It’s been a long time since I’ve had any weed
I used to do it often. I enjoyed how it caused my train of thought go on for so long. It felt like a train cruising down a track over open plains, and when I looked out upon the journey of my thought it naturally adopted its environment within itself and kept on cruising. But eventually I got scared of being on trapped on the track without the ability to stop. Sometimes I’d try to stop but the train would keep on cruising. It then reached a point where I'd inevitably get anxious the track I was on was one very long never-ending number, constantly changing and flickering at a speed so fast I couldn’t identify the individual digits. More than anything else I feared the more I took this train the more I’d get used to its speed and the more I’d get used to its speed the greater the probability I’d discover something precise about the sequence of digits... so I stopped doing weed and started to drink. No thought ever goes on too long with booze for on its influence the train’s got frequent stops.
Recently I watched Arnold Zuboff on the Closer to Truth youtube explain an argument for the inevitability of Ⓨⓞⓤⓡ Ⓕⓘⓡⓢⓣ-Ⓟⓔⓡⓢⓞⓝ Ⓔⓧⓟⓔⓡⓘⓔⓝⓒⓔ, using for his tools only an imaginary hotel with countless quadrillion rooms and an equal number of drugged up sleeping guests, one per room. He begins by explaining that one of two games are about to be played. In one of the games, all the guests are given an antidote to awake from their slumber. In the other, only one guest is given the antidote. You are then invited to pick a number between 1 and a few billion-quadrillion. After doing so, you are then told the guest in that hotel room number is awake. With this information, what conclusion will you draw about the game that was played? Probabilistically, Zuboff argues, you are compelled to conclude the game was played where everyone was given the antidote, the alternative being far too improbable, something akin to the probability of a particular sequence of events occurring in a specific order over 13 billion years, say, from the beginning of the universe to the birth of the Earth to your great-great-great grandparents fucking to the creation of the eggs and the sperm that became the eggs and the sperm of your parents with their intimate touches one day leading to the only possible release that could eventually become Ⓨⓞⓤⓡ Ⓕⓘⓡⓢⓣ-Ⓟⓔⓡⓢⓞⓝ Ⓔⓧⓟⓔⓡⓘⓔⓝⓒⓔ. I cannot deny I find a fairness to this point, although, earlier this week I was blasting electric chords in my ears that Roy Montgomery from New Zealand recorded 30 years before I stood watching the sun's rays flicker bejeweled reflections on the dirty gray waters of Vancouver’s Fraser River as clouds stood overcast listless, the same rays that less than ten minutes ago were still a part of the outermost layer of the sun, having flown 150 million kilometers before refracting on the Earth’s atmosphere before refracting through the clouds before refracting at last on the surface of the watery filth in front of my eyes, and there as I stood with Zuboff’s argument in my mind I inherited the feeling that any true seamless infinity would require both games to be played.
I cannot deny improbable numbers provide me great comfort. How wonderful it is when there’s a long line of trailing zeroes providing promise of a different digit popping up later down the line. Sometimes I wonder if death is a temporary series of trailing zeros, and once the numbers reach a black hole's horizon the earlier numbers reappear in a way such that those within the singularity have no idea the numbers existed earlier before a repetition of zeroes of in between time. Where does a decimal sit in this world, and on which side of the decimal are we sitting on now? These are the kind of questions from which I find comfort in not knowing the answers. The vastness of my unknowing leaves room for imagination, and its somewhere within that space I imagine my grandpa had in mind when he told me he'll see me again a long, long, long time from now a few days before he died.