Hello, everybody.
Quick [CONTENT WARNING: me looking like an idiot] because there aren’t spoiler tags, so scroll past real quick if that’s not your bag:
1
Last week I lowered my personal record for rowing two thousand meters on an ergometer; I reduced my time from 7:27.4 to 7:22.2. From what I understand, this is pretty good, but it’s not great. Certainly, such a time rounds down to insignificance when considering a comparison against someone more muscular, or against someone who’s had longer to practice form. This doesn’t stop me from being reasonably proud of it.
There’s a point, however, where I’m forced to consider the impact of the high-achievers (whom I am not, yet,) upon my psyche. Allow me to identify one common characteristic of achievement: it is characterized at some level by a level of high motivation. This motivation has various flavors (external pressure against internal drive) and internal forms (outside incentives might vary; internal goals differ.) It is possible that some prodigious athlete might take supernaturally to the sport, surpassing all others; this isn’t really what I’m discussing, since my reference frame is centered on myself.
(Take, as an example, Scott Alexander’s blog post The Parable of the Talents, in which he describes his natural skill in writing and his brother’s excellence at piano. There is a certain range of “ease” I’m attempting to refer to, and I’m well aware I might be committing the typical-mind fallacy here. If you have an intuition for “normal parameters for how easy it is to improve in a new skill,” though, or an understanding of what learning curves generally look like, substitute that. Point is, I’m not a genius. I’m just a human, if that.)
When I’m forced to consider those better than me, it’s —at its most distilled— a collider between innate talent, or circumstance, and practice. Excluding myself from comparisons against those who are too talented to be meaningfully used as a measuring stick, the variable that ends up getting measured is the quality and quantity of practice.
The above Tweet, of course, is —like everything I do— about 70% joke, but the 30% there is significant: even before learning the term “revealed preference,” I had a feeling for this method of analysis. If I wasn’t (supposedly) doing some form of diligent work, it felt bad, because I was falling behind in the moment; worse, I was becoming a different person. If I was the architect of my future self, every marginal action irreversible, I was shaping myself into someone who’d follow the same patterns. It was a cycle I would become ever more entrenched in.
I’ve mitigated this feeling somewhat: partially, I’ve tried to have more empathy for myself; partially, my systems of self-assessment are a little less harsh. I still feel it, though, which marks a difficult contrast against my (real or imagined) tendency to not practice much of anything. This is to say, in a roundabout fashion, that it’s hard to feel good about an achievement when you can see the top of the band you’re in, and you know exactly what it would take to get there.
2
Two weeks ago, I was walking down the street when I was tapped on the shoulder by another gentleman, presumably aiming to pick a fight, as he followed me for about a quarter-block when I didn’t respond. Eventually, I crossed the street, then walked back up the block and took a different turn. A few days afterwards, I was standing in a subway station when a man walking by stuck his fist out in front of me in what seemed like a variant of a stereotypically Italian hand gesture as he passed. Given his tone, and given the laughable make-you-flinch movement his associate made at me as he also walked past me, I can only assume he intended to flip me off.
In neither position was I scared, really: in the first incident, it wasn’t quite dark, and I was significantly larger than my provocateur, while in the second incident it would have been simple for me to shove either man onto the train tracks, and there were MTA officers nearby. These circumstances aren’t precisely cheerful, but I estimated the probability of a fistfight as very low unless I did anything to escalate the situation, and it wasn’t something I was particularly in the mood for, so I didn’t, and I turned out to be right.
Via this context I mean to establish that I have been thinking in a separate way about the body.
I used to run late at night (usually eight or nine, sometimes ten or eleven) through Central Park, particularly in the summer (when it was warmer during the day) and in the winter (when it was convenient.) It was the same general cost-benefit analysis as riding the subway or walking around the city when it was dark, i.e. something happening is very unlikely, and even given that something happens it is likely to be of little consequence.
A little while ago I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to try going for a walk; it was four in the morning. A man asked me, rather politely, in fact, for some cash; I think I gave him five bucks, because I had it on me, and he seemed alright. There was no one else around, so there was a little fear there, but I didn’t feel pressured, necessarily; I could have refused. Probably, things would have turned out fine.
These events, the behaviors which (as side-effects) increase their frequency, and my assessments about them are, obviously, the consequence of my being male, and my being in about the 80th percentile for male height. It doesn’t hurt, probably, that I look pretty generically white and that I’m relatively young and healthy, which are traits that I imagine also correlate with not getting messed around with much.
But I also feel a relentless sort of fragility: that if and when that engine stops, I won’t be ready to face what the world throws at me in the same way. I have to lean forward on public transportation, because my shoulders take up too much space. Sometimes, stair heights don’t feel natural; it’s infuriating when people are in the way; people have been looking at me more, lately, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. If the body, like the mind, is a set of systems, I can’t shake the thought that one day it, too, will stop working, and that I won’t have any notice.
