What does the future hold? The answer depends on how far in the future we are talking. Policies that are good in the short run might be bad in the long run, but not so bad in the longest run. I have reason to believe that the problems of today will be dwarfed by the joys of tomorrow and that all things will be redeemed.

Part of this mindset comes from my experiences with depression, anxiety, and self-control. I was rescued from my own mental traps by God himself in such a way that I was made to understand that all minds must necessarily undergo the same process. Reasoning further, I figured out that society as a whole (being a sum of minds) must be evolving in the same way. At some point, the failures of our collective idols will remove our faith in them and leave us dependent on God alone for guidance. Thus, things are getting better, even if by some measures it can temporarily look like things are getting superficially worse in some ways or in some geographical areas.

Part of this mindset comes from faith. It would be impossible for me to go forward if I actually believed there was no reason to do so. In order to participate in the economy, I must at least believe in the possibility that my dollar earned will still have worth five minutes from now when I want to spend it. In order to pray for an ailing friend, I must at least believe in the possibility that God will heal them. Society is nothing but the sum of the lives of all of us, so believing in personal good is tied to believing in world good. The moment I allow myself to think the world is going to collapse into permanent chaos is the moment I lose any reason whatsoever to invest in my employer, family, church, or myself.

Many Christians believe that the world is getting worse and worse and will completely collapse before Jesus returns to rescue his people from it, building a “new” Earth for them elsewhere. I have very different ideas. I believe Jesus is returning, but since he lives “in us” and tends to operate through what we interpret as natural forces anyways, the most likely scenario by far is that the world is redeemed gradually in such a way that it looks from the outside like we did it ourselves without God.

The Bible itself supports this idea. The Red Sea didn’t simply part, but was blown away by winds. King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a stone made without human hands that would cover the whole Earth. This is said to be the Kingdom of God that we learn later in the New Testament is “among us.” We also hear from Jesus himself that the prophecies of Isaiah have come true “before our very eyes.” We hear that the Kingdom of God is like a tiny amount of yeast that fills every part of the dough, almost as if it one day grows and influences everything. We hear that the “gates of Hell will not prevail,” suggesting that the forces of sin are in retreat, and that it is God taking over the world, not Satan. The subtle hints are everywhere throughout the Bible and I suspect that the “new Earth” might really refer to the continually renewed Earth of the future.

History also supports me. With the exception of the height of the Black Death, the human population has risen every single year in the past two millennia. We now have rudimentary space travel. We could spread out and be God’s tool in creating a “new Heaven” as well. Crunching the numbers, this scenario is actually more likely than not.

This is what gives me purpose and drives me to write fiction and non-fiction. I want to point the way to the future, educating people on possibilities they might not have considered, inspiring hope and driving creativity. Evangelism is not just inviting people to escape Hell, it’s inviting them to join a never-ending celebration of the endless improvement in God’s expanding Kingdom. The Kingdom of God is coming whether you are ready for it or not. In fact, it’s already here.

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post more thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Being creative doesn’t just mean sitting around waiting for inspiration. There are methods one can use to shorten the leap from what is to what could be.

Map The Possibility-Space:

Plants are generally immobile and fixed to the substrate, while animals are generally mobile and free. What about organisms immobile and free (like tumbleweeds)? What about organisms mobile and fixed (like barnacles and flytraps)? Use your imagination to make new combinations.

Solids hold their shape and their internal parts do not flow. Liquids have no regular, repeating patterns. What about materials that move in some dimensions but not others (like liquid crystals)? What else can you come up with?

Use Constraints:

Constraints of Classification: If you have already decided your world has mammals but no insects, and you want to add an animal with horizontal jaws, think of all the ways those jaws could be homologous to mammalian structures. Could they be modified forelimbs? What other, similar animals could fill that clade?

Constraints of Evolution: If you have already decided that all life on your world evolved from bony fish, what structures or behaviors might your spider-analogues retain to make them less like Earth spiders?

Constraints of Environment: If the seas of your world are highly acidic, what adaptations will your animals and plants need to survive? What if there is no water? What if it is very cold?

Consider Your Starting Point:

Life on Earth is assumed to have begun as aquatic and microscopic. What if it didn’t? How would it have to be different? What new possibilities does that raise?

Have you been assigned to improve on another’s advertisement ideas but don’t know where to begin? Maybe you can easier create your own ideas from scratch and then modify them until they fit the parameters given.

