Letter to Luke

Dear Luke,

I got us into this because I expect really fun conversation to flare up pretty easily. Worst case, each of us has an excuse to write, best case others might find our verbal tennis engaging.

I haven't been writing much. My attempts usually involve beginning by justifying the act of writing to myself, adding a layer of reflexive boredom to the affair. The miniscule snake bites its own tail. Thankfully we're past the beginning. Since I'm seeding this correspondence of ours, I suppose I could share a bit about my life since we last spoke. I've been slowly adopting functional programming in js (even now, I feel compelled to write English in a point-free style, without a subject), skateboarding, writing some tunes, listening to Vervaeke's lectures, planting some veggies... Not having to commute unlocks a universe of side-quests.

Initially, I was going to tell you about the veggies and their part in my plan to escape global turmoil by starting a permaculture community with my squad wherever in the map rural Portugal and fiber-optic coverage intersect. I decided against it (writing, not the plan). My step-dad says I have a tendency to explain myself. It probably comes from a place of insecurity. From my perspective, I do it to try to get someone else to informally review my thinking process. I want to make sure my reasons are sound. Most interlocutors likely don't pick up on that, and even if they did, chances are my accounts of these cavernous thoughts aren't that illuminating. I get how some lack of confidence might be pushing me to do this more than I should. I also get that the compulsion to explain what goes on inside me has roots in having been incapable at reading others while growing up, so all I knew about what they were thinking was what they told me, and conversely the only way to convey how I am feeling and thinking is by verbalizing it. Clearly that's false but it's a reaction entrenched by time.

Trying to write, what I lack most is examples for points I'm trying to make. I used to avoid examples like they were inelegant. "If I can give a perfectly general explanation, there's no need for examples!" They're hard to catalogue, but super practical, most people can make good estimates about a manifold given just a few points. The optimal move isn't even to catalog many examples, just have them serendipitously show up around the right time. On a related note, I made Thread Helper's idle mode show you random tweets and it's honestly a joy to rediscover random old thoughts.

Speaking of old thoughts, John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is a gem. He takes you through the history of spiritual and philosophical thinking - as they pertain to the meaning crisis- from 10,000BC to the present. It's very rich and to be frank I forget like 80% of it because it's a driving/cooking/chores-doing podcast, but the berries I do pick there are exceedingly tasty. Plus, an intuitive historical sense of the causal relationships of events remains. It got me reading St. Augustine's "Confessions". There's a richness in theology that, environmentally, I was just taught to dismiss as crazy and am only now discovering.

Theology brings us to earlier this week. There were two discussions in my friend group recently, about religion and language respectively.

On religion, I was trying to defend that God is something which emerges from human interaction. My friends were doing the usual "yes, bearded man in the sky, give money please sir give money no hell" routine and I was trying to show that exceedingly deep, thoughtful, and rigorous people over the course of history have been very religious (Augustine, Bacon, Euler, Pascal ) and therefore they must always have been referring SOME THINGS that matter, even if ontologically they were inaccurate.

First, like Joscha Bach points out on AI Podcast , there is a distinction between the "prime mover" god, the "life-creator" god, and the "meaning" god/self/christ. I'm talking about the latter exclusively. It's super presumptuous of me to address something like the Christian God, about which I know so little and for which probably the most ink has been spilled ever out of any topic. At the same time, this is me riffing with myself and with you for our own development, stoking d i s c o u r s e, and applying my science/computation lenses to find cool party trick analogies. The Christian God supposedly emerges from Agape - an unconditional, humanizing form of love, in contrast with Eros and Philia - being present and giving rise to behavior in people which causes the emergence of certain properties at a societal scale which, in aggregate, are referred to as God or manifestations of God. One can wonder which other Gods arise from different memeplexes being widely adopted.

On language, we were arguing about this Portuguese Youtuber Virtutis Discipulus , who in my pals' minds is an elitist prick who wants to reform the whole language at once, or make it exactly how it was 2000 years ago. For me, he's playing a character to highlight inconsistencies in the way our language has morphed through the ages, and to motivate some refactoring to make it more elegant and less entropic. When talking about language there's a common tendency for "past changes good, new changes bad" kind of thinking, which can be trivially counterargued. It's kinda pointless to show you this dude since you don't speak PT but oh well-

Writing this is highlighting how scattered I am. Nandi said that's my doom. I can't expand significantly on any one topic without boring myself. Like the only interesting topics are the ones I don't understand well enough to explain clearly. I wonder if this is a sign I'm not supposed to be writing/describing/explaining, but doing or improvising at the edge of comfort instead.

English makes you use "I" a lot. I wonder if a point-free style is practical and/or pleasant. My next letter will be proof-of concept. I want to experiment more with collapsible bullet-points too.

Sorry again for not expanding on any of these, but I guess a scattered opener is better none.

With much agapic love,

Francisco