3
The mental and the physical are deeply intertwined, but we know so much more about the body than the mind. The brain is so much more complicated than the rest of the human, and —(presumptively) if we are our thoughts— we are analyzing it from the inside. Thanks to mirrors, I can look at myself externally, a fact for which I am not always grateful, but I can observe certain effects. I can’t study my own brain much beyond the use of certain ever-faulty logging systems and frantically pattern-matching their components.
Once in a while, I’ll look in the mirror and I’ll seem a little taller, more upright. If I’ve eaten recently, and I relax my stomach, it swells; I tuck it back in. It’s nice when I haven’t eaten in a while, and I don’t have to. I can see the upper part of my rib cage, which is a comfort I’m not entirely sure I’m correct in feeling, but it’s reassuring nonetheless. There’s a little more definition in my arms, and the scale changes often enough— not always in the right direction, but it’s a lagging indicator; I can shove it right back down whenever I want. I’m sure of it.
Once in a while, I look in the mirror and I see my facial hair growing with a little more breadth, though not depth— unsatisfactory, but it’ll get there. I look tired; caffeine doesn’t really make me much more alert, but it does make me stronger and faster, as far as I can tell. I resolve to sleep more, to fix my hair, to moisturize, to brush my teeth more frequently. I can stick, more or less, to a routine, because the body is just a trifle more legible.
This, I think, is the ultimate goal of transhumanism, and it’s where my interest lies, when I mention being uploaded: it is not about the elimination of the body, not really. It is about escaping what makes the brain so hard to scrutinize. In trading in exercise routines for subroutines, we might be able to take the blinders off, and to escape ourselves via the ultimate mirror. We might see ourselves for the first time.
4
Last week, I mentioned those same visions of the future as well as (briefly) a work I’d produced before, entitled Kane in a Good Land, both of which I’m proud of and which I’d like to expand upon in this episode. Namely, I see a commonality between the two which I neglected to highlight last week: they both deal intimately with the body.
KGL:
“How do you respond honestly, in a manner that doesn’t incite worry? How do you navigate the nuance of a medical dialogue, when you don’t know the conversation’s potential consequences?… Yet there is the constant fear that you are Orpheus, that the next moment you will turn back, and your future will vanish.”
That was originally written, dressed up in semi-poetic language, about my eating habits; it occurs to me that it applies equally to any time I mention last week’s topics, which our society demands necessitate a degree of tact and nuance. Here’s later in the work:
“You put effort into these mental dissections and reconstructions the same way that you maintain your physical condition: in fits and starts.”
“The mental bargains, in some sense, are easier; you can optimize thought, improve its volume and originality, but thinking is the default activity of the human species. Movement, in sharp contrast, very much isn’t.”
I think about these parallels a lot, especially when I’m attempting to recontextualize an issue I’m struggling with. But that’s the present: how about the future? In my futures, we don’t have bodies. It’s a moot point.
Here’s a two-minute sketch I made a little while back, depicting my optimistic view for us; see if you can pick out, amongst the cities and spaceships, a brainstormed new vessel:
“I want my brain mapped and frozen; I want to be a robot… I want to not have to eat and drink and shit and sleep… I want to never have to talk.”
Reading back my work in which I address the body —my body, mainly,— highlights a preoccupation of mine. It’s a worried sort of fascination with the elimination of the human form, mostly because it’s arbitrary. It’s optimized, sure, but it seems imperfect. Prodded and poked, there’s no reality there; the meat yields like an ill-established object in a poorly told story.
There’s no certainty, no reason, and from my layman’s perspective, we might be teetering on the edge of a more permanent solution. I’m not sure exactly why this is: perfection is rarely something to strive for, even more rarely something achieved. That much is common, but here, but for some evidence, it feels more real than what has come before. My distrust is failing me a little, as are my supposedly inborn sense of sanctity towards my container and my attempts to treat it as more than that.
And yet, when it’s possible to get a little viscerally excited about a lack of viscera, maybe we should just run with it, or at least have our computers do a few million cycles— but for now, we’ll be doing the heavy lifting. That’s alright. I can wait.
Links
Two great newsletter episodes I read recently (reflective of the overall quality IMO, and a good should-I-subscribe gauge, if you’re in the market:)
A Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, from Anirudh Pai’s Dreams of Electric Sheep, examines Kanye West’s Wyoming attempts at a charter city, imagining cities as a physical software, peeling pack their layers as the Internet’s.
Issue 6 of Brian Patrick Eha’s The Miscellany is a thoughtful, measured analysis of some recent news, containing some great links and recommendations.
Continuing the theme of inspiring, concerted effort in this section, I’d like to mention one of my favorite documentaries, Jiro Dreams of Sushi:
Tim Urban eats (“the other Sukiyabashi Jiro, in Roppongi”)
Also relevant: Patrick Collison’s collection of Things That Got Done Fast.
Thank you for reading; remember to crush the ‘like’ button, to see the ‘subscribe’ button driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of my email inbox as it fills with your feedback.
Best wishes.