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Last week I talked about flow and wu wei, two ways of describing a state where the conscious observer ceases to exist. Each of these two descriptions has an accompanying framework or value system that connects the ideas to a greater body of work. I’m especially fascinated by the Taoist worldview that supports wu wei because it’s a value system that operates in a way that challenges mainstream western intuition. It espouses many truths that seem contradictory or incompatible with the way that we normally process information in modern society. In Blob Theory, I tie this default model to the Laws of Thought, which are some very old ideas that originated in Greece and have evolved over the past few thousands of years. These laws describe, in as precise a way as possible, the ways that logic or reason can shape and reflect our culture.
The model that follows these laws is connected with many of the core values in western culture and in science, but it doesn't reflect intuition on a universal scale. Other value systems such as Taoism use completely different rules, but I call the model built on the Laws of Thought an 'intuitive' system because it echoes a lot of the ways that things naturally seem to work. I have a unique feeling of what “normal” means to me, a Ruben-specific understanding of what makes sense in my world. This sense of normal results from a combination of shared knowledge, of scientific facts built up over many generations, as well as an implicit indescribable reaction to the environment that can’t be captured with language. These two parts complement each other to form a holistic picture of the way the world is. The shared knowledge can be explicitly represented in the laws of physics or mathematics, or in language by legal codes and government structure. The implicit reaction is just what being alive feels like, what the senses generate through consciousness. My personal feeling of normal is probably very close to your feeling of normal, but it’s not exactly the same. No two people have a perfectly shared version of reality, but we can get a pretty good guess of what objective reality might be like by seeing where the sum of individual points of perspective coincide. The people around me share my sense of normality to a high degree, but this alignment fades the further I look in both time and space. The western world 500 years ago saw things differently than we do today, and other parts of the earth have different stories of reality that tend to differ by geographic location. I can confidently describe our environment as a bacteria-filled world that orbits around the sun, but this only makes sense to my english-speaking peers in the modern age. Other ages or other parts of the world can easily reject this view as incompatible or insignificant when compared to their own explicit sense of normality, even though these hypothetical humans presumably share a very similar implicit indescribable reaction to reality. They would see similarly, hear similarly, think similarly, but have a different story or narrative for the way things work. In the West, our explicit acknowledgement is built on cumulative models that compound on each other. Our models start with foundational truths, which are then polished and refined through generations of observation and experimentation. For example, hundreds of years ago, the world was explained through the lens of alchemy and humors, theories of reality that are invalidated by current standards. Modern models like nuclear physics or endocrinology have proved themselves to be more consistent and applicable in more contexts, and they have successfully replaced the old ideas because they properly follow the expectations of the western value system. These expectations mean that all ideas compete with each other, and the ideas that emerge victorious in the West do so because they comply with the system of first principles that sits at the foot of scientific progress. These first principles, called the Laws of Thought, were originally documented around 2500 years ago, making it a framework roughly as old as Taoism. These laws, originally proposed by Aristotle, describe a framework for making sense of the world at the most basic level. In essence, they establish a preference for statements and information that is concrete, consistent, and non-contradictory. If information is to be treated as logical or reasonable, it must comply with the conditions stated by the laws of thought. The laws are considered self-evident truths, and can be represented as follows:
They provide the structure for the study of formal logic, and have evolved as a principle that supports mathematics, the scientific method, our legal system, and nearly every facet of modern western normality. Their utility comes from the fact that they can be used to infer or extrapolate: if you have a set of statements that satisfy the above conditions, you can draw trustworthy conclusions by using deduction or reasoning. For example, if I am older than my brother but younger than my cousin, then my cousin is older than my brother. This is intuitively obvious, but it’s also an example of the transitive property that arises from statements that follow the three laws. This type of calculation can be very basic, but the most basic bits of information compile and compound upon each other and ultimately culminate in advancements like the computer that I’m currently writing on. The western world is built using these blocks, and they shape our sense of implicit and explicit normality. This makes it very hard to understand a value system that goes against these laws, such as Taoism or other eastern value systems. We place such a high value on concrete concrete logic, so the Taoist emphasis on the ineffable seems like a strange tool for navigating reality. If I were to translate Taoism’s values into a structure that mirrored the laws of thought, it would look something like this:
It might seem difficult to imagine a system that can make calculations using such paradoxical axioms, but this is the starting point for Blob Theory. It’s probably unnatural to think of contradictions as useful, but I use these paradoxes as lenses for understanding complexity - embracing contradiction rather than resolving it. In next week’s writing, I’ll talk about contradiction in greater depth, and how each of us has internal division or contradictions to our personas or our behavior. Do you ever notice what your default intuition is like? Do you trust logic? Do you trust god more? When's a moment when you’ve realized your sense of normal differed from someone else’s? Let me know in the comments or by direct message! This past week, I’ve been working on the final cut of the Fall Creek prototype (version 2.18). This version cements the game’s structure and signals the last round of testing before publication. Final edits are grueling because they rely entirely on the observer. My favorite kind of work is done when I can enter the flow state, a term coined by psychologists in the 80s to describe a certain kind of peak performance. The original studies of flow described a state of effortless activity, where intense focus is combined with a disconnection from conscious thought. In this state, the observer rests and the body automatically executes without any need for deliberation or direction.
