Trees

I have found myself spending more time looking at the trees rustle in the wind recently.

The minutes, sometimes hours, spent admiring these (supposedly[1]) inanimate objects is a surprise to many, as I am a person who, at times, is prone to grow impatient while switching from working on my computer, to consuming content on my phone.

We live in a very uncertain time[2]. At times the world feels like an anxiety-inducing baking experiment, as pinches of democracy’s viability in the face of human nature, cups of climate change, and worrying amounts of A.I.’s existential risks (or at least the parallel reality of public discourse, media’s “extract” version of such, which is what’s available to most people) which may, or may not ruin the whole pie, are thrown together, among an infinitely long list of other ingredients, creating a recipe that at once could be unprecedented in its deliciousness, or in its fatal level of salmonella contamination, but is currently an amorphous goop of an unappetizing color.

Although such a reality (the real one that is, not my desert metaphor) is exciting, it is also inherently distressing. In the wide space of possibilities that saturates my field of (future) vision[3] like the panoramic view of the American West that was presented to the eyes of Lewis and Clarke’s expeditions after setting off from independence, I often become overwhelmed, and turn to knowledge, data, and opinions, guides not always as clairvoyant[4] as the native peoples of the west which Lewis and Clarke depended on, to outline ‘the’ path I should expect, and therefore prepare for.

As hinted at in the previous metaphor, such learning is not always as helpful as the underappreciated guides referenced. I will acknowledge that at times, my ‘research’ consists of pulling one-liners from the likes of Sam Altman, Noam Chomsky, or other famous fellow tribe members[5] to give enough of an (artificial) sense of intellectual security to assuage my intrusive thoughts about the socio-technological future of the world in order for me to go back to binging flag videos, but often, I do make a concerted effort to understand the facts of our times, in the hopes of informing my choices of the future.

This embrace of knowledge has not been entirely un-fruitful, I have found great joy in the complexity, and mystery of ‘the hard problem of consciousness’, and have derived actually useful life skills from camusian ideals, (although I still struggle with understanding human nature, and the AI ‘transformer’ architecture; I assume that the ability to hold one or the other knowledge set is mutually exclusive[6]), but in all this rabbit-holing I have yet to burrow my way to a bedrock of a perfect understanding of the past, or an immutable set of complete morals[7], much less an outline of what is to come, and how I should deal with it!

After hours, sometimes even days searching, I come out of my crazed consumption of knowledge. I am often awake from this daze stressed, confused, and mentally overloaded, yet no closer to a divine sense of understanding. What I am left with are the trees, as the rustle in the wind, the anxiety of whatever my current skull-bound obsession is melts away, I reflect a little, maybe even internalize some of the vast amounts of information I will inevitably forget. Maybe I even check in with myself, but in the end, what sticks, is often the trees.

Their leaves move in a chaotic motion, while I never could solve Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, or discover a physical theory of everything with my Ipad, I can appreciate the real-life beauty of mathematical chaos in the motion of the leaves.

I am no closer to telling you how intelligence, much less consciousness emerges out of millions of neurons, or data points, we can both revel in the beauty that emerges from the atoms, cells, biological structures, the infinitely rich history of the tree’s growth[8], and setting, and the ephemeral reflection of it all captured in a never again display of photons bouncing in trillions of unique directions after traveling from a big gas ball far away.

While discourse on the negative sides of my social media accounts pulls me into my human tendency for factionalism, and rage, I am hopeful in remembering that a collection of people in my vicinity decided to get together, form and government, and agree to protect trees like the one I admire outside my bedroom window.

On one of my answers crazed rabbit holes, I began listening to The Conscious Mind, by Zoltan Torey; in this book, he remarks our world, the reality of life, of the tree, and minds to ponder its beauty, both inherent and in its connections with everything else, is but an eddy in the flow of entropy, a perplexing pocket of highly order craziness in the vast sea of it all, flowing in a way we will probably never fully understand, but takes only a moment, staring out the window, to appreciate.

I am never going to have all the answers, and life will always be somewhat uncertain, but if I have learned one thing in my search for knowledge, it is that I will always love looking at the trees.

________________

[1] Here I am not hinting at a personal belief in arbolic consciousness; rather, I am offering an almost performatively insignificant amount of humility for comedic effect.

[2] Wow Ches! What a profound and novel realization you have gifted on to the world! I promise you I can present a takeaway more interesting than the intro to a melodramatic car commercial.

[3] This mental image tends to consume an arfitically inflated percentage of my head space, as I am currently a high school senior, and therefore it feels like of of society has decided that now is the time for me to ‘think about my future’ and what ‘impact I will have on the world’, a perceived pressure quite unfortunate for a person already unusually obsessed with ‘his place in the world’.

[4] I am not insinuating that these native peoples has some mystical power to see into the future, but as people who live(d) in, or had interacted with other that inhabit(ed) the lands that Lewis and Clarke where encountering for thee first time, they did have knowledge of the spatial “future” of the voyage.

[5] I am referring to our shared ethno-religious background

[6] Just kidding programmers, none of us really understand each other, but at least you can feel superior in the fact that I use MacOS, not Linux!

[7]Slow down there, psychopath seekers, I am not saying that I am without morals, rather I am acknowledging the existence of moral uncertainty, as demonstrated in the trolley problem, and Singer’s pond.

[8] This is in reference to the complexity of the factors that effect the way the tree has grown, the way specific way light shone on it at every single moment of its growth, the very particular genetics of its parents, and the epigenetic ways these genes reacted to the environment, the specfic climate conditions on each day (which connects it to a famously chaotic phenomenon), etc, another hint to mathematic chaos in a way.