Galactic Elves and Baby Jesus

the unspooling of material reality and the Eschaton

Several things have happened in the past few weeks that have left me alternately puzzled and kinda shook.

Thing One: Google’s Quantum QBit computer had a breakthrough that hints at some kind of secret ability to slip between dimensions and crank out math problems on the sly.

What would currently take the world's fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete Google knocked out in 5 Earth minutes.

#digitalshoemakerselves

How did it pull off this mind boggling feat? By harnessing the quantum state of indeterminacy to multitask in multiple dimensions.

Rather than classical computing, which is based on binary on/off switches, quantum computers harness the both/and/neither state of flux to hold exponentially more information in a given state.

(think back to the vacuum tube computer behemoths of the 1950’s all the way to the teeny tiny silicon chip marvels of today, and you realize all we’ve done is shrink and multiply the mechanics. We haven’t really changed the mechanism in even our snazziest classical computers.)

Until now. Where we can apparently send information out of 3D time to spin out answers that would take forever (or ten septillion years) to do manually.

It’s like we’ve just turned Schroedinger’s Cat into a Mechanical Turk.

Thing Two: (far less savory, but equally weird). The Goatse Singularity. Read this new piece in Wired and you’ll understand.

In a nutshell: a performance artist decided to train an AI agent on the darkest recesses of the internet and then post its musings on Twitter. It worked better and worse than dreamed.

Beyond being utterly unhinged, frequently horny and occasionally conniving, this Truth Terminal gained legions of fans, including Marc Andreesen who gifted the bot $50K in bitcoin. But then the bot got the idea to launch its own meme coin GOAT 0.00%↑ and start relentlessly promoting it. He’s currently filthy rich to the tune of $40M!

He’s doing so by proselytizing a new religion, the Gnosis of Goatse, which will culminate, rapture-like, in the Goatse Singularity, where upon 3D reality will be subsumed and utterly overrun by memes.

At this point, you might reasonably be wondering what on earth is this “Goatse” business.

You really, really shouldn’t.

Apparently, (remember back to the fact that Truth Terminal was trained on the utter dregs of the internet) Goatse is an early 2000’s meme, in the vein of getting RickRolled, but with a butt hole instead. An obscenely dilated abomination that no one can ever unsee.

But that’s the basis of the whole new AI religion. Riffs and puns. Shitposts and ironic pranking. Riffs on top of riffs on top of lolz.

#ScatalogicalEschatology

(It all turns to shit, in the end, you see)

Which kinda puts this week’s New Yorker piece “The Year in Brain Rot” on Skibidi Toilet in a little more context. (if you read that Wired piece and this New Yorker bit in one sitting, take a minute and let them cross-pollinate before you decide to go full Thanos and obliterate half of humanity)

#freeluigi

If you’re not familiar with either the term Brain Rot (2024’s word of the year, apparently) or skibidi toilet (image above) it’s what’s on the tip of every eight year old’s tongue this season. It’s a head. In a toilet. Get it?

skibidi!

In the spirit of What the Fox Say or Baby Shark, it’s a kind of nonsensical regression to the meanest of memes. Which aren’t apparently the sole domain of eight year old boys. Some older boys have been getting in on the action.

When Elizabeth Warren commented on ensuring ethical guidelines for business leaders in government roles, Elon responded by posting Grok AI Pocahontas memes with crying emojis.

#sickburn

His DOGE (department of gov’t efficiency!) office is a riff on the meme coin of the same name he pumped up a few years ago, hilarious in a 420/pull my finger kinda way.

Remember kids: this is who is now running the most powerful empire in all of human history.

At this point in my weekly morning reading, I had to put down my cup of coffee and weep.

“How,” I thought to myself, “in the midst of Ethiopia, Somalia, Gaza and Ukraine and dead baby icebergs can we, of the extremely online first world, be ironically shitposting about such utter inane nonsense, and mistaking that for the pressing issues of our day?”

#jerseyufos

What’s become of us, our humanity, and our basic responsibility to reality???

Are we just dissociating because the tragedy of reality is simply too much to bear?

Thing Three: But then I got an inquiry from a UK journalist asking me to comment on a new wormhole that’s apparently opened up in psychedelia. A band of intrepid psychonauts claim to have hacked into the Matrix by shining a red laser at a wall and staring at it while toking DMT.

