back in 2014 i wrote a small book. i called it musements.
it is small on purpose. thirty-odd pages, seven inches square, plain type on white. i ran off a few copies through Blurb and i think a handful of people ever read it. the word is a real one, borrowed from the philosopher Charles Peirce - a musement is the mind at play with no particular errand. that is exactly what these are.
i wrote them during a strange stretch. i had gotten it into my head that i should go live in an RV on the streets of San Francisco - a starving, street-dwelling artist - to find out what hunger does to a mind. (it does a lot. it is an extremely motivating force.) my friends worried i was coming unhinged. from the outside, watching myself, i worried too.
there are six essays. they do not admit it, but they are all the same essay told six ways. each one asks the same question: what can you work out about the world from the single brute fact that you are the one standing here looking at it?
that move has a name. anthropic reasoning. once you see it you cannot stop seeing it.
counting. i deal you a card from a deck numbered one to N. you draw a four. right away you know something about N: either it is small, or you got very lucky. now change the deck. N is the number of humans who will ever be born, and your card is your place in the line - somewhere around a hundred billion. a card drawn at random tends to sit near the middle of its deck. so how many cards are left?
intelligence. Searle says a simulated mind is not a real mind - it only walks in the dead man's footsteps. fine. so i pause the simulation, step inside, cure the simulated Beethoven of the syphilis that was going to kill him, and let him keep going. he writes a tenth symphony. i would like to know why that symphony is not an intelligent work. i would love to hear it.
simulations. if anyone, ever, builds one perfect simulated universe, then in time they build billions. count the billions against the single real one and take the ratio. you already know which side of it you are sitting on.
universes. nobody made the number three. nobody made pi. they were discovered - they simply exist, the way math exists. now: there are numbers with people living inside them, if you read the digits right. ask one of those people whether he is real. he will slam his fist against his world and say yes. that is the exact same test you use on yours.
immortality. ten identical computers running one identical mind; switch one off and the mind does not notice it is gone. now grant parallel universes for a second, and notice you can never once experience the branch where you died - because there, you are dead. so from the inside it never happens. from the inside, you don't.
that last one is the one the reputable people back away from. i left it in.
here is what gets me, reading it now. i wrote the Beethoven argument in 2014 to needle a philosopher about brains. it reads today like an argument about the machines we actually went and built. "it only remixes, it can't really create" is the same move Searle made, and it has the same hole in the bottom of it. i did not know that was what i was writing. i thought i was doing metaphysics. i was doing the news.
none of these ideas are mine. Carter, Bostrom, Tegmark, Everett, Hofstadter - they all got there first, and the epilogue says so, by name. i just found them all leaning against the same wall and wanted to introduce them to each other. and to my surprise every one of the threads turned out to run through Greg Egan's Permutation City, which you should go read the moment you finish this.
anyway. it has been sitting on a drive for ten years. i would rather it be read than kept safe.
so here it is, the whole thing, free: