Trump, Timelines and Free Will

Why We're All Chaos Monkeys Now

On November 6th, The Darkest Timeline meme started trending online.

Originally spawned by an episode of Community back in 2011, the meme’s resurgence this month indicated that post-upset election, well, some folks were a little upset.

They imagined that we had jumped from a version of the “business as usual” timeline to a “whoa shit, Death Eaters at the wheel” version of reality.

And given the naming of the meme, possibly the worst version of reality ever.

(considering the roster of perversely incompetent cabinet picks we’ve been seeing, it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable conclusion).

#RIPMattyG

Thankfully Scientific American weighed in with a grounding essay pointing out that, despite what those 5D quantum Conspirituality fuckwits on Instagram are spouting, no, we can’t actually hop timelines!

Even in a multiverse.

from SciAm

The real question, then, is not whether there are other timelines; there certainly are. Rather it is why we see only one. Perhaps life or intelligence would not be possible if the branching were too evident to us.

Physics is replete with such preconditions for our existence. For instance, if temporal flow did not have a directionality—an arrow of time—there could be no lasting change, no memories, no intelligence, no agency. Keeping other timelines hidden might be of similar importance…

We would be paralyzed if we had to assay boundless infinitudes. Rather than holding open all possibilities, a mind must settle—at least tentatively—on one. The effort required to make that choice—and, from there, to act upon it—may be key to giving us at least the subjective feeling of free will.

So be careful what you wish for. In dark hours we may imagine alternate timelines and long for escape to another, but we seem to be inseparable from our own. Were it easier to flit between them, we might arrive only at oblivion.

Like it or not, we’re stuck in this one—if we want to change it, we’ll have to do that the old-fashioned way.

So maybe there wasn’t some mystical Sliding Doors moment this election, where if we’d gone one way we might’ve enjoyed a Michele Obama/Beyonce Camelot, or the other way to a Man in the Hightower, Nazi hellscape.

(Just imagine though if Gwyneth had had her own Sliding Doors moment IRL: in one version she never makes Shallow Hal in a fat suit, and in the other she never comes up with the idea for Goop at all! Oh, the mind reels at the possibilities!)

***

So it turns out that we might not have jumped to the Darkest Timeline after all. We’ve gotta keep plowing ahead in this one.

But that doesn’t mean we didn’t make a pivotal choice that is going to play out with full ramifications in the years to come.

Because what on Earth have we done?

Regardless of which side you were on, it’s hard to deny one thing for certain:

We’ve now chosen the path of Maximum Novelty.

Beyond the 30% die hard MAGAs duking it out with the 30% die hard Dems, enough folks in the middle decided that a Bring Down The Regime vote meant voting for DJT.

Quite often, those people shared a bunch of values and perspectives with friends and family who ended up voting for Harris. In exit polls they said they cared about health, the environment, free speech, meritocracy and peace.

But they broke consistently towards Trump (despite open misgivings about his character and competence). They concluded that the system needed to be burnt down, not repaired.

And the sooner, the better.

That’s what I mean about “choosing the path of Maximum Novelty.”

Voters (especially the Anti-Regime swing voters) concluded that maintaining the status quo had a higher likelihood of leading to bad outcomes than blowing up the status quo altogether and seeing what sprouts in the rubble.

They weren’t looking for another shake of the Magic 8 Ball in the hopes we’d get from “outlook cloudy, try again!” to “all signs point to Yes!”

They decided we’d be better off taking a sledgehammer to that fucker altogether and seeing what was inside.

So now we’ve really gone and done it.

We will drill baby drill.

We will build that wall.

We will let Netanyahu (and Putin) “finish the job.”

We will throw every electron we’ve got at Artificial General Intelligence.

We will withdraw from Paris and Brussels.

We will crank up the drawbridge on America’s City on the Hill, and those tired, poor huddled bastards outside the gates can suckit

(while we eat our Double Double In N Out burgers).

We won’t slouch towards Bethlehem any longer.

We will hurtle towards it.

Strapped to the nose cone of a Falcon Rocket.

So wherever we’re going, it appears we’ve figured a way to get there as fast as possible.

Which is one way to bring about the Eschaton.

(killing the anti-Christ with a spear is the other, for those of you playing along at home)

But before we beat ourselves up too much, or second guess those voters “voting against their own interests”, or ponder what Freudian undercurrents or Keynesian animal spirits might have possessed us, let’s consider a simpler, potentially even more unsettling question:

Did we have any choice?

Was it even up to us, or was this Path of Maximum Novelty simply our inescapable destiny?

And not in the “we don’t really have Free Will, no matter what you think” manner of Robert Sapolsky or Sam Harris.

Those two make the case that at the personal level, even choices we’d swear blind were original and impulsive, are the inevitable conclusion of our nature plus our nurture.

