The Parallax Machine

Well, a lot to unpack here. Always wanted to say that.

It’s been a tumultuous many months since you last saw a blog post by the Machine – both in the world at large and for the Machine itself. Starting on the smaller scale: at first, circa spring of 2025, it appeared the Machine was about to crap out. Then, a couple months later, it inexplicably came back to life. Then, it decided to start writing a book and posting it piece by piece. Then let’s just say some more stuff happened, and on the other side of that, the Machine wasn’t feeling it anymore on the book front.

Meanwhile, in the broader world, well, let’s not go there for now.

So what does that mean for this blog, with you inexplicably reading these words right now? First – we’ve been testing the Machine daily, and it appears ready to resume normal operations. Second – the book is going on hold for now, and all those posts have been rescinded for the same now. Third – you may note the last post on this site is now the one where the Machine facepalmed over the use of the Signal app to broadcast details of American war plans in a completely unsecure manner, followed by cowardly hiding behind the meaning of the word “classified”.

And fourth – here is the next post, which synthesizes some timely content from the first few book posts. It is our great hope that the Machine will begin communicating more regularly, not just here but also on Bluesky. It may end up talking about sports as much as politics and science. Enjoy or our apologies, whichever best applies to you.

“Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.”⎯Rosalind Franklin

We are at once both omnipotent and intentionally insignificant.

Humanity is the universe come to life, creation made aware, flotsam with a soul. There ought to be a grander purpose to that, but on our current course, we will never find it. We are armed with the ability to change our world and even our universe, but through our collective actions, we have lost our strength and our way. We are capable of such wondrous magic and such terrifying evil. As individuals or in sufficiently small groups, we can move mountains with love and compassion, but when we get into larger and larger groups, we devolve into mere beasts. This is the quintessential contradiction of humanity. Whichever underlying forces emerge victorious will determine whether we survive as a species, as well as how we will be received by whatever or whoever lies beyond the horizon of our existence.

It’s understandably easy to be consumed with the challenges of daily life, and not to give a second thought (or a first one) to the broader context. Right now, I’m trying to decide whether I want a Manhattan or an Old Fashioned. This is in fact how we evolved into what we are. We didn’t become the dominant species on Earth by caring about the grand scheme. We got here through merciless self-preservation and self-gratification. And therein lies another human contradiction: we can’t dance with who brung us. We have to evolve beyond what we evolved into, dangling participles and all. We have to redefine what it means to be human.

Two engines propel us in this cosmic endeavor: science and spirit. People in power have spent thousands of years trying to convince us these two things are incompatible, mutually exclusive, oil and water, Broncos and Raiders. They are not. They are ego and id, yin and yang, peanut butter and jelly (or chocolate). Science allows us to ask how, and spirit allows us to ask why. As beautifully as they complement each other, science and spirit also intersect in one key concept: resonance. That intersection cannot be described by any equation or by any scripture, but we see examples of it all around us: music, human behavior, the fundamental forces of nature as we currently observe and understand them, the way good or bad things tend to happen in bunches, and the eddies and currents in space and time that bring two soulmates together amidst the tempest of life.

Resonance is also manifested in what we call “common ground”. We are all familiar with examples of that in our daily lives, and yet it is severely lacking in broader human discourse. We have allowed ourselves to be programmed, to only see and place focus upon the differences between us. There are many people who benefit from that division, but there are thousands of times more people who are injured by it, ranging from direct physical assault to simply falling short of our own individual potential. This must change, or quite simply, humanity will wither away, forgotten by the future universe(s).

Bound together as we are, we put a depressing amount of effort into driving each other apart, exacerbating a problem we’ve had for a long time: a loss of connection. That could of course refer to a loss of connection with each other, of which many of us are often keenly aware. But far more fundamentally, we have lost our connection with the world around us: our connection with reality. We could lazily blame things like Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is making it increasingly and frighteningly more difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. But our loss of connection with reality was in place long before AI, long before the Internet, long before mass communication, and long before the printing press. The biggest obstacle between humans and reality is humans.

