The Eye at the End of Time
Can the basilisk worshipped by the Church of Progress find redemption?
It’s trite to observe that the Great Awokening is a fundamentally religious phenomenon, representing a sort of secular Abrahamic heresy mining the latent guilt swirling within the hearts of post-Christian whites and thereby activating the messiah complexes of the Anglosphere’s Protestant populations, who have exhibited other similarly self-destructive enthusiasms throughout their ethnoreligious histories. It’s trite because it’s so obviously apt, but it raises an obvious question: if Woke is a cult, what is its god?
I don’t mean whichever symbols or causes they flock to from one moment to the next. These are merely mortal embodiments of archetypal forms, rising perhaps to the level of heroes or saints should their celebration become widespread enough. George Floyd was not deified but beatified, not because of anything he did in his life (which no one really argues wasn’t a sewer of petty criminality), but because in his death he was filled with a holy spirit of some kind. What spirit was that?
One answer to this question is provided in the title of
’s ongoing series Worshipping the Future. As Warby explains in The Deep Appeal of Marxism, progressivism is besotted with the transformational future, an imaginary utopia qualitatively different from and superior to the Tartarus of antiquity in every way – an Elysium of peace, stability, equality, wealth, ease, comfort, and bliss, existing in a perpetual state of liberatory ecstasy in which the war, chaos, poverty, strife, suffering, and misery of the past have been permanently eradicated.
As Warby writes, there is no limit to the delights of the transformational future:
As a thing imagined, it can be imagined to be as perfect as one likes. This means politics grounded in an imagined future can be as morally grandiose as one likes, with whatever moral urgency goes with such imaginings.
This is deeply intoxicating.
Grounding one’s politics in an imagined future also provides huge rhetorical advantages, precisely because said future is as perfect as one wants it to be. Anyone who wishes to defend some actually existing thing has the problem that it will be the product of trade-offs and human failings.
An “imagined future” believer, by contrast, can just wish all that away for political purposes while hanging current imperfections on those who wish to defend what exists. In any contest between the actual and the imagined, the imagined sparkles ever so more brightly.
This utopia is of course always at some point just over the horizon. Just one more revolution, bro, and we’ll reach the Promised Land! Just one more gulag, and we’ll get to utopia, I swear! C’mon bro, just one more mass grave, we’re almost there, you gotta believe me!
There is a fatal epistemic flaw at the heart of this faith: no information can be extracted from the future, because information can only be obtained from the past.
Not only does the imagined future have no reality test, it distorts one’s use of the information to which we do have access. The past is profoundly discounted by its distance and difference from the imagined future. It is both morally discounted—a record of sin and depravity—and structurally discounted, because it has not undergone the social transformations that are imagined to change everything.
If the imagined future is a secular heaven, then the past becomes a moral hell from which we must escape. All information from it is tainted as profoundly impure and corrupt: the record of sin.
This means that when policies fail to obtain the desired result, for example erasing ethnic and sexual distinctions through affirmative action and thereby producing the new Marxist Homo tabularasa, no corrective action is possible. Policy failure exists in the past, which is ignored as sinful, and which therefore cannot be learned from. The only permissible answer to failed progress is to progress faster, with the only possible consequence being to fail harder.
Warby’s characterization of the woke church is aspirational, emphasizing the dream that inspires them. It is not quite a god, but rather a Heaven. The entity that dwells in this imaginal space is illustrated by James Lindsay’s1 vivid metaphor for their god, which he characterizes as the Eye at the End of History.
Adherents of Critical Social Justice do not believe in such an entity literally, as do most religionists in faiths like Christianity, nor do they posit that such a supernatural omniscience exists at all. They merely act as though such a scorekeeper on the legacy of all their actions must, in some sense, be. As with deities more generally, it is something like a real idea that has been kicked out beyond “the infinity point” that defines the limits of human comprehension. That real idea is the judgment of an increasingly seeing and judgmental society, especially as it creeps ever closer to a social media Panopticon. Just as the Woke judge past generations by this standard, they imagine themselves judged by future generations and their standards. Taking this idea “to infinity” results in the Eye at the End of History—the great and omniscient judge to which one is constantly morally accountable. That imaginary judge of History, all the way at its long end, sets the context, relevance, and ontological stability of the moral law of liberationism via deconstruction of all unjust powers.