Doodle:

Just make up your drawings as you go. I like to start with a random line, ask myself what it kind of looks like, and make another line to fit that idea. Sometimes I find it starts to look like something else and I pivot. Sometimes I challenge myself by skipping the obvious answer that comes to me first and looking for another. Sure, it looks like a set of jaws, but what if they were limbs or ears? Maybe it’s not an animal, but actually a spaceship. Maybe it’s both. Doodling can also mean playing with clay or Tinkertoys.

Change The Context:

One thing that helps me think of interesting biological systems is to read about interesting physics or technology and then ask how life could use the same process. For example, could a brain store its memory on a spinning disk covered with tiny magnets? Could a cell store its genetic information in a sequence of pits and bumps? Scientific American Magazine is a great source of inspiration.

You Are What You Consume:

Want to be a great artist? Look at other art. Want to be a great writer? Read. Let others inspire you. Take the best parts and drop the parts you don’t like, creating a new synthesis. Over time, you will find your own unique style.

Keep Records:

Most importantly, when you do get an idea, write it down. Keep a notebook everywhere you go. Writers don’t necessarily have more ideas than everyone else; they just remember them so they can be recombined and used later. The longer one does this, the better they get at recognizing a good idea when it comes along.

Please comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Existence Charters are seekers of adventure. We encourage each other to recognize problems and solve them. We breed heroes. We help people find adventure and we help people see that in some ways life is already an adventure. We discuss travel, science, philosophy, and science fiction.

We are all explorers. Some of us explore land and sea. Some explore space. Some explore the nature of matter and energy through experiment. Some explore the human mind through self-reflection. We are all on an expedition for knowledge, a quest for truth, and a journey to understand. We swap our stories of heroism and cowardice and genius and stupidity, whether true or fabricated. Even fictional stories tell much truth about the storyteller.

We use our creativity to create art. We use our creativity to recognize art, digging up the beauty in things normally passed over, and to celebrate the beauty in others. We will not ignore the bad, but will find the good hidden inside. We celebrate the wonder and intricate complexities of nature, giving glory to the creator of everything, whatever form he (she? It?) might take.

Possibility Charters discuss philosophy, religion, science, math, and literature. Everyone puts forth their wacko fringe theories only to have them torn down because no finite idea can ever fully capture truth. The incompleteness theorem, the Berry paradox, chaos theory, cyclic conformal cosmology, and eternal inflation all strongly imply there will always be something outside our understanding. For all we know, the universe is infinite.

In an infinite universe, the laws of probability tell us that any combination of matter allowable under the laws of physics will exist somewhere. This means that even fictional places such as Vulcan, Tatooine, Gallifrey, and Narnia actually exist. This means that there are infinitely many parallel Earths, some of them just slightly different, some of them slightly ahead or behind us in time.

In an infinite universe must be beings capable of building advanced simulations wherein different laws of physics reign, allowing anything that can be coherently described. By playing the simulation forward and backward, time travel is possible. Some of these simulations may be infinitely large and infinitely old. For all we know, we are in one now.

In an infinite universe are multiple infinities that will interact in potentially paradoxical and unpredictable ways, leading to situations mortal minds will not comprehend, such that even some internally contradictory ramblings might in some sense be “true.”

Instead of dreaming of some magical place that might await us after death, we live it now.

“That is the exploration that awaits you, not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.” – Q, Star Trek The Next Generation

The original video was slightly too long for my webhost to handle, so I clipped off the beginning where I explain the differences between science, math, and faith. The whole video can be seen on YouTube.

If miracles are real, why don’t we see more of them? The problem is the definition of the word “miracle.” Miracles happen, but when they happen often enough for observers to discern a pattern and describe it, they are simply relabeled as science and no longer called miracles.

Is moving something without touching it a miracle? It is unless it happens all the time in a mathematically consistent way. Then it’s just called gravity.

What about moving around matter by the power of the mind? We do this all the time when we lift a finger. It has been relabeled neurophysiology.

What about mixing air, dirt, and water together into a living figure that dances and sings? That’s called biology. Plants combine air, dirt, and water all the time to build themselves up and are in turn eaten and absorbed by dancers and singers.

What about using positive visualization or prayer to heal the body? It is unless it happens often enough to be measured. Then it’s called a placebo effect.

What about creating something from nothing? Can science explain that? At the subatomic scale, particles pop in and out of existence all the time according to certain statistical laws. These “virtual particles” are how forces are thought to be mediated. Negative mass-energy is also possible when there are attractive forces. For example, a hydrogen atom has slightly less mass-energy than the sum of the electron and proton that make it up because of the electromagnetic force holding them together. In cases where negative mass-energy exactly balances positive to add up to zero, there is no limit on the positive mass-energy that can spontaneously exist. Mass is equivalent to energy through the relationship E=mc^2 and so it is possible for any amount of matter to pop out of nothing so long as the attractive forces holding it together add up to an equal amount. According to some estimates, the amount of mass in the observable universe is equal to the amount of negative energy in gravity it has, meaning that the entire universe might have zero net mass. In other words, the entire universe could have literally popped out of nothing without violating physics, all explained without resorting to intervention by supernatural entities.