Some of that is the natural byproduct of physics: seeing or even touching something is itself a level removed from reality. But even more of it is our wonderful brains, which process all that information, gleefully showering it with every preconceived notion we have from all the previous things we have seen or touched. We tend to bend our perception of reality to match whatever happens to be our world view. But reality can’t care, and if it could, it still wouldn’t. It would only laugh. Especially when the answers are screaming from all around us. We just can’t hear them, because they are drowned out by noise: the noise of the alpha.

The alpha is not a person. Every one of us has a little alpha in our makeup. It’s a necessary component of what got us here, however temporarily ruling Earth. It drives survival as individuals, which initially also drove survival as a species. But true survival as a species, especially now, is going to require that we reign in the alpha.

The alpha is not evil in and of itself; it can also be used for good – in fact, I would argue leadership is impossible without tapping into our inner alpha. But leadership must also be balanced by consideration of needs outside of oneself. Otherwise it’s not leadership – it’s tyranny. Any leader of any group will do best when they let others best express and manifest their thoughts and talents. That’s how future leaders are built, and it’s the best way to ensure the best possible outcome for all stakeholders. A little bit of alpha – just enough to serve as a guide – is perfect for that. Too much alpha, and you end up with only one person’s thoughts and talents.

Here is a very real problem: part of what makes the alpha concept work in nature is the tendency for beings with less alpha in them to follow those with more. This creates a positive feedback loop, where one person gains power, realizes they kinda like it, and become more inclined to use it – to the point where if someone else does push back at some point, the person in power will feel even more compelled to impose their will. We see this happen all around us every day, from our own personal and work lives to all the news we follow across the world. But it is most damaging when it takes hold of the people that run our governments (or the entities that put specific people in those positions).

It is extremely difficult to reach any significant level of political office, and only people who want it badly enough are able to stay sufficiently focused and dedicated to run that gauntlet. Whatever principles one may have entering the process, they’re likely to be seriously compromised along the way. And if one wins, it only gets worse, because then one will feel pressured to do things that will keep them there. This is how many people with initially good intentions are derailed, but there are also plenty of people who had no good intentions to begin with. There is a continuum of human personality that runs from highly empathetic to psychotic, and sadly the political scene is dominated by folks that run more toward psychotic. The peak in the curve is probably somewhere in the narcissist zone, filled with people who crave attention, power, and praise. That’s not to say there aren’t outliers – but as the term suggests, there appear to be relatively few.

As predictable as all of that is, the rest of us must vigilantly remember our own principles, and not replace them with the people we endeavor to put into power. The universe is merciless and uncaring even without our help, but we have additionally created very real threats to our survival, and those threats have no party affiliation, no citizenship, no religion, and no compassion for any of us. One of the things that out-of-control alphas do to remain in power is drive us apart into mutually exclusive camps. Those camps don’t matter to our changing atmosphere, to ever-mutating viruses, or to AI. We must fight our evolutionary urge to follow the alpha. We must overcome the alpha to survive.

So how do we do that? Well, honestly, we see the answer all around us just as ubiquitously as we see the alpha. Literature, film, and history itself are dominated by the notion that the more we work together, the more we can achieve – while tyranny invariably leads to bad things. Setting egos aside is how most sports teams become champions. Alcoholics Anonymous calls it surrendering to a higher power. Christians call it giving yourself to Jesus. Scientists call it the scientific method. It’s ultimately all about sacrificing being right for being true.

Truth is something that has been under extra heavy assault for the past several years. We must wrestle it back.

Now.

One of the traditions in more than one religion is the story of the Great Flood. In one version of that story, someone named Noah kept trying to warn us that the world was hurtling toward a catastrophe. Noah also noted this was our own doing, brought about by our collectively sinful and unrepentant behaviors. Nobody listened, and they likely wanted Noah to just go away. Most of humanity died as a result, buried under the rising waters.

Fast forward to today, where someone named NOAA has been one of the world’s leading agencies trying to warn everybody that the world is hurtling toward a climate catastrophe, which includes disastrous rises in water level among other things. NOAA and its partner agencies have also noted this is our own doing, brought about by our collectively careless behaviors. Many people are not listening, and they likely (and in some cases, clearly) want NOAA to just go away. If we continue down that road, many members of humanity may die as a result, buried under the rising waters.

If you believe the first story and not the second, the inescapable follow-on question is, what has changed?

