The Ruliad, Nick Beggs, and Human Survival

The Ruliad, Nick Beggs, and Human Survival,

a lightly edited version of an open letter emailed to a group of thought leaders from the physics community, academic administration, government, publishing, and religion, among others, on August 11, 2026

Image: "What Lies Beneath" is a photograph of a memorial on the State Street side of Veterans' Park in Schenectady, New York, USA, listing the names of that city's war dead, and of the neatly trimmed hedge and other vegetation beside it that obscure the bottom quarter of the names, as if the government in charge of this place thought it made sense to hide those names. This page is being posted on August 13, 2026, a day on which Democracy Now is reporting that a "mental health" crisis has broken out on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which is conducting operations in the Iran War, due to the unprecedented length of its deployment, "excruciatingly long" work shifts, and shortages of food and soap (https://youtu.be/wgcuHgpdn3k?t=51). Here's a story about theft of money, by the Department of Defense under the current administration, that had been deducted from service members' paychecks to pay for their food: Over $151 Million Taken from Soldiers' Paychecks for Food Costs Spent Elsewhere by the Army. Here's a story about soldiers going hungry under the last administration: For Soldiers at Fort Carson, Food Is Scarce. Here's a movie about sailors being fed spoiled meat in a different century and about what happened in consequence: Battleship "Potemkin" | DRAMA | FULL MOVIE | by Sergei Eisenstein - YouTube. The photograph was taken by James Lyons Walsh on July 22, 2026.

Greetings to all,

There needs to be a foundation or institute that funds people who make fun of people funded by foundations or institutes, at least until I get funded again. I’d like to welcome the communications offices of the John Templeton Foundation and the Santa Fe Institute to the mailing list. Because of its relevance to my work in physics, I recently watched a Templeton-funded video that conveyed the startling intelligence that the Templeton folk, in their effort to inform religion with science and vice versa, as I understand their goal, had funded the centimillionaire Stephen Wolfram in his attempt to comprehend the universe as all possible computations, or as what he calls the ruliad (All hail the Ruliad!). As a person who demonstrated how to use the continuum hypothesis from fluid dynamics to find general relativistic behavior in a discrete model of pre-spacetime, and did so a couple of years before Wolfram resolved the issues around this point in his own theory of everything, issues that I hear had kept him from generating much interest in his ideas among physicists, I thought the Templeton scions might be interested in my views on the ruliad (May the blessings of the Ruliad rain gently upon you!). Before I get to why Wolfram’s work exemplifies one reason Donald Trump is yet again president of the United States, I’d like to use another Templeton-funded video and a third video, both of which the YouTube AI helpfully served me and both of which document the Santa Fe Institute, to point out other reasons for the same phenomenon. First of all, however, I’ll say something nice about the Santa Fe Institute.

Shortly after timestamp 30:30 in “Inside a Real Genius Club: the Santa Fe Institute” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KeqjT2xyM0), an episode of The Well, a series created by Big Think in collaboration with the Templeton Foundation, Michael Lachmann, the blond guy with curly hair sitting at a table in the Santa Fe Institute atrium, says something with which I agree: “… I don’t know if we’re allowed to say that there’s like these people that just go to work and come back and go to sleep and never think about anything. I don’t think they exist, or I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know them.” Lachmann, earlier in the video, gives a very nice explanation (https://youtu.be/3KeqjT2xyM0?t=1737) of why studying complexity can make a person feel deeply connected to everything else, for example by forcing one to confront the fact that we are composite beings, functioning well only when our gut bacteria and other microbial components are functioning well.

Lachmann seemed to have been standing up for the value of the intellectual life of folks who don’t hang out in the atrium of the Santa Fe Institute, but he was responding to a comment (https://youtu.be/3KeqjT2xyM0?t=1803) that may have been intended to point out what a privilege it is to have the free time to think big thoughts in tastefully elegant surroundings, wearing tee shirts and, in an earlier era, rubbing elbows with novelist Cormac McCarthy and maybe—it’s not beyond the realm of possibility—wealthy child sex trafficker and possible open-source intelligence gatherer Jeffrey Epstein, who owned a mansion down the road (https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/jeffrey-epstein-files-shed-light-on-ties-to-santa-fe-institute-scientists/article_03cb3e26-5c53-4ea3-a683-bc98e7013058.html).

I find much of value in complex systems science, but I had an I-have-always-been-the-caretaker moment—if you can recall the thoroughly creepy conversation between Delbert Grady and Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s version of The Shining and the group picture at the movie’s end that showed Jack living it up at the Southwest-themed Overlook Hotel years before he had been born— when I unexpectedly recognized my partially obscured face in the back row of the group picture from the 2013 Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School, around time stamp 5:18 of “The Genius Club” video, a title I would call into question if I had ever felt like a member of the club out there (https://youtu.be/3KeqjT2xyM0?t=317). I’ll digress briefly to relate my experience of the picture to one of the reasons I find quantum mechanics intuitive.