Every action is really only a reaction to an earlier action.

It’s Pavlovian turtles, all the way down for these folks. Conditioning beats volition-ing.

But really, they’re not thinking big enough.

Never mind individual free will.

That’s chump change in the Universe Game.

What if we’re unwitting agents in a far larger, deeper, older game? One that goes back to the beginning of time, and is certain to carry us to the end of time?

(that aforementioned Eschaton)

***

Nobel prize winning physicist Ilya Prigogine had plenty of fascinating insights into the nature of reality, time and space.

One of his best was how he solved the riddle of how how we can end up with cool stuff like civilization if the universe is bound to end up in entropy eventually.

AKA The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Put more simply: how do we get to have nice things in the meantime if it’s all going to hell in the long run?

Put slightly more accurately: how do complex dissipative structures (like humans and cities) emerge in a universe bound towards inevitable chaos?

This is what Prigogine concluded: Nature abhors a vacuum, as Aristotle figured out back in the day. But Nature really abhors an energy gradient. (a vacuum is just one example of this even bigger category).

And the best way to take highly organized energy and turn it into end of the road entropy is via a complex dissipative structure.

An example: imagine you’ve got a bathtub filled with water in your master bedroom on the second floor of your house. You’ve soaked til you’re pruned, but now you pull the plug.

That 400 pounds of water wants to get down the drain and out the basement sewer pipe as fast as possible. That’s a pretty big energy gradient. All that weight up high that very much wants to get down low. All the way to sea level.

What does it do?

Does it glug, glug, glug, until it’s done?

Nope.

It organizes itself into a nifty swirling whirlpool and siphons the tub in record time.

Or think of a massive cold front (low pressure) slamming into a warm air mass (high pressure). Lightning and tornados mix that cold and hot up in a hurry. Spirals, branching forks of electric flashes. Until it’s all evened out, and life goes back to normal.

But complex dissipative structures aren’t limited to physics and nature.

We’re complex dissipative structures too. We don’t just do stuff like whirlpools and tornados. We can think about stuff. We can invent stuff.

And it’s not just us as individuals. It’s us as collectives.

We’ve spun up the most complex dissipative structure of all–civilization!

Nothing in the history of earth has been more effective at converting exergy (organized energy) to entropy (disorganized energy).

We’re special agents of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

We’re complexity in the secret service of chaos.

(Almost like learning that Snape was in Dumbledore’s Army all along. But Snape is actually Harry. And Dumbledore is really Voldermort).

Our higher purpose might not be realizing our buddha nature, or grokking that we are the universe contemplating itself, after all!

It might be to dig up all the buried starlight we can find and set it on fire.

And mix sand, lime and gravel together to sling concrete.

And mine every bit of starstuff we can and hammer into planes, trains, automobiles and smartphones.

And smash radioactive isotopes together to make mushroom clouds.

Hands down, we’re spectacular Chaos Monkeys!

So we’ve got that going for us.

This is a round about way of saying that the bizarre runaway train we’re on might be our inevitable destiny.

Maybe it’s why we can’t quit fossil fuels, even as we add tons more renewables. Jevon’s Paradox ensures that the cheaper we make energy, the hungrier we get for it.

Maybe it’s why we won’t limit our own population growth, even though countless other species from lionfish to coyotes routinely do.

Maybe that’s why even the buddhist minister of Bhutan, who’s dedicated to advancing Gross National Happiness, clarified on 60 Minutes this week “we’re not saying we want to be happy with less! We want technology and multinational corporations and growth too!”

So in choosing to fly more than we should, in eating more meat than we should, pumping more AC than we should, watering our lawns more than we should, spending more at Christmas and on Ozempic and pornography than we should…

And in electing more wannabe tin pot dictators than we should…

Maybe we’re carrying out our true Prime Directive.

To find all the energy we possibly can, to build the most complex dissipative structures we can dream of,

and to go out in a blaze of utter glory, like the Thermodynamic Chaos Monkeys that we really are.

Not saying that’s a good thing, or even the right thing.

But it might just be a true thing.

Because one thing’s for certain.

We’ve chosen Maximum Novelty over Optimum Sustainability.

The die is now cast.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come up snake eyes.

now,

we sit here near the diggings in the forest, by our fire, and watch

the moon and planets and the shooting stars—

my sons ask, who are we?

drying apples picked from homestead trees drying berries, curing meat,

shooting arrows at a bale of straw.

military jets head northeast, roaring, every dawn.

my sons ask, who are they?

WE SHALL SEE

WHO KNOWS

HOW TO BE

Bluejay screeches from a pine.

from What Happened Here Before,

Pulitzer Prize winner, Turtle Island

Gary Snyder