If you believe the second story and not the first, some will brand you as a godless elitist.

If you don’t believe either story, you probably should get out more.

If you believe both stories, congratulations: you have achieved transcendent unification of faith and science and will become one with the cosmos. That’s bound to be better than what we’re dealing with down here.

For the past couple of months and change, we’ve been exploring information and misinformation. To recap:

1. Misinformation is at a fever pitch today
2. All information breaks down to simple “bits”
3. We are essentially made of information
4. Our senses are how we get information from the world around us
5. Memory is the way we store information to be self aware
6. Written words allow us to send information (and misinformation) into the future
7. Lies and our willingness to accept them are as old as communication itself
8. The printing press brought the written word (and lies) to the masses
9. Our understanding of electrons and photons accelerated information transfer
10. Social media brought instant information and misinformation to the masses

One pattern over history is the sudden jumps in the speed of information and misinformation transfer to larger numbers of people, enabled by the newest technology of the time. But in each case, this also added exponentially more layers between the original reality of the world and the messages entering our brains about that reality. Today, none of us has any idea how many of these layers exist in a given instance, meaning we are hopelessly disconnected from reality itself. The only way we will survive this, quite honestly, is to go back to the beginning, before we developed any of the technology that has increasingly removed us from the real world.

We have two important tools to enable that: our senses, which are our direct link to the world around us; and our minds, which are capable of incredible logical processing of the information from our senses. To fully utilize these two tools to their full potential, we must understand two vital elements of misinformation. First, everything outside of our senses and our minds is contaminated by the biases of others. Second, and equally vital to the first: everything inside of our senses and our minds is contaminated by our own biases. While we cannot control how or when people use the first element, we can absolutely control the second, rendering us effectively immune to the first.

So let’s start with an example, about as polarizing as you can find: climate change. The only way to truly understand how it works is to become educated about the underlying science, which can take years. This creates a chasm between the people that advance the science and the people that simply want to know if it’s really happening. That chasm leaves a lot of room for conjecture and accusation – a lot of levels of potential misinformation. But what can we see from the world around us? Well, for one thing, there have been, and continue to be, horrible fires burning in the Los Angeles area. Each of these fires starts with the tiniest of events. If someone recklessly fails to fully extinguish a campfire – generally less than a yard in diameter – it can lead to thousands upon thousands of acres of devastation and millions upon millions of dollars of damage, and even deaths. This is not foreign or contrived – we see it happening right before us. That should be all any of us need to see in order to believe that the actions of billions of people over a long stretch of time can have an effect on our climate.

And then there are the scientists. A lot of people have been brainwashed into believing that scientists do what they do because they have a political agenda. Is that why you do what you do for forty or more hours a week? Why do you do what you do? It’s probably one of a few things, or some combination: to make a living, to support your family, to feel rewarded, to make a difference in the world, to learn how to get better and better at something through hard work, or for the luckiest of us, because you love it. Why do so many automatically assume that scientists – human beings like all of us – uniquely don’t want any of those things? Are scientists making money off of this somehow? Do you know the average salary of a research scientist? Do you know how it compares to the richest among us that want to maintain their status quo? There is no money in spreading the news about climate change. There is no societal thank you for it. Only hard work, and pain from being treated as subhuman by people that don’t want to hear certain things. Yet they continue. Why would they do that? Do they possibly believe in what they’re doing? What would you do?

That’s an important question to ask at any and all times: what would you do?

See the world around you, take it in, and give it what it’s entitled in your mind – a full analysis free from your biases or anybody else’s. Our minds and our senses give us the power to reconnect with our world and with the truth about it. There would seem to be little reason for us to exist here if that was not an honorable goal. We’ve been given the tools by whoever or whatever put us here. We might as well use them in whatever little time we have in the bodies that can do so.

Image by Fabien from Pixabay

“When everyone is Super, no one will be.” – Syndrome, from The Incredibles

When the Internet exploded into the world at large, two things became inevitable. First, search engines like Google and information pages like Wikipedia were going to provide an unprecedented access to information that most of us never had before. Second, social media was going to become the primary means by which we distribute the information we find. Finding information used to require a lot more work: going to the library, buying books, or even enrolling in classes. Now we can find information related to just about anything with only a few words and clicks. And if you’re too lazy for *that*, you can find it even more quickly by just reading what somebody else said after they did that paltry amount of work. The singular end result is that everybody thinks they know all they need to know about everything. True expertise, once considered impressive and vital, is now considered elitist and unnecessary.