It’s easy to enter this state if I’m drawing some art or designing the game’s mechanics. Days can pass like hours if I’m in the rush of it, and I’ve dedicated a great amount of time to understanding how flow relates to my life and my goals. The focus on flow becomes an issue when I have to do work where I’m forced to consciously observe, such as during editing. I have to begrudgingly accept that my goals involve periods of time where I can’t rest the observer, and that committing to the search of flow doesn’t solve my greater goal of ceasing to exist. I can rest in moments of pleasure like food or drugs, I can rest in moments of flowing work, but I can’t rest when I consider the whole big future ahead of me. For a long time, I was content to exist with no conscious cohesion or structure to my activities. I was happy to commit to the flow, to paint or write poems with no intentional cumulative goal. It was easy to cease to exist. Gradually, a restlessness within me grew greater and greater, driven by a helpless acknowledgement of the impending future. The restlessness is addressed by the observer, the entity who calculates plans and simulates futures. The Ruben of today has addressed the future by committing to game design, with a plan of publication that denies the observer its rest. At times it is hard to bring myself to keep executing this plan, but I really must know what happens at the end, to see if it works or not. My plans to publish are written with the laws of Blob Theory, and my curiosity to verify my hypothesis keeps the rest of me marching forward. Blob Theory has been developed and tested during the last two years of game development. Recognizing and maximizing flow was one of the first applications, because I was so charmed by the fact that peak performance can occur in the absence of conscious thought, rather than in the depths of it. As curious as flow is, it’s a rather isolated observation in the sense that it doesn’t connect to any other theories. We know that it’s real because we observe it to be real, but there is no existing system in the West that would expect it to occur in the way that it does. Similarly to how Einstein’s formulas predicted black holes, the best theories are those whose conclusions are evidenced in reality. A good theory of psychology or consciousness should be able to imply the existence of “flow” as predicted by core principles. Such a theory exists in the East. It’s a very old system, with many branches and evolutions, but its history begins with Taoism and it has been documented for at least the last 2500 years. The system itself is hard to formally describe, but it’s basically about living in the moment and harmonizing with nature. The concept most connected to flow is the idea of wu wei, which describes a state of trying not to try. Wu wei means effortlessness and spontaneity, a complete absorption of the moment, an experience disconnected from conscious thought. In both flow and wu wei, the boundary between self and the activity dissolves, and there exists only a fusion with the moment that excludes the conscious observer. Both flow and wu wei are described as ideal states to exist in, but only wu wei has an accompanying ideological framework that connects the qualities of wu wei to the value systems of a particular base model (Taoism). Flow is described in Taoist texts as a justification to practice wu wei, but it was not named and studied in the same way as it has been in modern psychology. There is a certain fundamental incongruence between the values of academia and the Tao, because they exist within different metaphysical frameworks. Western knowledge seeks order through measurement, while Taoism embraces the ineffable and rejects explicit descriptions. Taoist values go contrary to our modern intuitions of substance and reason, for they imply a universe that operates in an entirely different way from how we normally understand it. Flow and wu wei both show us how to navigate life without the observer. Blob Theory extends these insights into a framework that combines Eastern values with modern, practical categorization. Just as the principles of the Tao guide the practitioner to find ideal states of being, so does Blob Theory propose a guide on how to cease to exist. In the next issue, I’ll break down the core axioms of Blob Theory and explore how they shape my approach to goals and decision-making, and how they ultimately offer a blueprint for ceasing to exist. When do you let your observer rest? I’d love to hear moments about when you lose yourself, whether it be through flow, food, meditation, or any other experience. These writings will explore Blob Theory, my personal philosophy on navigating life’s paradoxes. I’ll show the way it works through the lens of my work as a game designer and through my musings as an obsessive introspective artist.
