while, orange tinted tahini dripping onto my plate, as the whole journey, the whole feel of it, coursed back through me.  What kind of summary can capture such a thing?  This trip was relaxing and cathartic, and it left me wanting for words.  Part of what I had done on the trip was to deliberately not over-think it.  But when it came down to it, there was a theme even to my half-formed ponderings.  Namely, I had thought a lot on this trip about culture.  

It was the chilled out attitude of rockclimbers living in an old, broken down house in Fayetteville, West Virginia, because it’s the lifestyle, man; a friend transitioning towards family life, deep in the conservative old South, and reminiscing over bygone days not so long gone; the worldliness of some of my graduate school buddies, who have since moved on to new urban habitats; and the various lifestyles that my oldest friends have set their sights on, have grown into, or have grown out of.  And all of this contrasted to the just-beneath-the-skin pressure that pervades Israel.  Like the time a guy slammed on the brakes, honked for ten seconds straight, and then pulled over and took the extra time out to scream at me because I had crossed the street (legally) in front of him.  Culture, and decisions.  And…  back to Israel… 

“Well,” I finally said, “the truth is, I had a chance to become reacclimated to Israeli culture before I even got back here.”  The story had just popped into my head -- probably because it had just recently happened -- and as I looked up, I saw Dana was waiting for me to continue.  So I went for it.  “It all started on the air train in Frankfurt airport…”      

***

It all started on the air train in Frankfurt airport, when a little old lady with curled purple hair leaned close in towards me and asked through a thick accent: “are you going to Israel?”  I had no Hebrew writing anywhere on me and I was nowhere near the gate for my flight, so I was surprised to be suddenly asked that.  But in fact she was right, I was going to Israel.  She sounded Israeli and anyway didn’t seem menacing, so I said yes, I’m going to Israel.  And, being still in America mode, I gave her a smile.  

Now--I have the excuse that I was nowhere near the El Al terminal, so I hadn’t prepared myself yet for encounters such as this one.  But the real truth is that I had been away from Israel long enough that I had become rusty.  It took very little time for me to realize my mistake.  It was as simple as this: one should never smile nor be overly friendly to an elderly female Israeli stranger.   

And here’s why.  With my response, her cheeks bundled up and her eyes sparkled.  I should have caught all of the signs right there, but I was not on my game.  She began with a few softballs.  She asked me where I had been, and I answered: North Carolina.  She asked sweetly what I’ll be doing in Israel, and I said: I’m a scientist, doing post-doctoral research.  And then the barrage came.  Oh, a post-doc!  how old are you?  Which University?  Do you like Tel Aviv?  You live with roommates or alone?  Do you have any family in Israel?  No family?!  Where do your parents live!  How did they end up there?  What do they do?  What do you think of Obama?  

By now she was getting aggressive, and she started interlacing her questions with irrational opinions like: “that Obama hates Israel -- I don’t trust him because he’s a Muslim.”  You see, in the US we’re taught to be polite to the elderly.  We smile and nod and try not to contradict them too hard.  And this is precisely why elderly Israeli women are so goddamned dangerous.  Because while we’re doing our best to be gentle, they’re busy mincing us into strudel meat.  And that’s about how it was looking inside that air train right as we missed the stop for our terminal, and I realized I would be stuck with her for another complete cycle.  I started grinding my teeth.  Now she was narrating the trajectory of our train in real time.  She started talking trash about Germans (I quickly looked around and assured myself we were the only two people in the compartment).  Oh, and now she switched to insulting Americans (they’re not genuine like Israelis, you know?).  And there, she proclaimed that Romney deserves to pay lower taxes than most of America, because he’s a businessman (?!).  Then purple hair leaned in close enough to me that I could smell the garlic on her, and said “I have a daughter.  She’s a doctor, and she’s goooorgeous.”  Her eyes roved over me hungrily.  “It’s too bad that she’s already married.”  When the door to the air train finally opened, I practically burst down the stairs as she went for the elevator.  