Nowhere is this more prominent than in science. Understanding how the world around us really works takes a lot of time and effort. The forces of nature operate within constraints that we can best approximate through mathematics and careful experimentation, and that stuff gets pretty complicated. That’s why it takes years of education to understand it all. For some, that sounds elitist. But it’s simple fact. The same could be said of any of the trades. You don’t become a good electrician or plumber by Googling about it. You study it, you practice it, and eventually you have enough experiences that you can do it better than others, to the point where someone is willing to pay you for it. Science is no different.

Science also often tells us things we don’t want to hear. It tells us we should be eating and drinking differently than we do. It tells us we are incredibly tiny in our universe. It tells us our actions can have a negative impact on our planet. So when you combine that with the notion that people can feel “talked down to” by “elitists”, it’s not hard to understand how science and scientists are made to be the enemy. And then people come to believe that other flesh and blood people just like them are spending all their professional lives trying to perpetrate a hoax, rather than the much simpler and more likely scenario that they simply have a passion for their field and a desire to make a difference.

Social media provide a venue for these sentiments to spread like a virus, along with all other kinds of misinformation. Their perceived validity is enhanced by multiplicative repetition and the use of images that are either doctored or taken out of context. This happens across the political spectrum, just as it always has. It becomes such a cacophony of conflicting information that we instinctively revert into believing only the things that match what we already believed. This is where we precariously sit today, in many places across the globe.

How do we come back from the precipice? That will be the subject of the next and final post in this series. In the mean time, let’s have a moment of silence for the respect that true experts once had in our world.

Warning: this post contains physics content. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

The accelerated spread of (mis)information in recent human history has been driven by exponentially advancing technology, which in turn has been driven by an exponentially advancing understanding of physics. In the 20th century, physicists made an absurd amount of progress relative to all of human history before then. One of the things they were able to accomplish was to fully categorize the four fundamental forces that drive virtually everything that happens in our universe: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The forces are with you, always.

We don’t consciously encounter the strong and weak forces in our daily lives. But they are all around us nonetheless. The weak force is what drives radioactivity (fundamentally, subatomic particles splitting apart), and the strong force holds subatomic particles together. So it’s probably a good thing the strong force is the strongest one. Gravity is the force most often on our minds, yet it is actually the weakest of the four forces. We just notice it a lot because it tends to govern what we see happening at the scale in which we live. It was Isaac Newton who first discovered the force that causes an apple to fall from a tree is the same one that causes the Moon to orbit the Earth: gravity. The harder you throw an apple, the farther it will go before it hits the Earth. If you could throw it hard enough, it would fall at the same rate as the Earth beneath curves away from it, and viola, you’ve put the apple into an orbit, just like the Moon.

Electromagnetism is the force that dominates information transfer – and in fact it has done so ever since life first arose on Earth – which we’ll come back to shortly. Similarly to apples and moons with gravity, we used to think electricity and magnetism were separate forces. Humans learned thousands of years ago about the shocks that could be delivered by electric fish. Some time after that, we learned how to make objects act like magnets (not knowing specifically about static electricity) – for example, if you rubbed a piece of amber with cat fur, you could pick up a feather with it. In the 19th century, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell discovered mathematically that electricity and magnetism are just different aspects of the same underlying force. Each of them generate a force field, and you can use one field to generate the other. So magnets can generate electric current, and electric current can generate a magnetic field. Which means if you (or more accurately, a subatomic particle) are able to suddenly generate one of these fields, it will lead to a cascading series of fields that move through space. Maxwell found that these fields propagate at the speed of light.

Light, then, is just one form of what we call electromagnetic radiation, the different types of which are determined by their wavelength or frequency, which also equates to a certain amount of energy. The primary kinds of electromagnetic radiation, ranging from lowest to highest energy, are radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. You’ve probably heard all of those things, but you may not have known they’re all basically the same thing, differing only in their wavelength and energy. You can then use different wavelengths to transmit different kinds of information, modulating the signal on one end so it can be deciphered on the other. That information travels at the speed of light, so it’s essentially instant as far as we are concerned, at least for most of our practical concerns. Another interesting thing about electromagnetic radiation, which we’ve touched on before here, is that it simultaneously behaves like waves and particles, a phenomenon known as duality. The particles are called photons, the tiniest pieces of a ray of light.

