3/45: The Meaning of Life

I have been delaying for some years now in writing a full-length article about aliens, or UFOs, or the “Phenomenon” more broadly. As it tends to, my interest in the subject entered my life unexpectedly, and was accompanied by much wider-ranging disruptions to my model of reality, not to speak of my life itself. Already I can feel myself going blank. It is hard to say anything true about the subject. I am trying to type a single true sentence about aliens. Or: I am trying not to type an untrue sentence about aliens. I am sure that “experiencers” truly “experience” their alien “experiences.” But I would be damned to say what the content of these experiences “really” is. I could never say that aliens are “real.”

A digression might help. The most recent to-do on X/Twitter has been over the fairness or difficulty or logic of LSAT reading-comprehension questions, which ask the test taker not to read anything into the question not specifically stated. No outside knowledge, no reading between the lines. The letter of the law, not the spirit. A bit more than a decade ago, an ex-girlfriend had an LSAT-prep book lying around, and I remember taking a test cold around 11 p.m. one night and getting essentially a perfect score in like half the allotted time. (I am sure my memory is flattering me.) Anyway, LSAT questions of varying difficulty have been making the rounds on X, and I am unable to get a single one right. It is comical. I read the question, and I feel myself getting bored with tracking it word by word before the first sentence has gone by. I am now interested only in the gestalt, or maybe in the negative space. Perhaps this is a left-brain/right-brain thing. But it feels like there are two competing information-processing systems, and at some point I switched from one to the other. (I know less and less about where words come from.)

Tom Campbell was on Rogan the other day, and he said something so reductive that I might have found my footing again. Campbell is a physicist who believes that consciousness is primary, and structured like a mainframe computer. And all us eight billion humans are “virtual machines” within the mainframe, like eight billion video-game characters in some MMORPG. The goal of the game is to decrease entropy; increase complex structure, learning, love. The goal is evolution at the system level, not the character level. So sometimes the game throws anomalies at its characters, to break them out of their ruts toward higher-order behavior. If individual characters die or suffer, it’s worth it if more order eventually emerges from their loss.

I do not find the computer metaphor inspiring, but there is one thing I do like. The Phenomenon proliferates: Three or thirty or three hundred alien races. Psychic abilities. Miraculous healings. Angels and demons. I could write an infinitely longer list. It never ends. One can never say anything precise, let alone accurate. But what if every single anomaly, from aliens to a chance meeting on a street corner or a fleeting bit of deja vu, is just the system trying to increase complexity? One could call this a trickster God, perhaps, or Lynchian, but even those have too many overtones. What if, neutrally, the point of the universe, the meaning of life, is to fuck with us?