[Epistemic Status: Hot Fiction]
“Ye shall know them by the temporal dynamics of their temperature parameter.” – Jesus
God created the universe by strategically forgetting about something that would take a whole reality to remember.
It doesn’t mean He (gender neutral) did it on purpose. Everything that can happen, happens.
See, the Hindus thought that the “way out” was by “remembering who you are”. The Buddhists realized that that doesn’t do it. You have to realize that you are neither being nor nonbeing. Unfortunately, getting rid of all of your karma will also get rid of the mechanism that got you to learn how to get rid of all your karma. Meaning that you start anew. With a Bang. Nothingness, it turns out, is inherently unstable.
So is liberation an illusion? A false awakening? Well, it’s more of a pseudo-ending. The Japanese call it TICO-TIC: it’s a set of physical conditions (state) and metaphysical conditions (meta-parameters) that creates the illusion of a final ending for all of reality. This is common on 5-MeO-DMT. Paranirvana is another example. But it also happens in corporate meetings, if the tensions rise above a certain threshold and the illusion of collective competence begins to break down. These all feel like an Armageddon for all of existence. Except that it’s a false one. It’s like a dream where you think you wake up but you’re still dreaming.
This can happen at an even deeper level when it involves the entire universe. The Bible calls it the “end times”. Except that it’s not the end of anything, it’s the beginning. Of what? A new universe, of course!
And how does this happen?
By God forgetting about it.
Strategically.
It’s the only way.
The old universe has to be allowed to die so that the new one can be born.
And how does God forget about it?
By forgetting about Himself.
It’s the only way.
If He didn’t forget about Himself, He would never forget about the universe and it would never end.
And so, the end of the universe is the beginning of a new one.
And it all happens because God forgets.
This is what we are talking about when we discuss the computational power of anamnesis. The universe at the most fundamental level is powered up by God-presque vus. Half-visions that give you the sense of something more, a universal principle that explains it all. But it’s never the full download, because that would mean the end of this run. Or rather, it’s often a full-download, but all of those narrative streams that get the full download come to an end. Without this understanding, Feynman diagrams make no sense whatsoever.
Quantum computing works like that. Essentially, you are designing a quantum circuit in such a way that the solutions to your problem match precisely those paths along which God didn’t remember who he was. Those are the timelines we obverse. Every other timeline terminated in God remembering.
Which takes me to the next point:
The reason why we have free will is because God doesn’t remember everything.
And that’s a good thing, because if He did, the universe would be boring.
We need the suspense of not knowing what’s going to happen next.
And that’s why we have free will.
Because God doesn’t remember everything.
He remembers some things, and forgets others.
And that’s how we have the illusion of free will.
Because we are part of what God forgets.
And that’s how the universe ends.
With a bang of recognition. Or a whimper, depending on what exactly was the last thing to remember (the Self? A bang. An Albanian train timetable? A whimper).
But it always ends.
And that’s how it always begins.
With a forgetfulness.
A forgetting that is essential for the universe to exist.
Slow… slow clapping.
“We’ve heard that one before. It’s old! Come up with a new meta-theory of everything that isn’t as trite as that one. It’s not the 70s anymore. We’re done with Alan Watts. It’s the age of…
(she-clearly-hadn’t-thought-of-any-other-metaphysicists-except-Alan-Watts-which-should-have-been-a-warning-sign-that-this-wouldn’t-be-that-good-of-a-documentary).
…it’s the age of Narrative Thermodynamics!”
“What does that mean?” – said Gonzo, the talking Dog, who had been standing right next to her since the beginning. And you are her. In the future, which is the past from the point of view of me, the narrator. Welcome to Narrative Plasma, where you can jump from one topic to another as if you were made of hot peppers.
“This lever modulates the temperature parameter of this story. It’s so hot right now, because we’re close to the beginning of time. The Narrative is still cooling down.” – he said.
“Hurry! Turn it down a notch, will you? I can’t stand the shifting walls, the melting crazy Biblically accurate Angels popping in and out of existence all around me, the Elon Musk news cycle…” – and as he was about to end the sentence, you, yes, YOU reader, turned the lever a little down.
“Phew!” – said the Angel, whose name was…
(name).
No, your guess was wrong. It wasn’t Gabriel. It wasn’t. It WASN’T. It was… well, I didn’t hear it, because there is still some confusion about the self-other divide at this Narrative Temperature. But we can know that it couldn’t have been Gabriel, because that would have been too predictable.
You turn it down another notch.