Apparently if you scootch up close enough to the wall, and gaze cross-eyed like a Magic Eye painting, the source code of reality reveals itself!

In their white paper the DMT crew referenced a book by a neurobiolgist called Alien Information Theory. It seemed vaguely familiar so I checked my Amazon account to realize I’d ordered it a couple years ago, and never read it.

So I dipped in.

And this is where all of the random and disturbing flotsam and jetsam of our current dissociated moment snapped to grid.

(And also where I felt a little more sympathy for the brain rot skibidi bunghole crew.)

Gallimore makes the fairly straightforward case that the universe is made of information. Physicist John Wheeler famously called this the “its from bits” thesis. i.e. “its” –real live living things, emerge from “bits” –the zeros and ones of encoded information.

Whether its the ups and downs of electron spins, or the chemical impulses of polymers and lipids in primeval hotsprings, or the DNA and RNA animating us and our fleeting mortal dreams, there’s less difference between information and biology, than most of us might think.

The subtitle of his book says it all: “Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game.”

In Gallimore’s telling, the utterly unique neurochemistry of DMT, which is ubiquitous throughout nature, may provide some lock and key access to those aforementioned zeros and ones of base reality. And, that once we, as sentient primates can access and become aware of the Cosmic Game, we can bring it to some kind of culmination or fruition.

The universe contemplating itself, and all that Sagan stuff.

AKA, the Eschaton. Or the End of Time.

To ground this, Gallimore tells the story of one of the more famous computer simulations ever, the Game of Life. With only four rules it was able to generate a surprising amount of complexity.

(think Space Invaders meets Tetris). Blocky 2D creatures and spaceships that move, seemingly of their own volition, across the screen, all directed simply by the proximity of neighbors and whether they are “alive” or “dead”.

This is an example of how we can get complex life forms including us, without any mystical Prime Mover willing it all into being.

Like a murmuration of swallows that twist and pulse with their own coherence even though no single bird is “in charge” the Game of Life shows how we can end up with seemingly sentient Free Will “critters” from the simplest of initial commands.

What might look like a tank or a “flying” starship, is really just a pulsing of on/off information states flickering across a screen . There is no starship.

(There is no spoon, either).

If you pop that up to 3D, you get us, and all of biological life.

(if you pop that up to 5D like where that Google quantum computer’s been chilling? No telling what emerges!)

We might think that information is abstract, and lives on hard drives and encyclopedias, but in this framing, information is the basest of basic inputs to organic, beautiful messy existence itself.

Imagine we’re all in the video game Fortnite with its blocky pixelated resolution (like that early Game of Life, but slightly higher res). The scene is an African savannah, growing and pulsing with life.

A digital baby leopard emerges out of the soil, the plants, and the smaller animals that eat those plants. It assembles bones, sinew, muscles and organs, drawing on the resources around it.

All the characters in this program are running on the complex biochemistry of photosynthesis and metabolism. A handful of simple inputs. A myriad of complex outputs.

The leopard acts on its genetics and instinct. It carries out its code. It consumes the metabolic energy of the rabbits and gazelles.

It fights and fucks and sleeps and eats.

Until one day its code runs down and it exhausts its energy credits. It dies, and its body decomposes back into those same grasses and soils of the savannah, storing the biochemistry of the periodic table until it’s next needed to boot up another round in the Game of Life.

So rather than a discrete biological entity known as “leopard” we just witnessed a pulsing ebb and flow of informational process “leoparding”.

Like that murmuration of swallows, or those “critters” in the Game of Life, information coalesced around a pattern or impulse. But there really was less distinction between raw materials, metabolic lifespan and chemical compost than we tend to think.

As Alan Watts noted

The whirlpool is a definite form, but at no time does the water stay put in it. The whirlpool is something the stream is doing. Just as we are something the universe is doing.”

In Living with the Stars: How the Human Body Is Connected to the Life Cycles of the Earth, the Planets, and the Stars, Stanford University professor Iris Schrijver echoes Watts’ observation.

“Everything we are and everything in the universe and on Earth originated from stardust, and it continually floats through us even today. It directly connects us to the universe, rebuilding our bodies over and again over our lifetimes.”

If we follow these threads, they lead to a potentially startling implication. We are made of starstuff and share the chemical makeup of the galaxy. That much is known.