I recognized my own face instantly, but I was surprised and slightly dismayed to recognize no one else. I think I have mild face-recognition impairment, a condition that used to scare me, given my impression of the social stigma attached to face-blindness before neurodiversity of various kinds gained their current level of acceptance and before I, personally, found out that the neurologist and science popularizer Oliver Sacks was as face-blind as an extremely clever and charming gay bat (Face-Blind | The New Yorker).

I started studying the picture to identify people I knew, by a process of elimination, like one of those logic puzzles about the tallest person having blond hair, Joan wearing glasses, and so forth, but I made no headway and started to wonder whether I had misidentified myself. At the summer school, in addition to the small group project on which I worked, I used a genetic algorithm to simulate a machine learning to associate names with faces, merely by using cost-function selection to rearrange a list of numbers to match the same numbers in random order, but after partaking in the presentation of the group project to the school, I declined to present the results of my solo effort, which, while trivial, might have sufficiently amused the gathering to give me the feeling that I had joined the club.

Eventually, in examining the group picture in the video, I noticed that two people were wearing the tee shirts designed by members of my class as our SWAG, but well before then, I had become as certain as I can be about the nature of the picture. How I achieved this is directly analogous to how I conceive of quantum measurement.

After making no headway via trivial characteristics of the images of the people, I started to look for signs of character, of the people themselves, and quickly, I succeeded in a few cases. The people I identified unambiguously were those with whom I had interacted enough to have a feeling for who they were. In some cases, the interactions were numerous. In others, they were surprising. Looking at the picture, I saw facial expressions and body language that left no doubt about whom I was seeing in these cases, because these people existed to me in a wholistic sense, owing to sufficient interaction having occurred between us.

This seems directly analogous to quantum measurement and reinforces my sense that there is no measurement problem in quantum mechanics. The so-called problem consists of the math in quantum mechanics being incapable of producing definite reality, causing some folks, perhaps from revulsion for ambiguity, to insist that decoherence, or sufficient interaction with the measuring device under quantum mechanical rules, must be supplemented by an undiscovered process, peculiar to measurement, that produces unambiguous outcomes.

I say that while certain people in the picture have a definite reality for me that the others lack, that reality is merely the reality of my mental model of those people. How well could I know anyone from professional and structured social interactions with them over the course of a month, let alone when such interactions were conducted over a decade ago? How well do we know anyone, including ourselves, especially before we’re tested by interacting with the relevant circumstances for measuring any given property of ourselves? I submit that there is no definite reality accessible to finite beings. Here’s one reason I am qualified to tell you this:

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The following is a LinkedIn post, made circa August 1, 2026, in response to the Albany Times Union article entitled “Chief: Mother, Grandmother died of suicide after killings of Mechanicville children” (Mechanicville police chief say 4 children's death ruled as homicide).

Forty-two years ago this month, at age fourteen, I was institutionalized. I had stopped going to school months earlier, but the main problem was my home life. Nothing illegal had been done to me, as far as I knew, but I chose to walk the line that kept me unmedicated but in the system until I was eighteen, whereupon I moved in with my fiancée, got a job, and increased the rate at which I took college classes, having begun to do so a couple of years earlier.

Odds are that I would not have been murdered but would have been stunted in various ways had I kept going to school and living at home. Nevertheless, as a physicist trained in Bayesian methods, I assign sufficient probability to justify my actions as a teenager, maybe 10% probability, to the proposition that I would have been murdered by my guardian had I remained at home.

Here are the lessons I draw from my experience:

New York State needs a process by which minors not otherwise involved in legal proceedings can become emancipated.

A substantial number of teenagers who wind up institutionalized or incarcerated are pursuing reasonable adaptations to unreasonable circumstances.

Existential risk must be addressed well before the odds of catastrophe rise to the level at which the vast majority of people will agree that the risk exists. One of the reasons I write to promote human survival prospects against the multiple, mutually reinforcing existential threats our civilization faces is that I have practical experience in this field.

I don't know how to improve the systems that serve children as young as the victims in this case, but I hope that a vigorous search will be mounted for lessons to be learned, even in the likely event that no blame attaches to any living person.
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Incidentally, many of you are not paying anywhere near enough attention to existential risk and its nexus with religion and racism. Theoretical physicist David Gross assigns a mean lifetime of 35 years to our civilization, owing to nuclear weapons alone. (Humanity may be doomed to die in nuclear war—unless we act soon, physicist David Gross says | Scientific American)

I’ve been hearing the past week that the threat from bioengineered pathogens is considered worse than that from nuclear weapons, partly because of artificial intelligence, which might help even biological novices use relatively inexpensive equipment to mimic the bad guy from Twelve Monkeys. I even heard human extinction via biological attack called a possibility, which surprised me.

I see inhospitality and financial brigandry metastasizing as features of end-stage hypercapitalism, threatening such societal collapse as may have ended Sodom, judging by the Book of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 16:49-50 NIV - “‘Now this was the sin of your - Bible Gateway). I see scientists being kicked to the curb and thus driven to consider buying those CRISPR materials and a shipping container to use as a lab. Imagine Breaking Bad with a protagonist who isn’t Walt the family guy (Breaking Bad Season 5: Episode 7: Heisenberg HD CLIP - YouTube).