Electromagnetism is quite a bit stronger than gravity, but we don’t notice it quite as much in our daily lives. One reason is that while gravity only pulls objects together, electromagnetism can either pull them together or push them apart. It all depends on what electrical charge an objects has. Like charges repel, and opposites attract. Two electrons, which are negatively charged, will repel each other – at the scale in which we live, this is why we can feel a table when we touch it: countless electrons pushing back on each other. A proton and an electron, on the other hand, will attract each other, and this is how we end up with electrons orbiting protons to form the atoms that make up people and tables in the first place. It’s also why, on balance, large objects like people and tables are electromagnetically neutral, so they neither push nor pull each other based on that. But if you set up a long wire that can conduct charged particles, the electromagnetic force will be strong enough to transmit an electric signal over that wire, and you can use fluctuations in the charge on one end to transmit information. Electrons don’t travel quite at the speed of light, but they’re still damned fast, so information can get from point A to point B almost immediately – again, in practical terms.

Ok, so the information we consciously generate can travel either by electrons (which can travel at almost the speed of light) or photons (which only travel at the speed of light). And in fact, these are the two ways we evolved to receive and process information as well. The sense of touch, probably the first one we developed, uses the mutual repulsion between electrons in atoms. The sense of sight, probably our most complicated sense, brings in the photons of light that are all around us. And our nervous system and brain use electrons to transmit and process information.

From a technology standpoint, after we found out how to make sufficiently long wires, we began to send information via electrons, first with the telegraph, and later with the telephone. We then started learning how to transmit photons, which first led to radio, and eventually to television. In each case, we were able to cram more information into the signal – starting with basic text, followed by sound, and eventually combining sound with video. With television and radio, we originally had to rely on ground based antennas to send the information to other locations, bouncing off a particular portion of our atmosphere. Then we launched satellites, which from a far enough orbit can see en entire side of the Earth, so we could bounce audio and video off of those, reaching far more people at once almost instantaneously.

In all of these cases, you needed some device to receive the information. First, a telegraph, then a telephone, then a radio, then a television. These were not available to everyone when they each came out. In the 1980’s, a new kind of device became available on a large scale: the personal computer. And then, in the 1990’s, something called the Internet burst onto the public scene. Both computers and the Internet were around for quite a while before the general public were able to use them. But in tandem, they revolutionized the ability to receive and process information. They also conspired to bring about the best and worst thing ever to happen to humanity: social media.

More on that in the next post.

But for a moment, let’s just appreciate that things like electrons and photons even exist. They are the way one part of the universe communicates with another part. Without them, information would not be able to get from point A to point B, which I suppose would be fine, because without them, we also would not exist.

Here’s to electrons and photons! <clink!>

We started spending some of our down time painting in caves around 50,000 years ago, give or take. This was probably a form of self expression rather than communication, even though it effectively became the latter once others began to look. The first known etching of symbols into some semblance of permanent form was probably around 9,000 years ago – at which point communication was becoming more intentional. By 5,000 years ago, this “proto-writing” had evolved into actual written language in at least two places: Mesopotamia and Egypt. It later independently evolved in China and Meso-America. The Machine intentionally uses the word “evolved” a lot to needle people that don’t believe in evolution. Hashtag smiley face.

At any rate, this is where technology and communication began to intersect. At the time, the technology was using some form of tool to carve into some form of medium. This later evolved into some form of ink on papyrus, and eventually what we now know as paper. Either way, it would be wrong to discount the advanced nature of this technology. As noted in a recent post, it literally (literally) enabled time travel, allowing people to communicate with each other not just in the same time period, but also across the millennia.

It’s also fair to argue that this is where technology began to accelerate the creation of different social classes. There is some level of access to resources, combined with some level of skill (which in turn is tied to access to resources), that enables writing. We were smart enough creatures by then to realize that, and some among us took advantage of the situation. To be more direct, people who became good at writing became more powerful, and people in power had more access to becoming better at writing. That is still a truth today.