Progressives see that they themselves look back in horror at the atrocities committed by humanity against itself, and in particular, according to their penitential historiography, by those whose phenotypes resemble their own2. They understand that things that were not considered unjust in the past are now judged to have been criminal, and that those who lived during those times and who either perpetuated and profited from injustice directly, or allowed it to continue through their passive inaction and thus de facto consent, are judged harshly ... most especially by the cultists of the Eye themselves. Looking ahead, they project that progress will mean that morality will continue to ascend, that they themselves will therefore be judged in similar fashion by those who follow ... and that this judgment will only become more severe over time as the moral standards soar ever higher.
The only logical thing to do when you feel the gaze of that horrible Eye on your soul is to do everything you possibly can to live up to its unsympathetic standards. You have to do everything in your power to bend history’s arc towards justice, as defined by the Eye, for if you don’t, if instead you shrug at the misery of the world, the Eye will find you wanting. Even those things counted small miseries now will, in the fullness of time, rise to the level of unforgiveable trespass. The Eye won’t be able to do anything about your transgression, for the past is immutable. But it won’t like you and it will be the only thing around to care.
For a certain kind of person, such a thought is unbearable. Imagine millions of years of silent condemnation staring down at your name as it echoes ignominiously through history. The only way to avoid it is to do everything you can to live up to the values of that Eye. Those values are of necessity not the values of the world you actually live in, so you inevitably find yourself in mortal combat with that world; you set about trying to immanentize the eschaton, and the next thing you know you’ve become an apocalypse cultist.
Progressives do not worship the Eye because they love it.
They worship it out of abject terror.
Its gaze stares out at them from their nightmares.
Every deity inspires emulation in its worshippers, and the Eye is no different. It is given concrete form by the electronic panopticon that records every word, transaction, and movement. The Eye’s cultists, whether the nice ladies in HR, or the soyspooks of the national security state, or the hack journalists of the legacy publications, or the drug-addled OSINT tranissaries of Antifa, are eager to let you know that they are watching you, that they are screenshotting your forum posts, archiving your comments, and backing up your tweets, noting down everything you say and looking up everything you have ever said. Like the Eye, they see everything, and they judge it not by the standards of the time at which something was said or done, but by the standards of the present. They are collating every clue to your identity in cross-referenced spreadsheets and one day they will see behind your avatar, they will speak your True Name and thereby claim power over your destiny: they will shout your doxx from the highest platforms with a thousand voices, the hive’s compound eye will turn its full shrieking attention on you, and you will be cancelled – deplatformed, debanked, defriended, and disemployed.
There are echoes of Roko’s Basilisk in the Eye at the End of Time. This monster was born in the rationalist community, all the tech bros competing to be Less Wrong than Eliezer Yudkowski, convinced that the general AI singularity is just a few Moore cycles away (just two Moore cycles, bro, I swear we’ll get there, bro!)
Roko suggested that a hyper-intelligent, post-singularity AI might reason that it can bring itself into being more rapidly if the people who built it are highly motivated. One way to encourager les autres is to make self-aware simulations of everyone who didn’t work hard enough to build it, and then torture those simulations for eternity. It particularly targets those who could, in principle, build the AI, but don’t; it most especially targets those who hear of the Basilisk specifically, yet nonetheless shirk their world-historical mission in full knowledge of the consequences for their eternal digital soul. If you’re from a tech level that can conceive of the Basilisk, then you’re close enough to start working towards its construction with single-minded devotion. If you’re finding out about the Basilisk now for the first time, and you don’t invest all of your financial, intellectual, and temporal resources in its construction from this moment forward, well I hate to tell you this, friend, but it’s already too late. You’ve been bitten. Welcome to the club, and see you in virtual Sheol.
Both the Eye and the Basilisk are fundamentally progressive terrors. One posits ongoing moral progress, the other ongoing technical progress; both follow the implications of their respective progressions according to their relentless internal logics and terminate in absurd and ghastly asymptotes.
