The origins of Blob Theory

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.