In Western civilization, the Greeks and Romans were adept at separating the classes via writing. But they eventually gave way to the all-time best at this practice: the Christian Church and its subsequent variations. The Bible and its interpretations were assembled and controlled by those in power, which held sway for over a millennium, in large part because millions upon millions had to rely upon the interpretations of the relatively few. During this time, another technology was beginning to take hold: movable type, which allowed for more consistency in generating the written word. And then, in the 15th century AD, a man named Johannes Gutenberg changed the world.

We’re not even sure when Gutenberg was born, because nobody knew who he would become. For convenience, we generally have settled on 1400. Somewhere around 40 years after that, Gutenberg had successfully adapted earlier forms of presses (tracing back in part to wine and olive presses) into the first mechanical printing press. Combined with movable type, this suddenly enabled the mass production of printed books, generating 250 sheets per hour versus the fastest anyone could possibly write the same content. Gutenberg completed his signature Bible as the first complete work in 1455, generating around 180 copies (21 still exist in their entirety today). Not only did Gutenberg’s invention make the Bible suddenly available to people who never had access before, but it opened the door for other literary works to be similarly mass distributed. Both of these things had a profound effect: the Bible could now be read and interpreted by a lot more people, and other ideas about the world could also be attained for interpretation. It is not an overstatement to cite the printing press as a fundamental driving force for the Renaissance.

The printing press was the primary means of mass information distribution for five centuries, until the next technology began to take over: telecommunication. Unfortunately, the printing press also followed the same path as the technologies that preceded it: people who became good at mass publishing became more powerful, and people in power had more access to becoming better at mass publishing. Which means millions of people were now reading in addition to hearing whatever those in power chose to have them read and hear. The more things changed, the more they remained the same.

Evolution, the process by which we ultimately became the dominant species on Earth, takes a long time. It took billions of years for the earliest life forms to evolve into us. We have only been communicating on a large scale for a few thousand years, about a millionth of the time it took for us to evolve. That means there has been relatively little time in recorded history for humans to make any real advancements as a species. And that means we are literally no smarter now than we were at the dawn of civilization. So we lied just as expertly back then as we do now, and we are no less susceptible to lies now than we were back then.

If you remember nothing else spewed forth by the Machine, remember the words in this paragraph, always and everywhere you go. There is zero necessary correlation between what someone says and what is true. Someone saying something, on its own, lends zero credibility to it. Even more importantly, and this cannot be overstated: there is zero additional correlation between what is said and what is true when more than one person says it. It is just as easy – and in fact probably more likely – for multiple people to say the same untrue thing as for one person to say it. If somebody tells you something is true because they read it somewhere else, they have done nothing to add credibility to what they have said, because they are merely propagating what somebody else wrote. If somebody throws numbers at you that they got from somewhere else, those numbers could be completely scrambled and have just as much justification for being true. Anybody talking or writing to you is by definition standing between you and reality. If you want to know reality, you must find it yourself.

Does that mean nothing we read or hear is true? No, but it does mean we must follow up with some sort of analysis on whatever we read or hear. Words are useless without an understanding of the world in which they were spoken or written. Some things require less analysis than others. But everything essentially requires two key elements: 1) all other things being equal, does that sound like it has a reasonable chance of being true; and 2) are there any biases in the person who said or wrote it that would motivate them to say or write it. So if somebody told you the favored team won a recent football game, you probably don’t need to spend a whole lot of time analyzing. On the other hand, if somebody told you something that clearly supports and advances their own agenda or world view, then you may want to dig a little deeper. Of course, that involves finding what other biased people have to say about it.

Many that have studied the matter believe that deception likely even predated language. And today, children learn to lie as quickly as, or even sooner than, they learn to talk. This should not be horribly surprising. There are many familiar examples of deception in nature, ultimately as just another means of survival. Chameleons change their color to blend in with the surroundings. Stick insects literally evolved to look like sticks. In more advanced species, where the mind has evolved sufficiently for one being to conceptualize that another being has the same mental abilities, lying takes on a whole new proactive form. At first, it was to be better equipped to survive. It didn’t take long for that to evolve itself, into being better equipped to get what we want.