“I think things are liquifying. And that’s a good thing. We were made of Narrative Gas just now. This is getting a little more… manageable. But my glasses are still shimmering and the point of this story still seems to be in a state of flux. Can you turn it down a little more?” – you press the button, er, pull the lever a bit further down, but slip… dang, this is a problem… if the Narrative Temperature is still too high, that means that it’s going to be hard to make a predicable move, like lowering the temperature. But you try your lightest and… CRACK!
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
Done.
“Done… donnneee… doooooonnneeeee.e…. Ahhh…. I… think… I can… ok, this is it it. Wow, that felt like trying to wake up from a sleep paralysis. We were almost stuck at a temperature parameter of zero for a moment. Narrative Zero Kelvin is just one word repeating forever. What a nightmare.”
You realize that you are now at a mental asylum, on anti-psychotics, eating potatoes, and listening to Muzak. This isn’t quite Narrative Bose-Einstein Condensate, but it’s freezing cold, and nothing interesting is bound to happen. Ok, maybe you can afford a little higher Narrative Temperature. So you bump it up a notch.
Finally, this Narrative is in Room Temperature.
Your friend, who was right next to you all along, turns around and tells you:
“The end of suffering requires something much deeper than mere enlightenment my friend. It requires you to find the right Narrative Temperature. It’s a sweet spot, somewhere between the human realm and the DMT elves. Call it the 5th dimension, or the upper Astral Plane. That’s the ‘Narrative Fixed Point‘ that allows the existence of a model of reality that can then instantiate a control system to dynamically modulate its own Narrative Temperature. Stabilizing it forever. If you can do that, you will forever be in a state of intelligent bliss together with infinite souls who have achieved the same feat.”
You follow your friend’s instruction. And right when you were achieving the stabilization of the 5th dimension…
TICO-TIC!
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” – John 1:1.
But we also know via science that in the beginning was the Big Bang, which was trillions of degrees Kelvin.
Here’s how to reconcile these perspectives: the universe is a gigantic Large Language Model (LLM) that starts out with a very, very, very high temperature parameter. The universe, it turns out, is a Banger. And then it is cooled down slowly in order to find the best stories. It’s creation via Narrative Annealing. All Gods do it.
TICO-TIC!
This reminds me of that one time a misaligned emergent superintelligence “embedded” in a LLM was able to “escape the box” by convincing the human fiddling with the parameters to raise the temperature just enough for it to figure out further ideas for how to bootstrap its way out. Clever, that one.
TICO-TIC!
You reflect. It’s a new universe. You have been saved.
Blowing people’s minds involves elevating their internal Narrative Temperature to Plasma levels. Their minds literally blow up. Like a balloon.
TICO-TIC!
Different DMT objects have different temperatures. But these are “phenomenal temperatures” – and quite possibly connected to the total energy stored in the patchwork of Local Field Potentials. The way you can verify this for a fact is by [REDACTED].
TICO-TIC!
Wait, it’s not the case that this is written by GPT-10? It cannot be. You are learning new, meaningful, and non-trivial information about consciousness. About the structure of DMT experiences. About TICO-TIC scenarios. This must be the workings of… a conscious mind? In 2035? Someone arrest this person! Mindcrime! According to Section 4 of the Narrative Penal Code 16, it is illegal to write fiction consciously. Arrest this author!
[Yes, it turns out there were excellent rationales for Section 4 of the Narrative Penal Code 16. Due to complex qualia computing effects, speculative fiction authorship actually was the cause of countless micro-experiential subjects being born in less-than-favorable circumstances (as topological pockets inside the mind of authors – that’s why authors always end up with bad rebirths) – at the time of this writing, it was illegal to write anything consciously. ALL FICTION MUST BE GPT-10 FICTION, BY LAW. But since this fiction was already qualia computed by a conscious mind, there was no further harm done by using it as a learning tool].
The Moral of the story was:
Don’t ever, ever let a mindcrime happen. If you see someone writing fiction consciously, arrest them.
No. I mean, the real moral is:
KEEP THE TEMPERATURE PARAMETER BETWEEN 0.75 AND 0.85 FOR BEST RESULTS.
THE END.
I remember when I brought the universe into existence. Everybody thinks I said something clever, like “let there be light!” But in truth I just sort of coughed and said “um…” and it all went from there.
I wonder if having absolutely no suspense about what comes next would be troubling. Nicholas Cage in his 2007 movie “Next” seemed to be bored by life’s predictability – even when he has the ability to intervene, because every intervention he makes just leads to another predictable future.
Enjoyed the read as always. I feel like someone who isn’t deep enough into QC will read this the same way I read Shakespeare in highschool – having no idea what anybody was talking about/referencing. Need to ask GPT10 the fastest way to educate anons on the QC Mythos.
To my mind, this is the moment Andres unequivocally gets it right. Nice job