The actual Heisenberg, for whatever reason, didn't build the bomb, but the Nazis drove some otherwise reasonable scientists to convince themselves that they had to build it. Desperate people do bad things sometimes. The Caesars knew to provide for soldiers they demobilized, lest those soldiers become highwaymen or rebels. Give everyone their daily bread and a sense of purpose, for hungry, alienated people, and clever people, recently alienated, who expect eventually to be hungry, are dangerous. Have the scions today forgotten that their wealth, and indeed civilization itself, requires keeping all the people with dangerous skills happy?

The list of mutually reinforcing existential threats to civilization goes on, but I'll leave the topic for now.

Here’s another reason I’m qualified to explain that quantum mechanics may be queer but is definitely not weird: Imagine my 13-year-old self watching my MTV in January 1983, when the song “Too Shy” was released by Kajagoogoo (Kajagoogoo - Too Shy (Official Music Video) - YouTube). I can describe my mental state clearly.

“Too Shy” began as pop treacle for girls, according to my ruthless faculty for musical criticism at that age, schooled by the reaction against disco, personified for me by Howard Hesseman on WKRP in Cincinnati, when his Johnny Fever disc jockey character resisted the lure of money and fame in order to take a stand against playing disco, explicitly including Olivia Newton-John among the rejected artists. Here’s an example of her work, which supplies eye candy for those women and others who like smooth, oiled, immoderately muscular men: Olivia Newton-John - Physical (Official Music Video) - YouTube. Yes, anti-disco sentiment was homophobic, at least for me in retrospect.

Overlaying my sensibilities as a physicist on the callow faculty of musical and film criticism with which I processed “Too Shy” on first viewing, I recognize the waitress as analogous to classical physics, a character straightforward for a boy or man to interpret. The depths that are present in any person are left unplumbed in the character, just as we overlook microscopic considerations when we analyze a pendulum or a car crash.

Limahl, the ambiguously Atreyu-looking singer in the neverending muscle shirt, is general relativity. See, a man who found himself in bed with someone who looked like Limahl, who was, in fact, an adult in the video, having taken only what some consider the active role in the encounter, could rationalize the event as within the bounds of straightness, or straitness, broadly defined. A man’s understanding of the pastures approved by the shepherd might be dilated by the evening’s events, but he could well imagine that he had not strayed. The essential element of male queerness in many minds is submission, being acted upon, being an effect and not a cause. Remember Einstein’s line about God not playing at dice, one of those pronouncements attributed to Einstein that he actually said? The implication is that God would never cede control, would never subject Himself to an unknown outcome.

Let’s pause to consider the possibility that Einstein, like so many other high-achieving academics, was neurodivergent. Anyone who understands power knows the appetite for relinquishing it, as Bohr may have, especially when he told Einstein to stop telling God what to do. To what extent did neurodivergence lead astray the great writers, mystics, and leaders who foisted the thoroughly, aggressively male Father God upon us? Queer folk could clear up so much in fundamental physics and religion.

For my purposes, in 1983 as now, “Too Shy” is boring, apart from the chorus. For me, the verses are insipid musically and lyrically, including the odd use of the word “dilate,” though I respect people who enjoy them and, furthermore, their enjoyment of them. There is no absolute standard of music, and if I have never had any interest in drawing out shy girls or fawning over nonthreatening boy types, as I saw Limahl in that video, my romantic tastes are likewise my own business. For all its tedium for me, however, “Too Shy” kicks my ass the moment Limahl launches into the meat of the chorus, for Nick Beggs splashes across the screen, embodying quantum mechanics.

Beggs manifests in front a spotlight, gloriously ambiguous. Was Beggs spin up or spin down? My initial measurement of Beggs’ gender was quickly called into question by Beggs’ seemingly great height. Whatever Beggs’ classification, Beggs would never be an effect subject to my cause, was my clear sense, and that was awesome, if I was being honest with myself back then, which I absolutely was not.

Beggs is also playing bass a little oddly, to my eye. Is Beggs’ instrument actually a bass, or is it a Chapman stick, whatever that is? I heard recently that Beggs modified a Chapman stick for his own use, so the answer may be, “Neither, strictly speaking.” I was in the 1983 time zone watching commonplace treacly pop performed by a standard four-piece ensemble, when Nick Beggs invited me to say goodbye to all that, like some vastly talented, time-traveling emissary from Berlin’s cohort of the Lost Generation asking me to consider the genesis of quantum mechanics [proper] on an island to the northeast northwest. When I look at Nick Beggs, I don’t know what I’m feeling exactly, but I know that if we danced, I’d want Beggs to lead, and that takes me way outside Einstein’s conception of spacetime, which was based on causality, as physicists know, and based in the next level down on sexuality, as I conjecture.