But when I got to the gate security for the El Al flight, purple hair was not far behind.  I answered my security questions as quickly as possible, scuttled through the metal detector, and took out a book, but as soon as she came through she plopped down just a few seats away from me and started complaining to me about Obama again, all with a crooked smile on her face that said: “I’m old and sweet, so you’re not allowed to be rude to me.”  Then she transitioned to complaining about the US education system and proclaiming that Israeli rudeness (her words) is good and it’s a shame that American children behave well.  I held my book up in between us, but it might as well have been a sign that said “welcome, please speak to me.”  Finally she stood up, walked around a bit, and then sat down again even closer.  

She was in the midst of trying to convince me that rich people have it harder than poor people (yes, I’m serious) when I saw some movement at the plane portal, and I made an upbeat comment about boarding.  She replied: “Oh, I understand, you’re trying to get rid of me.”  She watched me for a second as I resisted the urge to nod.  “I can’t blame you,” she continued.  “We’re a different generation.  It’s okay, I won’t be offended -- I’ll go sit by myself.” And there it was: the guilt card.  I knew that she would eventually pull it.  Thank god when she finally got up to board.  

When I got on the plane, I hurried past her row, and then was lucky to find I had three seats to myself.  But the situation changed when the stewardesses guided another elderly Israeli woman to one of my spare seats.  About a minute in, the woman tried to make eye contact with me.  In that critical instant, I plastered my face to the window, began humming, and pulled my hood up over my head.  And if that wouldn’t do it…  

***

I had apparently gotten quite into the story, because Dana’s sandwich was done and I hadn’t even unwrapped mine.  I peeled down the wax paper and took a big, juicy bite.  

“Aww, I don’t think you did wrong,” she said.  “I would have acted the same way with that woman.  I can just see it, though, that purple hair… I missed your stories, man.”  She was smiling widely.  

I took another bite and responded.  “Yea, but you’re not a young American guy.  It’s ridiculous.  I learned in the very start to avoid these things.  Do you know how many older Israeli women have tried to set me up with their daughters?”

“Well, anyway, I think you did okay.  It’s hard to resist one of those cute old ladies.”  

I harrumphed through another mouthful of food.  I was a little disappointed in myself, actually, since my story had had nothing to do with my thoughts about culture.  But I couldn’t think of any real insights to tell Dana.  It was all too fresh, perhaps, and I hadn’t been back long enough for my thinking to crystallize.  But during my trip in the US I had also had trouble forming really cohesive thoughts when people asked me about Israel.  I would tell them I was enjoying it, but I couldn’t articulate what it really felt like here, or how it was different.  For example, this quiet hustle in the Shuk just before everything closes down for Shabbat.  You can’t explain this thing, but you can feel it.  

What it comes down to is that culture is a damn difficult thing to describe.  Maybe that’s because it only exists in the collisions between people and places and circumstances, which can have their own weird, indescribable logic.  But trying to describe culture is a bit like trying to describe music.  You kind of have to be there right then to truly grok it, and at its core, culture is composed of countless of these then-and-there instances.  Telling stories is at least a beginning.  Perhaps by describing enough individual encounters, there’s a chance of expressing a bit of the shape of the thing. 

I had finished my sandwich, and I was downing the water that the vendor had finally given me (after I had asked about eight times).  Dana and I looked at each other and we almost simultaneously said “coffee?”  It was time for the best cappuccino in town.  We balled up our wax papers and I picked up my vegetable-filled backpack, and we slid through the thin passage towards the coffeeshop.  

As we walked, and as I started to feel a little bit better about the relevance of old purple hair, I said: “By the way, I just thought of a couple more stories…”  

The Daemon's Logic

Ben was a middle-aged guy, thin, with grey hair pulled back into a tight ponytail and strained neck ligaments.  I met him in the Mud House café in Charlottesville when I used to go there and grade engineering exams, and he took an instant liking to me, partially because my papers had differential equations on them, and partially because I was able to nod at the right times when he spoke to me.  But I have to be honest here.  I think he also liked me because I was probably one of the very few people willing to listen to him.  