The standard model of particle physics is incomplete because it predicts the mass of each fundamental particle and the sum of the quantum vacuum energy fields between them to be infinite. This defies observation. Some have suggested that the universe we see is only a tiny fraction of an infinitely dense sea of reality. In one sense, we no longer need God to explain physics, but what if the infinite quantum vacuum energy is God? Who is to say it isn’t? Something of that complexity would certainly be capable of thought – and probably many other activities far beyond our comprehension. There is no way to predict with any certainty what the nature of an infinitely complex energy field would be. It would mediate all forces and sustain the physical laws through continual intervention (Colossians 1:17, Acts 17:24-29). From this infinite reservoir energy could be added to and taken from the universe we see. Since known physics derives from this deeper physics, occasional violations of what we think of as normal physics could occur and these would be called miracles. It would also explain the evidence of intelligent design we see in creation.

In conclusion, science has already found proof of miracles and may even have found God, but it knows them all by other names. The conflict between science and spirituality is one of semantics.

Government is the use of force. A government with no way to protect itself from other governments (foreign or domestic) cannot long exist. A government without a military or police force will not last long before being replaced by a government with both. Government may also pick up your trash and supply you with water, but not doing these things makes it no less of a government. Government is not just the collective expression of the people. It can be, and perhaps it should be, but a dictatorship is no less of a government.

Government is violent. This is true even when the proscribed punishments for breaking its laws are non-violent. The authorities may fine you, but refuse to pay the fine and they will order you to court. Refuse to show up, and the sheriff will bring you in. Refuse to cooperate with the sheriff, and then the inherent violence of government will show. This subtle threat exists behind every law. If it did not, there would be no incentive to follow the laws, and the only laws that would be followed would be those the people were going to follow anyways even if there were no law.
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This is what most people forget when they call for new legislation: They are endorsing violence against their fellow citizens. They threaten their neighbors in order to get them to obey. Sometimes this is both justified and necessary when our neighbors are destructive, but most people never stop to ask themselves if the tradeoff is worth it. Which is worse? That some people ride without seatbelts or that we make people buckle up at gunpoint? That some people drink too much soda or that officers threaten to shut down businesses that sell it in cups larger than sixteen ounces? That someone might ignite a piece of cloth to make a point or that the state kidnaps and imprisons them for burning the flag? That some people waste time getting high or that we drag stoners into jail so they can waste time there? Does it really cost society so much to allow drug use that we are justified in criminalizing it? There are always tradeoffs. Remember this.

Sometime between 2000 and 2003 I became fascinated in psychology and sociology and read much on the subjects. This has lead to many musings and observations over the years. I had always been interested in how people acquire ideas, especially beliefs, and how it was that different people could come to different conclusions. One branch of sociology that captured my imagination more than any other was memetics.

Memetics is the branch of sociology that deals with the study of memes. The theory of memetics states that meaning comes in discrete quanta upon which a Darwinian algorithm may act. Cultural institutions, knowledge, and the like are made up of ideas called memes. These memes are passed from one person to another by both communication and imitation and so spread through society. Some memes are more likely to be transmitted than others. Sometimes it is because passing on the idea gives some benefit to the transmitter (e.g. makes them look smart, makes people like them, makes people buy their products). Sometimes it is because the meme is more readily noticed to the receiver (e.g. promises higher income, warns them of danger, promises better sex). Sometimes it is because simpler memes are easier to remember, and fewer errors are made in transmission. Whatever the reason, some memes become common and others go “extinct”. It is said that those memes were “selected” against. Often, when a misunderstanding occurs in transmission, it is said that a “mutation” happens, creating a new meme. This new meme may be either more likely or less likely to spread, depending on its nature. Over time, a group of many interrelated memes (called a memeplex), such as a culture or a language, may evolve through this mutation and selection process. This is why many use the story of genetic evolution to help explain memetic evolution.