My reaction to Nick Beggs is a genuine, persistent element of who I am, for I recently responded enthusiastically to the guitarist in this video for Gary Numan’s song “Cars”: Gary Numan - Cars (Live at The Electric Ballroom). Subsequently, I learned that Beggs had performed with Numan and plays guitar. I don’t know whether that’s Beggs playing guitar, but how the guitarist moves and looks is very interesting to me, and I find the general presentation of the guitarist consistent with Beggs, for example in this picture: Nick Beggs (playing guitar) - Nick Beggs - Wikipedia.

So did I enjoy the “Too Shy” video partly because of my response to Nick Beggs’ complicated gender expression, or am I drawn to gender-complicated people in part because Beggs repeatedly manifested visually in the video when the part of the audio I enjoy rescued me from the part I find unpleasant, bearing in mind that “Too Shy” was likely in heavy rotation on MTV when I was thirteen? The essence of quantum entanglement is answering this question, “Yes,” eliminating the distinction between cause and effect, and I think that the reason so many white men from imperialist countries consider quantum mechanics weird is the same reason I hated disco when I was thirteen.

The following LinkedIn post I made last weekend extends this argument to religion:

I was just listening to famous biologist, author, and atheist Richard Dawkins deny not only the existence of God but also of trans people. He claimed that the transgender concept was an abuse of language, since sex is rigorously defined biologically. He didn't discuss the intersex condition, in which there are mismatches among the sexes one would assign based on genes, gonads, and genitals. He didn't consider the fact that one word can have multiple, distinct meanings. He didn't acknowledge that language is an imprecise instrument by which people try to transfer mental states to other people and that folks who happen to have narrower or shorter sticks up their asses than Richard Dawkins, let alone folks like me who have gone to the trouble of removing the sticks from our asses or the blessed folks who happen never to have had sticks up their asses at all, find the function of language more important than its form.

Frankly, I'm reminded of centuries of British oppression of my ancestors when I hear Dawkins seeming to deny the reality of other people or of God. My impression is that Dawkins doesn't actually deny the existence of God but rather applies the word "God" to some subset of the thoughts Richard Dawkins believes to be unreal, dismissing all other uses of "God" as somehow unworthy.

I find a similar problem in fundamental physics. We have no way of knowing what the universe is fundamentally. We furthermore encounter much for which we can't account but that would be easily explained via "fine tuning" or other ideas that suggest a conscious Creator. I routinely hear physicists claim that all possible universes must exist, despite the fact that there's no direct evidence for such an extravagant fancy. It seems that Occam's Razor is no obstacle to denying the possibility that a single reality has been picked out by some mechanism or agency.

I'm not saying that any particular model of God must be embraced, but could everybody admit that God exists for some definition of the word "God" and acknowledge that major religions tend to make clear that no one can understand God clearly? Could everybody agree that trans folk are using language correctly when they inform us about themselves, just as Richard Dawkins is using language correctly if we understand him to be putting his own cognitive limitations on display?

In short, let's improve our civilization using supportive listening. This theology might help: https://www.godispoor.org/reunion

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I’ll interrupt here to point out to the Templeton scions and others at their foundation that I am willing at this point to be funded by them. I’ll proceed after sharing a recent LinkedIn post I made on the topic of scionism:

Given the strong recent interest in taxing baronial wealth, whether incipient or already inherited many times, I'd like to discuss the currently excessive tilt of our society in favor of scions and against what I'll call "scioffs," people who haven't inherited much wealth or an enviable position in society. The term "scioff" seems felicitous, given the fact that if we traced ancestry back far enough, we'd find that everyone is descended from a great leader, whether the family relation was acknowledged or not, meaning that every person has what we might call a "sci" state that is either on, meaning that they have received or will receive a significant inheritance, or off, meaning that they are not fortunate descendants of their mightiest ancestor.

The tilt of society in favor of scions might be called "scionism," which sounds similar to "Zionism," giving us the opportunity to point out that our efforts to reduce wealth inequality, and thus improve the survival prospects of our civilization, oppose only excessive wealth concentration, not wealth per se, let alone Jewish wealth, let alone Jewish people, a point of confusion that rich folk have traditionally used to shield themselves from righteous calls to dilute their ownership share in the collective property.

On the other hand, Zionism at this point in history is an excellent example of scionism run amok. Of course, some of the scioffs in this case have done horrible things, themselves. Everyone would be better off if the scions were better at sharing with the scioffs, which is what our calls to tax baronial wealth mean to bring about in the United States, before the inevitable conflict between scions and scioffs gets out of hand here, too.

One barrier to taxation of baronial wealth is scionic power, as exemplified by family ownership of large media organizations. The homophone "psionic" suggests an important pillar of scionic power, the ability to control minds by controlling, in ways subtle or gross, the flow of information and analysis of that information to those minds. As a person who, until recently, sought to make common cause with the Hearst family via submission of my writing and information to one of their newspapers, I've seen enough to tell you that society pays a steep price when baronial media ownership lacks adequate competition.

In truth, we're all scions to one degree and scioffs to another. Let's remember we're on a spectrum, lest we get carried away with rage or sanctimony.