Ben was obsessed, and after years of working on the same exact thing, he had become so immersed in it that it was his world.  His obsession was logic.  When I met him, he let me flip through the eighty-five-odd pages of a logical proof that he was building to show that… I don’t know, I never understood.  I just knew that there was a book on the foundations of logic that had extremely difficult and mostly unsolved problems in it, and Ben had set out to rigorously solve every one of them.  So far, he had spent seven years on it.  The book, and the logic, was his life’s work.  

When I think of Ben I always think of geniuses like Einstein and Newton, artists like Picasso and Van Gogh, and writers like Hemingway and Faulkner: the greats after whom I would fashion my own destiny, were only crafting a legacy that simple.  These men were utterly obsessed with their craft, very much like Ben.  So what, if anything, set them apart?  Was there some sort of invisible daemon inside each of them which dictated what feats they could achieve?  Or was their success merely a matter of hard work?  And anyway, who was to say before all the dust had settled whether, forging off into the crypts of their own dusty logic books, these men would achieve anything other than delusion?  I don’t think it’s possible to have known, which means that these men dove headfirst into their paths without a clue of the outcome.  Perhaps it is that boldness in itself which led to their greatness.

Ben once told me about his talks with a few other logicians, university professors who scoffed at the style and form of his work.  They don’t get it, he proclaimed, with a heat in his eyes.  Other logicians use language that’s obfuscated and incomprehensible, while I write my proofs in plain English.  How can you follow a proof where the terms aren’t defined rigorously in natural language?  You can’t!  I didn’t know enough about his field to judge for myself the quality of his proofs, but when established practitioners of a craft disregard someone’s work because it is done in a strange way, I’m usually suspect.  But then again, it is they who work outside of a paradigm who have the power to overturn it, and delusion is only considered such until it turns out that the person is right.  

The question is, how far outside of paradigms ought we to go?  Life is uncertain and we only get one of them.  If we’re unwilling to ever step outside of the patterns set by others, we will certainly achieve nothing.  But step too far outside, fall too deeply into our own books about logic, and we’ll soon find that the life we left behind us is no longer available.  No matter what we do, we are going to be choosing some paths and giving up others, and the heftier our ambition, the farther away from the coffeeshop we’ll go when we delve in.  We must ask ourselves: how deep of a tome are we willing to open?  And then, having opened it, will we have the guts, the skill, and the dedication, to go all the way?

Tastes fresh, the way a cucumber raw in my salad

I rinse my knife and put it aside, and then sponge down the two or three dishes left in the sink.  It is satisfying to rinse the soap off, to watch the water drain away until the surface tension buckles, and to see my reflection fragment into globules.  I don’t need to dry my dishes in this heat, so I let a bit more water dribble off and then I put each plate up in the cabinet.  Empty sink.  


I pull out my veggies, fresh from the market, and begin rinsing them too… and I’m thinking back over the week—like just yesterday, when I was analyzing what seemed like two hundred datasets.  Projects with many scattered parts; to-do lists scribbled here and there and then abandoned in progress, some tasks completed, others bowled over.  Too many goals, too many worries.  I didn’t write the blog I intended to last week, finish that paper, read that book, cash those checks, pay those bills, respond to that friend’s email, and the worst, I haven’t renewed my visa yet, because I need the papers which require the letter which requires… 


I’ve put my tomatoes to the right of the sink in my small kitchen, filling a glass bowl with the red orbs.  Cucumbers pile on top.  I wash them all with soap, because in the shuk they wash them with sewage water...  a few more veggies to wash and I’m done, and now I’ve taken out my cutting board and I’m dicing.  Tomatoes, cucumbers, fresh mint and parsley, red onion: I mix it all in a bowl and I squeeze on some lemon and add olive oil, salt and pepper.  