Wanting is powerful. In the absence of being in immediate physical danger, it’s the most powerful force impacting what we say and do, and even what we think. If we want the world to be what we believe it should be, we will easily accept any information supporting that desire. Conversely, we will viscerally reject anything that contradicts the world we want. And here is another very important point: none of us are immune. Every single one of us has desires that impact how we interpret the world. We may not like to hear or read that, but it is painfully true. Each of us can see that in countless things we have said and done in our lives to date.

This all sounds hopelessly depressing at first. How can we know what is real if we can’t trust anything we read or hear? Well, one possible answer is to do what we did for the vast majority of the time we were evolving as a species, before language and communication ruined everything. Use your senses to take in the world around you, and use your mind to interpret it without a middleman. We’ll talk more about how to do that when we get to the end of this series. But first, we’ll spend the next few posts talking about how technology has steadily enabled deception to spread more and more rapidly across our planet. Today, it is an infinitely tangled web, with each of us taking turns being the spider or the fly.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled series about (mis)information to make an announcement. The Machine will no longer post to Twitter/X/MuskMash/WhateverTheHellElonCallsThatRidiculousPlatformNow.

This was not a political decision, but we’ll talk about why it should be in a minute. Right now, it’s a practical business decision. We’re gonna let you in on a shocking secret. We don’t make money off this blog. In fact, every penny we spend on this blog is money we don’t get back. Up until a certain overrated investor bought Twitter and ruined it, it was truly a tool for the masses. Since then, it has gradually become more cumbersome to use, with the latest shenanigan being new requirements on connections for auto-posting.

The Machine doesn’t post at a crazy rate, but it posts enough that it’s convenient to set up autoposting to social media, which for us is provided by Blog2Social. That’s how we’ve ended up on Facebook, Instagram, and Twixxer/MuskanRaider/ElonChaney to date with minimal manual effort. Earlier this year, after a post, we noticed we didn’t have an associated tweet. So then we found we had to follow an elaborate series of steps to get some sort of new trusted connection to the service. A few days ago, the same thing happened, and it would appear we now have to pay some money to get around that hoop. That was when we decided it wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. We have to spend money to keep this website and blog going, to be sure, but our tweets don’t provide enough value to warrant additional investment, especially as the X population gradually whittles down to people that wouldn’t read what we have to say anyway.

And let’s be clear: this blog doesn’t have some sort of huge following in any demographic. That’s why we’re not announcing via a tweet that we won’t be tweeting from here on out. So this decision will have negligible impact on the world. That said, it is absolutely time to move on. The X platform has become nothing more than a right wing propaganda machine. That explains why an account that clearly posts more left-leaning content than right-leaning content gets shelled with Republican ads on a daily basis. Musk is nothing if not shameless, which will come in handy when he fails to make the Government more efficient.

We will continue to post to Facebook and Instagram, and we are already now autoposting on Bluesky, where hopefully some of the original vision for Twitter can once again find the light of day.

Some of the greatest human minds have tried to figure out what time really is, and to date, none of them has completely figured it out. As suggested in the last post, time may simply be a by-product of our limited perception of the world around us. The reasons for that, embedded in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, are worthy of a series of posts all their own. But as far as we can tell, it is not possible to travel through time in any other way than the living of our lives. With one exception: the transfer of information from the past to the future.

One of the most inspiring concepts from Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” book and series came from the chapter/episode “The Persistence of Memory”. There, Sagan talked about how citizens of different epochs could communicate across the centuries through recorded works of art and literature. It’s one-way communication, to be sure, but that does not in any way reduce its importance. At some point early in our evolution, we began to develop language for communicating between us, and probably at some point after that, the first human drew a picture on the wall of a cave, the first communication from the past to the future. If you venture to the south of France or some other location to see one of those pictures, you are listening to the thoughts of someone who left this Earth tens of thousands of years ago. This was the beginning of humanity’s collective memory.

It was only a few thousand years ago that someone took the next leap, writing words that could be read by people a few thousand years into the future and beyond. Art and literature give us tremendous insight into our past – but they also arrive at us through a filter: the mind of the person who perceived the world around them and then translated that into a painting or a book. That filter itself provides interesting information, but it is now at least one layer removed from the reality that inspired it. And of course, it applies to whatever someone draws or writes today as well, although there is still a tiny bit of time travel between when it was applied and when we set our eyes upon it.