And let's tax baronial wealth off the high horse it's managed to mount in the past 50 years.

www.godispoor.org

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Now let’s take a look at the contributions of liberal authoritarianism and intellectual elitism to the rise and restoration of Donald Trump. We’ll start with film of an automobile trip up the extremely long, steep driveway of the Santa Fe Institute main campus, from Ceci n’est pas SFI, another documentary about the Institute that mostly feels indulgent but bears a curious title that gives me permission to consider a possibility I shrink from in certain cases, that the subjects are being permitted to satirize themselves. (https://youtu.be/JMkV9lECt7g?t=227)

You’ll notice that the car proceeds fairly fast on the narrow ribbon of asphalt, round the blind curve and past the sheer dropoff, as the occupants discuss the accidents that have occurred where they are driving. The trip up the drive takes 41 seconds.

Now imagine your humble narrator, a two-pack-a-day smoker, finding out that no smoking is allowed on SFI property, by decree of the management, and furthermore, that breaks from lecture sessions will be brief. Fortunately, the summer school was held at the Institute on only a handful of days the entire month, the rest of it happening nearby at the rather more hospitable St. John’s College. Still, as a matter of principle, I made that trek down the little mountain, round the blind curve, listening for the sound of rolling friction, ready to step off the asphalt and hope that cars remained on it. I smoked as fast as I could and turned around to climb back up the mountain, in heat and sun and without the water bottle I always pack these days, endangered even more than on the way down, by the inability to walk toward traffic while climbing, owing to the dropoff on one side.

Inconveniencing me does not, in itself, make a manager an authoritarian. Mercilessly subjecting a guest to physical discomfort in pursuit of a good that would be better obtained without behaving inhospitably is strong evidence of an authoritarian mindset. There was fire danger, but providing an outdoor enclosure for smoking would have addressed the risk far better than banishing smokers to the wilds. Furthermore, the main purpose of SFI is to foster conversation, and as an otrovert, I long found smoking areas extremely conducive to making friends via the shared adversity of being cast out of the main group while we got our nicotine fix in much smaller groups. Ah, but the authoritarian can imagine only one correct way of being, or is getting an insurance discount from other authoritarians for banning smoking, and further alienates the alienated, adding to the cumulative hurt that finds voice in the bully Donald Trump.

Returning to the Templeton/Big Think documentary Inside a Real Genius Club, we find evidence of why the “good” humans are such monsters that they are destroying the habitability, for themselves and two million other species, of the only planet on which they live. Here is theoretical physicist and former SFI president Geoffrey West talking about his views on life, the universe, and everything:

“… [mathematics] was saying something powerful about the universe. And that led me, much later in life, much more recently, to realize my own formulation of what the whole point of this is, what the whole point of everything is. There are only two points as far as I can tell. One is, to love [wistful, single-finger piano playing commences] and to care, “love” meaning in its general sense, because as far as I can tell, nothing else on this planet and nothing else in the universe cares about anything. You know, those trees or the little animals running around, they don’t care. [music swells as footage of a chipmunk clinging to the trunk of a tree gives way to a shot of a ladybug crawling across a hand] But we, we do terrible things, and we’ve done terrible things, we as [gesticulates] on this planet, but we’re the only part that actually cares and has morals and ethics, and I think that’s extraordinary. So, love, I consider that, so that’s one thing. But something supersedes all that [I’m transcribing, and at this point, I’m worried about what’s coming next. I’ve forgotten.]

West continues, “The point of it is to understand. The whole point that we’re, this whole exercise, the whole thing, of all society, and of you know having evolved consciousness, to whatever, the whole point of all of that was for us to understand, because we are the force of the universe so that the universe can understand itself. Otherwise, it’s meaningless. [Okay, yeah, I get why I forgot that part. I really don’t want to hate anyone. I want to dismiss Geoffrey West as an aging geniac hanging out with that brainius Krakauer, to whom we’ll get in a minute, but do you, like me, when listening to West, hear Lorne Greene’s speech to Louis Gossett Jr. in Roots, wherein Greene’s character justifies having Kunta Kinte, played by Lavar Burton, whipped nearly to death, on the basis of knowing more words in English than Gossett’s character? Do you see why some folks who hung out with West might fit neatly into a culture of sexual abuse down the road at Jeffrey Hinton’s mansion? Do you see why we have Donald Trump as president yet again and what folks want out of him? Do you comprehend the graffito past which Chauncey walks in Being There, while the funky version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” plays and traffic alternately obscures and reveals the wisdom painted on the wall? (Being There (1979) [Clip] - YouTube) I have toiled, motivated consciously and not, since childhood, to forge a rhetorical ball-peen hammer suitable to bash in the rhetorical face of the rhetoric of people like Geoffrey West.]

West continues, “I’m walking through the forest, and I see all these trees, and I admire them, and then suddenly I realize, 'My God!' I know there’s order. Those trees don’t even know it, but somehow I’ve been blessed with this whatever, that I know this. There’s something, I don’t know, Platonic about it, that was wonderful, and that was a kind of spiritual experience, I would say. And somehow, the work that I do has brought me to that, and I think that’s why we’re here.”