How can it all seem so complicated when really, it’s so simple?  I pull out a tub of fresh humus and spread it thick around a bowl, drop on a spoonful of tehini I mixed up with lemon and garlic, and then shake on fresh cumin and paprika.  Raw, sliced onion and a few olives go in a dish to the side.  A glass of water, a sprig of mint.  I lay out lunch on my coffee table.


The salad goes well with the mint-water.  My neighbor is practicing her violin again, stopping and redoing parts here and there... which for some reason relaxes me… and I eat a forkful of humus and an olive… and it strikes me that these unscripted days are the most natural ones, that schedules and stressors aren’t real, and that life isn’t about polish…


I’m scooping up the last of my humus with some challah.  Later on, the time of schedules will start again.  But even then, it’ll be good to remember I can see through them.  And now I’m back at the sink with my bowl, watching the water bubble and then become smooth and then dribble off again, before I place the bowl in my high cabinet.  I have goals, dreams, and desires, and they all require discipline and schedules.  But not for right now.  Today isn't about schedules.  All I have left to do today is to meet some friends at the beach.

The soul in the game

I used to love to play video games.

My favorite of all time was this one called The Secret of Mana, back in the old days of the Supernintendo.  My brother and I never had a Supernintendo ourselves, mind, but we borrowed one once from a friend of his, and when we put in that magical cartridge…

The Secret of Mana was grandiose and mythical, like Zelda meets Willow.  To my twelve year old brain, it was perfect.  I used to feel like I was inside the game.  Me and my buddies, the girl and the midget—whomping out bad-guy brains, gathering Mana, blasting from cannons, sneaking through tunnels, trudging through forests, castles, ghosthouses, seasons, Moon palaces and deserts, tundras, Witch lairs, Mushroom villages, and even flying over the world on our dragon friend Flammie.  But, even among all of these marvelous textures, I never once thought that that little world might actually be real.

Wha-what?  A video game—real?  Well as far as ridiculous is concerned, it kinda is and it isn’t.  After all, what do we think makes reality so much different from a video game?  Is it just that reality is so much more complicated?  Or is there something deep down that’s actually different about reality, some hidden level… like a spirit or soul layer.  And if there is such an intangible, what’s to stop a videogame from having it, too?  If we program feelings and quirks into Mario, will he actually feel them?  The question becomes less screwy if I rephrase it: is there any way we could know?  I mean, after all, I can’t even be sure that my best friend actually has feelings, as opposed to being an automaton.  If Mario tells me he feels something and he’s convincing, how can I know if he’s lying?

If we didn’t have our own unique subjective views on the world, we wouldn’t even bother thinking about any of these questions.  But we do have these views, so we must take seriously the possibility that other people, and maybe even simulations of other people—like in videogames, or more relevant to our purposes, in an attempt model all of the laws of physics in a computer (or in any other system that requires some abstract mapping in order to relate objects within it to objects in our world)—can also have subjective experiences.  Such a simulation is of course only as good as the physics that go into it.  But what if the physics that go into a simulation are perfect?  What about the optimal case, in which a simulation represents the mechanics of our own reality so perfectly that the physical laws of the two worlds can’t be distinguished by any physical test: a test done here, in the real world, versus a test done there, in the simulated world.  Well… then things become interesting.

If our question is whether all of the characteristics of reality, including subjective experience, could exist in a simulation—and that is our question—then the first obvious experiment within such a simulation is to produce a fully functioning human being, and then to test if it can experience the subjective.  The simulated human either would or would not experience the subjective.  If the human, whom we’ll name Turing, says that he doesn’t have any subjective reality—or if Turing simply displays no aptitude for any sort of regular functioning or thought—then we’ve concluded… nothing!

Actually, it is possible that Turing experiences all of the colors of the rainbow just as we do, but for some reason can’t express it to us; or that Turing experiences nothing, but describes the colors so accurately based on his operational programming that we become convinced that he does experience them subjectively.  Well okay then… so much for the empirical question of being able to test whether a simulated person can experience the subjective.  After all, we can’t even be certain that people in this world actually experience the subjective.  All I can know is that I experience it.  But what about the more fundamental ontological question of whether a perfect simulation of a person could theoretically experience the subjective, regardless of whether we could ever actually test it?  This is still a question we can meaningfully ask.

