Who I am

I'm Grant Robert Smith. I'm Zyzzyx of Nal. Actually, that's an alter ego name that I use internally in several ways. Nal is sort of like my word for God. It's a portmanteau of nothing and all - the combination of opposites into a single foundational concept that underpins my conception of the universe. You could take and restate Nal however you like, which is kind of what I think of when you look at the myriad conceptions that individuals have of the notion of God. For me, it commonly appears as 'Doubt everything except and including this.' Or, 'We know nothing for certain, and this we certainly know.' It is the juxtaposition or combination of nothing and everything, doubt and certainty, whatever you want.

Ok, you may be thinking, "That's nice, but it's kind of not saying anything at all." To which I would respond that this is precisely the point. Because on top of this foundational concept (or without or next to or however you prefer), you can build the rest of your conception of reality. For better or worse, our existence seems to have a decent amount of consistency to it, which leads mostly to conceptions mirroring the universe itself. "Cogito ergo sum," as Descartes put it. And then you have science or fantasy. You have fate or free will. You have chaos or morality. These are inclusive 'or's and not intended as opposites. Build a worldview however you like, but be warned that you may not like the world you view.

How I do it

Balance. More specifically, I think of balancing truth and positivity. That consistency of experience I mentioned before comes in use for our small and limited minds. The fact that we can make predictions based on past experience and causal relationships is quite nice. So, I hold the truth in high regard. While you observe a rock hurdling toward you, it might feel nice - for a bit - to have the unshakable belief that 'the rock will be stopped by your mind powers, and that it will fall to the ground before it strikes your face.' This sort of positivity is almost certainly unwarranted. Here, the physical reality is simple and predictable to a degree that positivity should play no part in the matter. On the other hand, positivity is great when reasonable doubt enters the picture. The unshakable belief that 'I will have a pleasant interaction when I go up and talk to a stranger' is hence more reasonable. Obviously, it's not going to be true 100% of the time, but it's still reasonable. It's reasonable because it's going to be true some of the time and because the potential harms of its falseness are negligible.

While this is a simple and reasonable place to start, it's not much of a worldview yet. Truth alone is enough to create most of my view on the world since I exist not in a vacuum but in an observable space. I hope I'm quoting my friend Shane Golden correctly as saying, "I am, now, in this place." Or, incorporating my brother's idea of 'mutually shared experience,' one could rephrase it as, "We are, here, now." This is the basic acceptance of a shared universe with consistency across local observation of space and time. Truth begets physicalism which begets science which begets more truth, and it appears trivial to simply accept the majority of that which is and of that which you hear and see and feel and smell and so on and so on. I even largely extend this acceptance of truth to that which I read and that which people tell me, so long as it's consistent. And, even when inconsistencies arise, it's easy enough to take Occam's Razor approach, the simplest explanation, assuming best intentions and greatest positivity when explanations are comparably simple.

Good intentions and positivity only seem to matter when I start adding the key ingredient - meaning - to existence. The choice to give meaning to existence is logically arbitrary, but almost universally intrinsic in the context of existing in the first place. If I think I am, here, now, in this place without meaning, I can logically justify anything. I can subsequently create meaning in a bubble surrounded by meaninglessness and derive whatever moral framework I want. To some extent, we all do this. It's necessary because we have limited capacity. We can only process so much information, and we can only observe so much of the universe. But, anytime we make an arbitrary bubble without ever thinking about it's context or questioning it, we risk losing our connection with the truth. In turn, we lose true consistency between the universe and our conception thereof. It will still appear to be consistent because the inconstancy is covered in meaninglessness, hidden outside the bubble of meaning we have defined for ourselves. But the truth and our inconsistency are there, lurking in the meaninglessness beyond our bubble of spatiotemporal relevancy.

Instead, I choose meaning, always. Plus, meaning just feels better than meaningless. It seems like a nicely balanced take on truth and positivity. And with meaning, comes morality. Actually, morality requires there to be context and for that context to include other human beings or comparably intelligent forms with which to interact and reason about morality. But since that's pretty much a given, we all have morality in some sense, even if we don't always recognize it as such, especially in others. I'd guess most people define their personal worldview and morality from the inside out, from where they're positioned in the universe. I do this too, and at the same time, I define it from the outside in. What do things look like for the entirety of the universe? Obviously the answer is beyond my capacity, but it's an important question for me in defining my morality. I do my best to take into account all possible context, from where we come and to where we will go. Personally, this thought process comes from a place of decision making. My morality stems from trying to decide how to spend my time and what to do with my life.

In making decisions, I started with what I felt like are the biggest ones. The things that an individual chooses with greatest impact on the universe are what to do with your life's work and wether to have children (since it's going to be a big part of someone's life to raise that child). Because children additionally have a propagating effect of potentially creating more children, that decision seems to have a high chance of being more impactful on the universe over time than even what to do with one's life's work. So first, I decided not to have children. We have enough people for the planet; if I want to raise children, I'll adopt. Plus, humans are evolving faster based on technology than biology, so it's not like genetic propagation matters much. Second, I decided what to do in the 60 or so years I had left to live. This turned out to be a much more difficult decision making process. Apparently I started with the same question as Elon Musk ("What will most affect the future of humanity?"), but I was trying to pin it down to a single answer rather than a list of topics.

I guess as a side note, the rest of my morality, like how to treat people and what laws should be and all that "simple" stuff is taken on a case by case basis within the context of where I want humanity to go with itself in the future. I'll get back to this later because in deciding what to do with my life, I ended up coming up first with a framework for combining goals and desires with inevitabilities and physical trends. This in turn led to a method for deciding what laws should be. And, the remainder comes from evaluating the local context from the inside out (e.i. being nice to people around you) and from balancing contexts against one another based on the consequences.