Memes and Genes: Genes are inherited directly from parents. With the exception of mutations, the genes of the offspring are identical copies of the genes of the parents. Memes, on the other hand are not transmitted directly. A potential host must observe the current host’s behavior to “reverse-engineer” the meme in his own mind. When different memes cause the same behavior, the underlying memes may not be the same. Genes come from only two parents (or one in some species) and deliver their genes at conception. Memes can come from anybody at any stage of life. Genes have copies of themselves in every cell. To learn the genetic makeup of an individual, one need only take one cell. For nearly all types of organisms, this observation will not cause any harm and will certainly not alter the genetic makeup (single-celled organisms are an exception). To learn the memetic makeup of an individual, one cannot choose from billions of copies; there aren’t any. Any questioning, scanning, or “dissection” of the mind will affect what is there. The act of observing alters the memetic makeup. This is why study by observing behaviors and artifacts is preferred.

Memes compete for resources (records and human memory) and so only some survive. Accents cannot be transmitted by being carved in stone. Practices deemed private will not be discussed and will die out in the individual that holds them. Some practices are simply inferior to others and are forgotten in favor of others. Some memes are spread almost exclusively from parent to child. Upbringing makes a huge difference to the way people turn out later in life. Smokers tend to spawn smokers. Children tend to be of the same religion as their parents. These memes prosper by encouraging the one who holds the meme to have as many children as possible. Taboos against birth control may be just such an example of this. In theory, those who shun birth control have more kids, and therefore more become carriers of the taboo. Over time, those with the taboo should outnumber those that do not.

Benefits of The Paradigm: Memetics can yield useful insights that more conventional viewpoints that focus on the motives of individuals and groups cannot. One notable parallel that can be drawn is that between insecticides and censorship. Insecticides are used to kill certain types of insects, and keep them from spreading. Censorship does much the same thing to certain types of ideas. The point is to keep them from spreading. Unfortunately, there is a downside to using too much insecticide. Because of variation within the insect population, some insects are more resistant to insecticide than others. These resistant variants will invariably be the ones that escape the effects of the insecticide and continue to reproduce and spread. Then, because they are no longer competing with resources with their less resistant brethren (they are all dead, thanks to the farmer), the resistant variants now easily dominate, replenishing the numbers of the entire insect population in the next generation. If less insecticide or less potent insecticide was used, these resistant variants would never dominate over the others, and the insecticides would continue to be useful. This is how insecticides create “superbugs” (a similar phenomenon occurs with bacteria and antibiotics).

In the same way, censorship, if too strict or far-reaching, can generate “superideas” by killing (halting the spread of) the less virulent ideas, leaving only the strongest and most censorship-resistant ideas to dominate. If the censorship were applied more gently, it would still have retained its usefulness. It is believed by many that this is one of the reasons that religions often flourish secretly in those countries where practitioners of said religions are heavily persecuted. This effect would have been very easy to miss by one not using the memetic approach. It is a great paradigm.

Criticisms: There are many criticisms of memetics. One is that it has yet to make testable predictions. Culture is so complex that it cannot be known ahead of time which memetic effects will be strongest and so which memes will win. Whatever happens, it is compatible with the theory. Another problem is that cultural evolution may have a property known as high-sensitivity to initial conditions. This means that very small changes now can yield enormous changes in the future. Since it is impossible to know the exact state of every mind in the community in perfect detail, predictions will become exponentially inaccurate with time. This is the same reason that weather can’t be forecast accurately more than a week into the future. Feedback is also a problem if the scientists are themselves part of the same system they study. There is also the phenomenon of individual learning, as opposed to receiving information from others. It is not always clear how much individual learning there is in the system to compete with the memetic effects, and this must be taken into account.

Another criticism that has been raised against memetics is the possibility that “blending” may occur between memes sometimes. When learning a language, does one adopt the accent for a particular sound most often heard by the individual in question, or does one blend the sounds together, creating a unique sound? While it is obvious that larger memeplexes such as accents blend by mixing and matching individual memes, it is generally thought that the individual memes themselves are fundamental units of information that cannot blend; one must adopt either one or another. Now, however, it is being questioned whether a such thing as fundamental units of contextual information (meaning) exist.

At first glance, it would seem that there is no real cause for concern; the phenomenon of meme-blending should not kill memetics any more than the phenomenon of incomplete dominance should kill genetics. However, there is a difference: during incomplete dominance, the underlying genotype remains unchanged and one or both alleles may be passed on to the offspring. With meme-blending on the other hand, the original memes are lost and reverse-engineered, creating a brand new meme. It would be as if the offspring of someone with strawberry-blonde hair also had strawberry-blonde hair by reverse-engineering up some genes for strawberry-blondeness, rather than inheriting either a redhead gene or a blonde gene to combine with a gene from the other parent. Memetics may still be model worth using, though. If meme-blending happens infrequently or not at all, it can be considered mere statistical noise. The one thing that is clear is that much more study is needed.

Please discuss.