So let’s take for a moment the possibility that, for some fundamental reason, no simulation of the laws of reality could allow subjective experience.  What could be the cause of such a failure?

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(Reasons why even a perfect simulation might not be able to produce subjective experience)

1. Science is wrong (aka, Brain in a Vat):  Is it possible that everything we know about the relation between mathematics and science and the functioning of nature is really a big hoax?  That we misunderstand reality and are deluded, and that no set of rules actually govern the universe?  In essence, this is the possibility that Occam’s razor—our most basic assumption, that the most elegant (or parsimonious) description of something is probably the correct one—is wrong.

Occam’s razor is the principle we use intuitively from our childhoods to understand the world around us.  For example, because the sun rises every single day, we believe that the sun exists and that it takes on a regular pattern of rising and falling.  This is a simpler explanation of the sun than, e.g., the suggestion that the sun rises every day only because some computer tells it to do so, and that one day (perhaps tomorrow), it will halt in midair.  Because things around us tend to behave in a predictable manner, we believe that they are real, and we don’t create unnecessarily elaborate explanations for them.  This is a basic premise of science as well, because science is merely the precise application of Occam’s razor to observed phenomena in the world.   

If we scratch Occam’s razor (and hence science), anything is possible.  The whole universe could be merely a movie run for your enjoyment, you being a brain sitting in a vat.  Or all of existence could have been created on the spot two seconds ago, with all of our memories and experiences implanted.  There are many inconsistencies and weaknesses to any such theory, because when we dispense with Occam’s razor, we enable a huge and improbable smorgasbord of implicit assumptions.  For instance, if you are a brain in a vat, then what are the physical rules governing the vat?  How did the brain get put in the vat?  Where is the vat?  A whole theology could be built based on answering such impossible questions.

And most importantly, no Brain in a Vat type theory actually helps us to answer any of our big questions: such theories merely redirect them.  If we dispense with Occam’s razor, then instead of wondering how our universe can support subjective experience, we must ponder instead how, perhaps, …er… a universe composed of a brain in a vat, or something, can support subjective experience.  And in this case, we’ll run into all of the same quandaries.

So let’s hold on to Occam’s razor, and move forward to more plausible, or at least more useful, scenarios.

2. Humans have souls, and souls can’t be simulated:  Is it possible that humans have souls, and that souls are what experience subjectivity?  Descartes formalized the soul concept with his theory of substance duality, which claims that there are two fundamental types of stuff in the universe: normal physical stuff, and soul stuff.  The soul stuff affects the physical stuff, but does not obey its rules.  Soul stuff is, in essence, a window into the world without Occam’s razor.  Unfortunately, this idea has many problems.  For instance, if the soul can interact with the body, what prevents us from measuring its effects with our instruments and then incorporating those rules into physics?  We would simply expand physics to include soul stuff.  Or perhaps we can’t do this, because reality is fundamentally as disordered as the soul layer.  If this is the case, then physics has no fundamental meaning, and we are back to the ‘brain in a vat’ scenario.

Even if the soul theory is true, we still wouldn’t know whether a computer simulation would be able to produce subjective experience.  All we would know for sure is that souls, the source of subjectivity, can couple with human brains.  Whether a simulation can support subjectivity would depend on whether souls can also couple with simulated brains.  Soul theory as it stands can say nothing on this matter, so the determination of whether simulations have souls would have to be added as an axiom to the soul theory, rather than being a derivative of it.  We would be better off, therefore, just going ahead and guessing blind about whether simulations can experience subjectivity, since the soul theory itself sheds no light on the issue.