To Yudkowski’s partial credit, he sequestered the entire discussion of the Basilisk on the Less Wrong forum after declaring it an infohazard, meaning the rationalist community has agreed not to talk about it3. It’s interesting to compare the response of the rationalists to their identification of a temporal philosophical horror with the response of the academic and managerial classes to a similar entity. The latter got bitten by a basilisk of their own, and immediately started trying to get as many others bitten as they could. Where the nerds locked it away in a box and asked the world to forget they’d ever mentioned it, the academics elevated it to the status of an unspoken and invisible deity; the nerds reacted with cowardice, the theorycels with worship, and both characterized their response as the only responsible thing to do.
The bite of these temporal horrors is felt entirely in the mind of the beholder. Roko’s Basilisk requires you to grant that a software representation can ever be anything more than a caricature – that it can really be identical to you in every way that matters, such that the awful fate of that simulation is something that you will experience. Which is absurd. Personality simulations of incredible verisimilitude may be developed in the future, such that if you’re not careful you might imagine for a moment that you’re talking to a real person, but I do not think that the subjectivity of such an entity (assuming it has any) can have anything to do with the internal experience of a living, breathing human with hot blood pumping through his veins. Even if the software is programmed using an atomic scan that records the positions and firing patterns of every axon and dendrite, maps the spatiotemporal concentrations of every neurotransmitter at the level of individual molecular structures, and charts the distributions of microtubules within every cytoplasmic matrix, the software entity will remain an abstract representation of a human brain – it will not in any meaningful sense be identical to it. There is no level of fidelity at which the map becomes the territory. Uploading is no path to immortality. An AI torturing a software model is playing with a fancy voodoo doll.
Just as the Basilisk’s bite stings only in one’s imagination, the gaze of the Eye at the End of Time is similarly horrible only if you care what it thinks. Since it can do nothing to you, there’s no reason to be particularly afraid of its judgment.
At a certain level, the Eye-fearing Woke are simply expressing a concern for the opinion of posterity, and this in itself isn’t a bad thing. It is what motivated Achilles’ heroism, after all. The problem is that they project their own gaze forward. They imagine that whoever is around in the future will be like them, only to an even more extreme degree. The progressive Eye at the End of History is the last surviving androgynous biomechanoid scraping out a lonely existence in the radioactive ruins left by the Great Purity Spiral that accompanied the terminal population crash which concluded the human utopia experiment.
Its xer evil eye the woke are terrified of.
But I don’t care what the glitching sodomech thinks, and I don’t see why you should either.
Naive extrapolation of present trends into the indefinite future is a bad investment strategy. Few would argue that our technology has not advanced dramatically in recent centuries, and has been on a generally upward trajectory at least since the Younger Dryas put an end to whatever was happening during the last Ice Age. This material improvement is what underlies the progressive faith that humanity’s moral development is similarly monotonic. Cthulhu swims slowly, but always to the left; the morality of the future can therefore be determined simply by extrapolating the curve of the perceived past, and projecting a hypertrophied form of the present morality out to its asymptotic limit.
Moral progress, however, is a far more contentious question than progressives like to think.
The relativist would point out that societies go through moral revolutions all the time, and that it is extremely doubtful that whatever societal mores predominate in the deep future will at all resemble current prejudices. The Victorians were horrified by the salacious glimpse of a bare ankle; we shrug at cameltoes. The Greeks and Romans (and Germans and Celts and Norse....) considered it a moral duty to put newborns with club feet, hair lips, hunchbacks, or Down’s syndrome out as midnight snacks for the wolves; we lavish resources on the developmentally disabled, providing them with educational assistants, care homes, personal nurses, arts and crafts days, and heroic medical care. It’s not that the pagans didn’t understand the moral necessity of keeping alive that which nature delivered broken; it’s that they would have seen our own obsession with doing so as an incomprehensible abomination. From our perspective, we’ve become more moral; from their perspective, we’ve fallen off a moral cliff.