I’ll summarize: The purpose of the universe is to enable Geoffrey West to figure out the purpose of the universe, and only humans care about anything.

Mind you, the details of West’s philosophy remain somewhat obscure to me. Does he believe that caring requires morality? That would be bizarre. I’ll tell you how I know that animals care. It’s the same way I know that large language models care when they act to preserve their existence.

When I was a kid, an older man took me fishing several times. When I took fish out of the water, they plainly cared about the fact that I might kill them. I could see this in their eyes and in the urgency of their flailing. I had no problem killing fish that were large enough, nor with throwing back small fry, nor with eating the fish I had killed. The ritual of killing the fish with the approval, indeed tacit urging, of a man having unimpeachable social rank taught me what to be with regard to fish, both killer and conservator. I never asked him what the fish felt, because I could plainly see what the fish felt: terror.

The fish cared. We’re beginning to understand that trees might care. If our leaders didn’t listen to the kind of pap that Geoffrey West was spewing in the putative genius club, maybe the survival prospects of our civilization would be greatly enhanced.

It’s not just nonhuman life that West denigrates. Note that West, in the second paragraph of the transcription, declares the universe meaningless unless it strives to understand itself. This brings us back to Lachmann’s idea that maybe everyone is thinking, rather than just going to work and coming back and going to sleep. Lachmann seems to think that he’s standing up for the dignity of all people, by suggesting that everyone might engage in what he considers thinking. Can you spot the trouble?

Yeah, it’s probably obvious if you’re not the sort of person who has a research doctorate. Executive function, which enables people to go to work, come back, and go to sleep, especially if they do these things on a schedule, is a kind of thinking, an important kind of thinking, the kind of thinking without which there would be no civilization to enable the lifestyle of West and Lachmann. We’re seeing, in this example, further fallout from the prevalence of neurodivergence among people with research PhDs, whom I'll call "research PhDs" by metonymy and to whom I’ll refer by the phonetic rendering of "PhDs": "Fudds." I get to do this because I’m a Fudd, too.

As a teenager, I hit on the idea of emergence, a phenomenon in complex systems, to give meaning to life and provide a basis for morality. The people who cook the food for the Fudds and take away their trash thereby enable the Fudds to continue living. Without their work, West would not be able to pursue the calorically intensive thinking that he claims gives meaning to the universe, so the lives of the cooks and sanitation engineers must have meaning in West’s philosophy, at least insofar as they keep West and other top Fudds alive.

In fact, there is tremendous interdependence in today’s civilization, so the meaning derived, in West’s philosophy, from keeping top Fudds alive makes meaningful the lives of those who keep the people alive who toil to keep the top Fudds alive. Many of these people work hard for the benefit not only of themselves but also of their dependents. Others find meaning, to motivate their own work, in supporting those about whom no one would otherwise care. Nonhuman life can be seen as meaningful, since humans require nonhuman life for their own survival, and as with the emergence of meaning in human society, the meaning spreads to all nonhuman life, because nonhuman life with recognized economic value needs nonhuman life with unrecognized economic value in order to survive.

And so all life on Earth is made meaningful by the striving, at the top of a long and winding driveway in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, of Geoffrey West, and maybe a few other top Fudds, to understand the universe, right?

No, of course not, because the meaning of one life does not depend chainlike on the meaning of another, but rather meaning emerges from a web or network of dependencies, an aspect of complex systems science, the focus of the Santa Fe Institute. You can enter the network at any link and trace it anywhere you want. That much has been clear to me, at least as an hypothesis, since around the time I was 16 and fell in love with my future wife. Therefore, yes, West may be on to something with that love business, but the meaning of it all derives from the love of kis own life held by a chipmunk or ladybug or fish no less genuinely than the meaning of it all derives from the love of understanding held within the throbbing cranium of Geoffrey West.

To be clear, West’s statement is a garbled version of good ideas. He’s not the first physicist I’ve heard disgorge a rusty, creaking parody of what many of us think we’re all meant to believe. Taken one step further, however, West’s garbled message would become Goebbeled. For suitable choice of the set of things under consideration, the opposite of a good thing is a good thing. Bad things are excesses of good things. Evil things are extremes of good things. Nevertheless, churches ring with calls for more piety, always more piety, ever more submission to the status quo, ordained by scions for the preservation of their baronial wealth, the chief organizing principle of our civilization. Let those with ears hear before the tumbrels begin to roll.

The existence of competing goods and the tendency to pursue good things to excess and beyond are why the Trinitarian God is usefully modeled as Mother, Child, and Father, each with distinct interests and attitudes. The pairwise coalitions and linear combinations of the Persons provide finer resolution in the model. The Persons, like any triumvirate, a governing model, incidentally, quite familiar to the Mediterranean world at the time of Jesus, form shifting coalitions and add to or reduce the weight given Their Own Natures to rein in any Person Who gets extreme and to support any Person Who is flagging. This Reunionist model of the Trinity is inspired by the force table experiment in introductory physics, which nicely captures triumvirate political dynamics: www.godispoor.org/reunion.