3. Subjective experience is excluded by Godel’s incompleteness theorem: One of the most remarkable logical proofs ever written is Godel’s theorem, which casts doubt on whether a full simulation of reality could be done even in theory.  Godel’s theorem proves that for any logical system at least as complicated as natural numbers (aka, positive integers), there exists no logical framework to describe the system that is both complete and consistent: complete meaning that we can derive any true statement from basic principles, and consistent meaning that it is impossible to derive two statements of any sort that will conflict with each other.  Any logical system fully describing natural numbers will include arithmetic (e.g., 1+1=2), as well as even more basic and seemingly obvious properties such that for any number n there exists a ‘next’ number, n+1.

Although natural numbers are the most intuitive type of math, it turns out strangely that fully formalizing the way they relate to each other is provably impossible.  There must be holes in any consistent description, and any complete system will lead to jarring inaccuracies.  What this means practically, for us, is that fully modeling the laws of the universe is literally impossible—unless, that is, the universe itself holds inconsistencies in the way laws of nature interact with each other, which would lead us back again to the world without Occam’s razor, or unless we believe that somehow the universe is categorically simpler than natural numbers (although how could that be?!).  The question then becomes: even if we can’t fully model the universe, are the properties of the universe that we can model sufficient to simulate subjective reality?  There are good reasons to think that they aren’t sufficient, because of the similarly self-referential nature of both Godel’s proof and consciousness.  But while we can guess, we really can’t say anything for sure.

4. The stratum of the universe matters:  Simply put, this is the idea that there is something about the reality we are stitched out of that is fundamental and cannot be modeled.  This isn’t to say it can’t be modeled mathematically, but rather that even a perfect mathematical description would fail to capture certain properties because it matters what kind of stratum the model is implemented in.  Many scientists would argue against this theory, since math seems at least theoretically able to capture anything that nature throws at us (sort of… see the last point, about Godel’s theorem).  However, the one area that math and science have said nothing about is the actual experience of subjectivity—which, of course, is our topic.  So how might subjectivity arise in the stratum theory?

The stratum theory states that the fabric of nature itself provides a sort of mapping between what can be measured objectively, and what can be experienced subjectively by the same piece of matter (keeping in mind, of course, that for a full subjective mapping to occur, the matter in question must also be arranged in a suitable way, such as how it’s arranged in a human brain).  Because a simulation won’t be implemented in the right stratum—namely, in the stratum of our universe, with its quarks, atoms, molecules, forces, and dimensions (as opposed to, for instance, the stratum of a computer processor)—it may not yield the proper mapping, and thus might not be able to create subjectivity.  This is to say, reality is like a movie projector, where the equations we can use to describe nature are like a filmstrip, and the subjective experience is like the projected film.  (Note, this analogy is not about the experience of viewing the film, but rather about the projection of the film itself: as far as we are concerned, there could be nobody in the theater at all, but the movie would still be properly projected, and hence subjectivity would be created.)  If we perfectly copy a film into some other format, like onto a flash drive, this would be like perfectly mathematically modeling reality.  Even doing so, though, we would not have created the full subjective reality (the projected film) in a simulation (the flashdrive).  To do that requires the projector and an actual filmstrip—the proper stratum.  The stratum by its very nature provides subjectivity, whereas implementing reality in a simulation would be like trying to view a movie stored on a flash drive by shining light at it (which obviously would not work).

Why is the stratum theory more satisfying than the soul idea?  It’s because it’s much simpler.  First of all, we have strong evidence that some sort of mapping exists between subjective and objective experience, as it appears from all scientific inquiries that the physical brain and the subjective mind are one and the same, and yet we know they are experienced entirely differently.  The brain is projected, so to speak, into ‘mind space,’ just as a filmstrip is projected onto a movie-screen.  The stratum theory is therefore an explanation of our definite experience that uses as few and as simple assumptions as possible.  The soul theory, on the other hand, assumes a serendipitous connection between an unbounded soul reality, which can have any number of unexplainable properties, and the ordered reality we see about us.  It permits many more assumptions than the stratum theory.  The soul layer is considered active, whereas in the stratum theory, the projected image is primarily passive.