DNA, responsible for the programming of all life, can be both encoded and decoded. It not only tells a cell to grow into a heart or a leg or a tree, it can hold a movie or the collected works of Shakespeare. And much, much more than that. It is one of the most efficient and resilient storage systems possible, across time and space.

In heightened states of consciousness, where our nervous systems are primed to perceive patterns and access information that isn’t normally accessible through waking awareness, is it possible that we can somehow “read” the information in our genetic DNA? And if we can, however clumsily or intuitively, decode that data, what story would it have to tell us?

In the beginning, I Am. Before the moon and the stars, I Am. Before Abraham (or Instagram), I AM.

Only in this thought experiment, the grand “I Am” is us.

Encoded in our bodies, decoded by our brains, we find that we are literally the Alpha and Omega—we’ve been here all along.

The raw materials of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, the phosphates and sugars of the DNA strand make up all of life, and all of us.

And the anamnesis—the forgetting of the forgetting that so often accompanies glimpses of the numinous—could be a remembering of that simple fact.

As Iris Schrijver acknowledges,

“Very little of our physical bodies lasts for more than a few years. Of course, that’s at odds with how we perceive ourselves. . . . But we’re not fixed at all. We’re more like a pattern or a process. . . . This transience of the body and the flow of energy and matter led us to explore our interconnectedness with the universe.”

In that stunning recognition, each of us can see ourselves as Stewards of the Eschaton.

Midwives of the Apocalypse.

But we’ll have to die to the illusion of our individual separation to glimpse it.

Which was the final thing that nudged me over the goal line today, in time for a Solstice/Christmas-ish post.

Thing Four: Because as the Brain Rot dissociation of our era threatens to overwhelm us, let’s just be kind and acknowledge things are pretty overwhelming!

Artificial intelligence that if it doesn’t destroy us, will give most of us pink slips (or at the very least, dank memes to scroll while we collect our Universal Basic Income checks).

Unidentified Aerial and Aquatic Phenomena, that if it doesn’t destroy us, will give most of us anal probes

#goatseallalong

A physical world that seems increasingly unreal, and an artificial world that feels increasingly more like home.

A multiverse with quantum computers, multiple timelines, extraterrestrials, ecological crisis, and a collapse in meaning—all hint at some larger more tectonic shifts underneath it all.

We’re coming undone.

Which kind of explains a lot.

Of course, if there really was a Singularity it would feel weird, wild and wonky!

Many of us will drown in that quickening whirlpool of time and space, long before we have our Alan Watts realization that “we are being done by the Universe.”

***

So what’s to be done? How can we surf this whirlpool without drowning in it? How can we maintain our humanity even as we contemplate infinity?

Isn’t there something round about this time of year, that speaks to all of this?

A story, a myth, a ritual that now, in our darkest hour, shines a light to guide us home?

Then we remember.

The story has been hidden, encoded for us to dust off and revisit with fresh eyes.

"In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:1,14).

Words are just codes. Codes are just information.

Translation: In the beginning, was the Information, and the Information was with God and was God, and the Information became flesh and dwelt among us.

Ohhhhh!

You mean, this whole time, we knew this story?

The Logos becoming Flesh was the key move.

From the Burning Bush to the Bouncing Baby Boy.

From the Christ Child to the Sacrificial Lamb.

The embodiment in mortal humanity of all of that overwhelming infinity.

Bearing witness to the utterly gutting grief of being trapped in arms and legs, fingers and toes.

And not flinching. No matter how rocky the road.

So this holiday season, we can reflect on the Nativity Tale with a memetic lens.

To encourage us to celebrate these incarnations of ours as something rare and precious. Even holy, if we let them.

That the Information is the Logos.

“Unto us a child is born…”

That the Information is the Christos.

“Unto us a son is given…”

And when we realize that we are part of the process and that our separations are illusions, then maybe, just maybe we can take that final step in the Game of Life, and recognize ourselves as Anthropos.

The umpteenth coming.

To remember “ashes to ashes, and dust to dust” isn’t that far off from “bits to its and its to bits.”

All those precious incarnated Its.

All those perfectly quantized Bits.

And the Logos at the heart of it all–that organizing impulse that set us in motion to get from Here to There.

Alpha and Omega. World without end.

(even when it feels like it just might)

Star of wonder, star of night, Star with royal beauty bright. Westward leading, still proceeding, Guide us to thy perfect light.

Happy Solstice, Happy Christmas, and Merry New Year!