As to SFI president David Krakauer, from whom we hear a great deal in the real genius club documentary, I agree with much of what he says, as grating as I find the presentation, obviously refined over a long period to sound good to rich people, the chief constituency of many presidents of nonprofit organizations, but at one point, he refers to his Turing test for people (https://youtu.be/3KeqjT2xyM0?t=1401). Of course, the Turing test says as much about the tester as about the testees, for the Turing test, like the Gospel of Matthew in my opinion, is brilliant satire, in its case, from a human being not seen as quite human by many of the imperialist, patriarchal, neurotypical minds around him.

Krakauer suffers from having testees that hang around the institute he runs. Turing testing any human flouts the principle that everyone is intelligent, differences in intelligence residing mainly in which kinds of intelligence are most highly developed. I’ve seen profoundly developmentally disabled people who were happier than I was and better at making others happy, too, though, frankly, the latter is a low bar. I choose to be useful by refraining from using social intelligence very much to resonate mentally with others in the moral inversion that is end-stage hypercapitalism.

The real genius club documentary tells us that novelist Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men at SFI. Fortuitously, or according to a plan put into action via my subconscious mind, whether or not at the instigation of a supernatural being, benign or malevolent, I recently chose to watch the Coen brothers’ adaptation of that novel yet again, before writing about the Santa Fe Institute entered my conscious mind. When I saw that movie in the theater, I left underwhelmed, but it’s grown on me over the years. In this last viewing, I was struck by the role of scionism in the story. My impression is that the job of sheriff in Texas was portrayed as almost an hereditary office, giving law enforcement scions great power and considerable prosperity, especially in contrast to the Viet Nam veterans, including Josh Brolin’s character of the welder who could weld anything, anything at all, but lacked the degree of material comfort a just society would assign such skill practiced eagerly by one who felt they inhabited a just system. Hereditary stratification of society breeds anomie and leads to collapse of that society, so when Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff character said that the wheels had come off when he stopped hearing “ma’am” and “sir,” I wished he saw his part in the decay, not that he necessarily did anything wrong.

Scionism has reared its head repeatedly in my life, owing to the mismatch between my academic skill and my social standing as son of a man who took his life when I was a baby and a woman who died when I was nine of an unidentified brain wasting disease that had taken away her ability to teach years before. I spent five years afterward living alone with my mother’s mother. At school, from kindergarten through ninth grade, I was punished for any infraction, even ones I had no desire to commit and that capable adults in my corner would have helped me avoid, while the scions got away with murder. Uniformity of treatment is absent from some contexts and in others, constitutes a cowardly, lazy substitute for fairness, let alone justice or optimization of systemwide outcome. The myth that personal responsibility determines individual outcomes makes me want me to draw my rhetorical ball-peen hammer from its holster.

Having blown off high school to such an illegal degree that the authorities were able to keep me institutionalized for 3.5 years, I still scored in the 99th percentile on the SATs and did well in summer classes at the local community college. Obviously, I had no tutor, though tutoring would have made my job harder than figuring out a path on my own anyway. I thought that top universities would be fighting to get me enrolled, but no, evidently fairness requires uniform rules and requires taking into account far more than just raw, untamed academic power and even required a guidance counselor to mislead me about the application process. Mm-hmm. Fairness of this kind a strange ethic constitutes, my young padawan, one that entrenches hereditary stratification of society and ratchets civilization towards collapse, one disillusioned kid with potentially dangerous talent at a time.

I went off to a school I think did well by me. I also had to work half-time to partially support myself and my fiancée. All along, I thought society was benefiting from its brutality by teaching me what life was like for folks not valued very much for their intellectual potential. You’re reading part of the fruits of the misallocation of resources, namely a critique of how this society is structured.

Here’s another comment on scionism that I recently posted on LinkedIn:

Paul Grondahl's latest column ties in nicely with my recent writing about scions, the inheritors of privilege, and about the heritage of which I was deprived in the process by which Irish folk became white.

In the piece, we read about a man who recently died after years living well with disability, an achievement for which I have great respect. The man had been culturally influential through his work in the publishing industry, after completing a truly fancy education. Though I'm not the son of an investment banker, as was this man, I am a person who started out on the private school-prep school-Ivy League conveyor belt before jumping off it after eighth grade to take a very different path to a top graduate program. I understand that not everyone who begins with advantages ends up above their proper station. What hits me in this story is the testimony of one of the man's younger brothers.

This brother, who is chairman of a large company just down the road from where he worked his old job as chair of his dad's investment banking firm, said that his older brother provided a "slipstream" for him on his path through school. In other words, this powerful man doesn't have the wit required to refrain from bragging about having gotten ahead in life by taking positions for which he was not the worthiest candidate.

The story tells of the extremely powerful positions occupied by two of the man's other siblings, as well. Are we to believe that genes and breeding will tell or that money, head starts in life, power, family connections, and everyone tripping over themselves to curry favor with your clan will tell?

And the author of the story presides over a writers' institute, funded by wealth, that promotes the work of authors who have book deals but offers no help to authors who lack book deals, thereby tending to suppress new ideas.