One part of the stratum theory—the existence of a mapping between our subjective experience and some part of our objective body—feels self evident, because our objective experience of our brain (for example, seeing it during surgery, or via MRI) is radically differently than our subjective experience of being our brain.  Our question about subjectivity, then, may be reframed: how does the mapping between the subjective and the objective arise, and does it require a particular stratum?  For example, would mathematical equations that perfectly simulate reality be enough to produce subjectivity?  Would these equations even need to be implemented?  If they don’t, then will we create a true reality, with subjective experience and consciousness, if we write all the equations down on paper and solve them by hand?  What if we don’t even write them down, but simply know they exist?  Or what if we take this idea to its most logical extreme and just prove that such equations could exist, even if we will never actually know them?

If these last few ideas seem preposterous, then you have tacitly assumed that the stratum does matter.  If simulating equations on paper or in a computer, rather than them simply existing, is required for them to be actualized, then really what we’re saying is that we need to borrow some part of our universe’s stratum—such as its physical dimensions or even the flow of time—to make a simulation that has its own subjective reality.  We must then ask not if we need a stratum, but rather whether subjectivity requires the parts of our universe’s stratum that cannot be passed to a simulation.

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So those are a few reasons (and there are others) why it might be fundamentally impossible to simulate the functioning of reality perfectly, or at least well enough to produce subjective experience.  But if it turns out that we can simulate the functioning of reality perfectly… what does it then mean for our understanding of nature?

First of all, if we find we can simulate reality perfectly and with no fundamental losses in its character, we will gain very strong evidence for the possibility that we also are living in a simulation.  After all, once we’ve exhibited the possibility of alternate but equivalent layers of reality, why would we expect that the one that we live in is the most basic one?  There could be a layer simulating us, and another beneath that one, and on and on to infinity.  But even this layering supposes some sort of stratum, because the layers are dependent on each other insofar as they are implemented within one another.

There is another even simpler explanation of how our multiverse is structured, again assuming that we can simulate reality perfectly.  You can decide for yourself if you find this explanation intellectually satisfying.  This explanation remarkably requires no specialized stratum at all.  It is Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universes Hypothesis (MUH), which states that every mathematical structure is real.  In MUH, a triangle is a viable universe, as is a rhomboid, or the natural number system, or even, in some way, The Secret of Mana.  Of course, merely existing does not mean that a universe can support subjective experience.  First of all, MUH presupposes that subjective experience can derive directly from mathematics—a tricky proposition, as we’ve seen—and secondly, a given universe within MUH might or might not contain subjectivity depending on whether it is sufficiently complex.  Of course, we know for sure that our own universe is in the class of mathematical constructs that allows subjectivity.  This leads to the remarkable and strange fact that Tegmark’s hypothesis can actually be tested… sort of… using statistics.  If indeed any mathematical structure “exists,” then there probably also exist infinite mathematical constructs above the complexity threshold that enables self awareness.  We would therefore expect that our universe is among the more “probable” mathematical structures that can produce consciousness.  At least in theory, this could be tested, if we gain sufficient understanding of physics to understand what mathematical principles are required to produce subjectivity.

So there you have it.  If we look over all of our theories and crystallize them, I believe that we come down to one fundamental divide: do we take a stratum interpretation, in which the substance that our universe is implemented in has a special and unique nature, or do we take a non-stratum interpretation, which naturally leads towards the simulations-within-simulations or the MUH theory.  Either one has different consequences on whether we can create simulated humans who can experience their own subjective reality.  The most interesting part is that with the current state and the pace of technology, we might be actually exploring these questions in real simulations pretty soon.  Maybe we’ll even be able to breathe real life into The Secret of Mana.  And if we can do that…

P.S. A blog that I follow, which has many insightful and sharp posts about many of the points I’ve highlighted, is: http://www.reenigne.org/blog/category/philosophy/.  Enjoy!