I have a practice of observing myself. There is a corner of my mind that pays attention to the way I write, the way I behave with others, the way I make my decisions. This part of me judges the significance and outcome of my interactions and sets goals and standards for how to follow a life best lived. All of these observations represent guesses about reality, stories of my place in the world and how I come off to others. Even though I do my best to make truthful observations, they spring mysteriously from intuition and they don’t necessarily have any basis in pure hard fact. I tell myself a story about the person that I am but there’s no guarantee that the external world will agree with that story. Despite not being entirely trustworthy, the stories crafted by my internal observer are my framework for making sense of the world. The observer weaves together repeated patterns, noticing consistency and cohesion among the flood of moments of experience. Upon reflection I can recognize the futility of overly trusting this framework, but under normal conditions the framework is as invisible as the air I breathe. It is simply solid ground, it feels like truth or reason itself. The more patterns I observe, the more cohesive the patterns become, and the more confident the observer becomes in its role of predicting the future. It becomes blind to its own untrustworthiness, and it is an unapologetic advocate for its own proposed framework. It is the steward that navigates reality and that crafts the plans that lead to better outcomes. That being said, I hate preparing for the future. I hate making decisions and being responsible for tomorrow’s self. I do not wish to observe myself, I simply wish to cease to exist. While the observer is active, I identify with it because its calculations feel like they hold the truth of the story of my future, and I can see myself exist in that future. I forget that the observer is just a corner of my mind, and it is not the entirety of me. I easily mistake the observer’s framework for reality itself. I can exist outside of this framework. To cease to exist is to dissolve the observer and to become something that is free from the responsibility of coming up with the right choices. When dissolved, I don’t need to do or be anything. Life throws these moments my way constantly, little pockets of time that comfortably hold attention without being distracted by calculations of the future. It could be a good meal, stimulating work, or my favorite show. Any activity that sufficiently holds my attention represents a point of rest in the timeline of the decider. The observer, the part of me that evaluates how the present relates to the future, briefly takes a break from having to decide what to do next. I’d like to find a way to get more of these moments, to more easily slip into this state and cease to exist on command. There are many ways to do this, but generally the easier ones (food and drugs) are detrimental to the long-term wellbeing of future selves that the observer feels responsible for. If I want these moments without hurting my future, I need to somehow align the experience of the moment with the web of potential futures that await. Sadly, there is a clear conflict of interest in this relationship. The steward of the future can never experience what it’s like to live in the moment because the moment of pure experience only occurs when the observer ceases to exist. It’s a paradox that muddies the relationship between the present and future, and it doesn’t seem to have a solution. The part of me that makes plans and the part of me that experiences reality are fundamentally disconnected. The observer’s forecast of the future and the feeling of the so-called “here and now” cannot be simultaneously felt. Because of this paradox, it hurts the reliability of the observer’s calculations. Even if I write excellent arguments made in the name of the future’s sake, they are ultimately arguments written by a being that will never experience the moment and cannot understand its unique challenges. Free will exists, but the soft animal of my body doesn’t always behave as I demand it to. There is always a chance that the authority behind my plans will be usurped by the urges of the organism. I’d like to have it all. I want to trust in the conclusions of the observer, to make decisions based on its framework and to reap the positive outcomes. I also want to resist the mistake of taking the observer’s stories as truth itself, because I know that they are merely an estimate of reality. Finally (and most importantly), I want to cease to exist as much as possible, to be able to turn off the observer and let life unfold itself with minimal reflection and judgment. These three contradictory goals seem impossible to simultaneously fulfill, but I’ve come up with a model that describes their interaction in a satisfying way. I’m sharing this model to make sure that I’m not merely deluding myself, because it is only through the eyes of others that I can verify my own stories of reality. I call my model “Blob Theory”. I’m still figuring out the best way to articulate the theory, but in short, it’s a model for navigating life’s choices without being trapped by constant self-observation. The theory is a guide to honing intuition and automatic thought, freeing the practitioner from having to deliberate and make hard choices . This series of emails is my first attempt at publishing the ideas in written form, and it will combine an analysis of the theory with my personal experiences and with my journey as a game designer. My work on the game has taken a brief pause. This past week I was able to entirely cease to exist by indulging in my vices. I got Covid and I spent dawn till dusk on my tablet or my laptop, plunging myself into a screen-induced vegetative state. I’m constantly in awe of how easily attention can be held for such long periods of time by modern machines executing some type of algorithmic design. A good program or algorithm will eliminate the need to make interrupting decisions, and it lets the decision-making observer take a break from it all. While I’m sick, I no longer feel the responsibility to find a better action for the sake of my future self. The goal is to simply be entertained and to melt into the easiest possible task at hand. In my Covid haze I spent at least twelve hours a day bouncing between Youtube and Reddit until both got simply too boring to stand, then I filled the rest of my hours with video games. Saving the games for last was the virtual equivalent of eating my salad before my dessert… even in sickness I still have the impulse to delay gratification. It’s one of my many blessings. After this brief escape from the observer, today I’m back on my feet, happy to be back in action before my favorite games become too stale and repetitive. Luckily, being sick is an outlier experience. I normally don’t have full license to indulge in oblivion. Now that I’m healthy, my attention turns back to understanding self-observance, non-existence, and my responsibility in navigating this connection. I have experiments to run and ideas to test. The current priority is to publish my game and to document the process with a series of essays about Blob Theory. |
Ruben Lopez
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