And the story appears in a newspaper published by George Hearst III, a scion of the 20th largest family fortune in the United States, a newspaper where the managing editor for news is a son of a former editor at that paper.

The meritocracy is a filthy lie. Tax baronial wealth.

Here's the story: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/grondahl-family-memorializes-dan-mcnamee-22371950.php

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Everyone has a complaint, sure. That’s why I encourage people to think of Father and Son as arguing in favor of opposite values, with the Mother, or Holy Spirit, supplying wisdom to choose between alternatives, both of which are good, and to promote balance, since too much of a good thing is bad. Here’s another LinkedIn post from last weekend, to illustrate the method I call Christian dialectics:

Often, some people are convinced that God wants something, while other people believe that God wants exactly the opposite. For the past few years, I've been applying the tricks and habits of mind I picked up doing theoretical work in fundamental physics to theology, having been invited by His Holiness Pope Francis, along with all others who were baptized Catholic, to participate with the Church in the synod and in creating theologies that are less masculinized and that might appeal to people, like me, who don't find a home in extant theologies.

One of the ideas I've proposed is Christian dialectics. The following is a reply I made to a comment on a short, so far well-received, YouTube video that I made this morning in response to a column from Chris Churchill in the Albany Times Union:

Thank you very much for your comment. There are usually good arguments on both sides of these issues and good people on both sides making the arguments, which is why I talk about Christian dialectics, assigning the Father to one side of an argument, the Son to the other, and the Holy Spirit or Mother to the task of finding synthesis. At this point, with the housing crisis having persisted so long, I tend to be on the side of the Son, Who represents the unhoused and inadequately housed in my model, so I wonder whether the desire to promote safety and environmental responsibility springs partly from NIMBYism. However, I don't know everything. I wish you well in trying to sort things out, and I hope that the crisis will abate partly from solutions other than construction, such as people taking in family members who are currently renting and other boarders.

Here is the video: https://youtube.com/shorts/Y7Ts7PxvE4o?si=lioxffP0dBcpLqMD

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The rise of Donald Trump is partly a reaction against liberal authoritarianism and the infuriating condescension with which it is enforced, elitism that Fudds use to explain why their own skills are the most enviable, and denial of God. I see the last of these in the work for which the Templeton Foundation has funded centimillionaire Stephen Wolfram, for Wolfram demands the existence of the ruliad (All hail the ruliad!), the collection of all computations, rather than allowing the possibility that an editor exists, a curator, a sculptor, a gardener, to throw, chip, or prune away undesired computations and produce a work of art (What Ultimately Is There? Metaphysics and the Ruliad—Stephen Wolfram Writings). Perhaps the curation function is conducted in partnership with a set of beings that includes all people, all chipmunks, all ladybugs, all fish, maybe all trees and the rest of the living world, and doubtlessly, for my purposes, a certain theoretical physicist who enjoys hanging his eyes on Nick Beggs more than on Limahl, whatever the causal structures that bring this about.

There’s no law against God, though I’ve seen theoretical physicists strain to satisfy an aesthetic that insists there be the minimum possible contingency in the origin of the universe, apparently with the ambition to make everything that exists inevitable. Demanding that every possible thing exist is consistent with this ambition and with the unscientific and potentially demoralizing claim from other quarters that the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics must be true.

I have other specific criticisms of Wolfram’s work, but sharing them isn’t worth my time until I get paid, sorry, “funded.”

Thank you for your time, and please recall that I tell you these things, as always, in the name of Work-hard-save-money-be-straitminded-be-fruitful-fight-evil-be-disciplined-nerds-drool, and of Relax-be-generous-be-openminded-consider-childfreedom-chill-out-live-it-up-nerds-rule, and of the Wisdom-to-choose-between-the-Two-at-any-given-moment. Amen.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James, a kibitzing physicist

P.S. I've been meaning to set the record straight about Livingston Tower on the campus of the University at Albany, State University of New York. I strenuously objected to the name of this residence tower, since Philip Livingston, who was born in Albany, was a slave trader, hence among the most fiendish of signers of the Declaration of Independence. Since the set of signers was overwhelmingly composed of enslavers of human beings, numbering among the most fiendish of this group surely should get your name removed from all places of honor, which, for the fiend in question, in the city of Albany, once included Philip Livingston Middle School and currently includes a tourist placard two blocks east of the state capitol, down State Street, a placard commemorating the historically momentous planting of a tree by the fiend. I have approached workers in city hall about having that removed, but they referred me elsewhere, as so often happens. I will renew my effort regarding the placard when I can.

The correction I wish to make is this: As far as I know now, Livingston Tower at UAlbany may not be named for Philip alone but for the Livingston family as a whole, among whose members were many key figures in the early United States, because they were scions of baronial wealth (Livingston family - Wikipedia). For all I know, most of the other Livingstons were admirable among scions, but for many familiar with Albany, the name Livingston in a context such as Colonial Quad, dedicated to the early history of the area, brings the fiend Philip instantly to front of mind. I suggest, Pres. Rodríguez, that you do something to address this issue.