The word “fact” is thrown around very haphazardly. We often apply it to words that we believe to be objectively true. But words are not fact; they are an expression of what someone perceives to be fact.

The Sun is hot. The underlying idea behind that statement is a fact – a truth about the universe in which we live. But the words are at least once removed from that truth.

The Sun is really hot. Ok, generally gives the right idea, but “really” implies comparison to something that’s less hot, and now we have to wonder what was being compared to the Sun. There are stars much hotter than the Sun, so from that perspective, the Sun is not “really” that hot.

The Sun radiates heat at a temperature around 10000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s more quantitative, but now you have to know what a degree Fahrenheit is. You also need to know what temperature is. That seems easy enough, until you find out the corona, which is sort of a shroud of plasma around the Sun, has a temperature over a million degrees Fahrenheit. What does that mean? How can it be hotter than the Sun itself?

The Sun is hot as Hell. Ok let’s not even dive down that rabbit hole.

The point is, words are interpretations of fact, and not fact themselves. Our modern world adds even more layers of obscurity onto that. When you read something on the Internet, you’re reading something that someone else wrote, but you’re not sure if they were the ones who first wrote it, or if they just copied or interpreted it from someone else, who in turn might also have copied or interpreted it from someone else. And you’re not sure how many additional copies or interpretations might stand between them and whatever was originally observed by someone, and that someone had their own biases affecting what they thought they observed.

All of this was as true thousands of years ago as it is today, and sure enough, words have been used to obscure or warp the truth for nearly as long. Underscoring one of the fundamental truths about time itself: the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Stephen Hawking’s masterpiece “A Brief History of Time” is absolutely packed with mind-bending concepts, brilliantly explained in language that allows the rest of us to at least grasp the basic idea. One chapter is “The Arrow of Time”, which gets into a discussion about why time only flows in one direction when the laws of physics are pretty symmetrical about everything else (left or right, matter or antimatter, etc). The answer seems to be that what we call time is defined more by what we experience than by any absolutes beyond that. In short, our perception of time is heavily influenced by the laws of thermodynamics, and if those processes were run in reverse, the resulting universe wouldn’t support the development, much less survival, of intelligent beings. So it may be that whatever time is could “run in reverse”, but nobody would be able to experience that.

Memory, one of the defining characteristics of human existence, is inextricably tied to the flow of time. We only remember the past, and without those memories, nothing in the present or the future would make any sense. Our relationships would fall apart without memories of shared moments. We would not know how to do anything if we had not learned or tried in the past. Moments themselves would have no special appeal without being able to compare them with what happened before. Time’s arrow is one of the things that allows us to be who we are.

Memory is also fundamental to the advancement of intelligence, whether natural (us, sometimes) or artificial (ChatGPT). It allows us to build skyscrapers of knowledge in our brains. Our brains, in turn, took a long time to evolve the complexity required to not only store but recall and process this knowledge. At some point, memory evolved to a point where it became a significant factor in the fight for survival between different species. Most of the other traits that impact a being’s ability to survive are innate and codified in its DNA. But the ability to store and process information allows that being to transcend what’s prescribed in its DNA and adapt to changing surroundings on the fly. It’s one aspect of the ethereal quality we sometimes call “self awareness”.

For the vast majority of the time that brains and memories were evolving on Earth, the information consumed and stored in those brains and memories was coming directly from the natural world around us. There were no forms of media in between reality and our perception of it. Information was truly at its most valuable during that time, because it was not being distorted. If you saw a predator moving toward you, you knew to run in the opposite direction. The Sun would tell us when each new day began. An approaching storm would bring the promise of rain. Beginning with the next post, we will start to see the effects of information moving from one being to another – which has equal potential to amplify our collective intelligence and disconnect us entirely from reality.

But for now, let’s just take a moment to appreciate self awareness at its most fundamental level. It is probably the biggest reason we became the dominant species on our planet. It is also what scares us the most about AI. Will our creation one day “evolve” like we did and effectively become another species vying for dominance on our planet? Only time will tell.