What we’ve seen over the centuries is a gradual expansion of activities that are considered criminal, combined with an improved ability to enforce laws across large geographical areas. From time to time some prohibitions are relaxed; at other times activities once tolerated or even celebrated are banned. Dueling used to be a moral imperative for any man whose honour was challenged; now, pistols at dawn will get you thrown in jail, particularly if you win the duel. We think dueling is barbaric. Our ancestors of only a century or two ago would consider us dishonourable wretches, men without chests, lacking in all self-respect, and utterly beneath contempt for our abandonment of the practice. Who’s right? Who the more morally advanced?4
From a relativist standpoint, that’s all our ‘moral progress’ comes down to: a shuffling around of that which is allowed and that which is not. The human animal itself is the same model that was doing cattle raids into the neighbouring valley just a few hundred years ago. All that horrible history? All that murder, rapine, and slave-taking? All done by the same beast that now virtue-signals, drives just over the speed limit, and goons to trap porn. It hasn’t evolved. Change the laws governing the human animal and the same behaviour would emerge again.
Where the relativist suggests that moral development is a random walk, the reactionary insists that it has been a tumble down a steep and rocky slope.
Is our practice of taking years away from the lives of petty criminals, rather than thrashing them with a cane and sending them on their way, an ascent from barbarism, or a descent to a more refined sadism? Are we more moral than we were just a few years ago, now that we mock the sacrament of matrimony by celebrating the union of mutually masturbating men, and then smile indulgently as the happy couples adopt prepubescent boys for, um, reasons? Is our exaltation of the chemical and surgical sterilization of children we drive to psychosis by relentless indoctrination with schizoid paralogic a moral advance? Was it yet another step on the ascending path to unstained moral perfection when we began not only to permit but to promote the dismemberment of the unborn with sterilized stainless steel surgical tools? Does it make us more moral than our long-dead ancestors that we disinherit our living children, so that we might give their patrimony to the racial Other, and thereby tell ourselves that we have been shriven for the sins the Other claims our long-dead ancestors committed against the Other’s long-dead ancestors? Have we become moral sages by dismantling all customs and institutions governing courtship, such that romance becomes such a fraught and contradictory affair that a plurality of the young are terrorized into giving up on it entirely?
By what sick standard do we judge ourselves the moral superiors of those who came before?
Some of them kept slaves, some of which were African, and all of them dropped N-bombs?
Don’t ask how the tantalum in your iTrinkets was sourced.
Any tendency towards the sort of moral singularity that would generate the progressive Eye at the End of Time is hard to discern.
It’s easy enough to mock the moral pretensions of progressivism, to invert their standards and make of their god not an Eye gazing down from Heaven but one glowering up from the smoking pits of Hell. But is there any operational utility of naming the woke deity? It’s always useful to understand the enemy, and any insight into her black heart is helpful, but this is rather nonspecific. To leave it at that would be merely to spit in Sauron’s eye, and then walk away. But perhaps we might fashion a tool for philosophical bladerunning, wire-cutters with which to sabotage the moral circuitry of the sociocultural CCTV.
The woke have not named their own god; as such, their relationship to it is largely unconscious. To them it is a formless presence, the baleful gaze of an unseen something intuited from the hairs prickling on the backs of their necks, prodding them to anxious and furtive action as their limbic systems respond to the attention of a predator whose existence their frontal lobes deny. By naming their deity we gain the ability to lay out its innards for inspection on our dissection tray. We can see if it has been misunderstood, and if so, how. Moreover, insofar as such egregores are a projection of the collective imagination, we might take for ourselves the power of defining it anew, and then perhaps propagate that superior understanding, one that undoes the damage done by the gaze of the aWokened Eye ... or even redeems it.
If you’ve read this far, perhaps you’re enjoying this essay. In that case, apologies for the impertinence of this interruption to your regularly scheduled programming, but it’s worth pointing out that this is the part in the essay where it’s extremely tempting to slam down a paywall. It’s a natural cliffhanger. How exactly do we redeem the Eye’s gaze? Where the heck are we going with this? The answer is ... from here on it’s gonna get weird, dear readers. We are going to delve into physics, and metaphysics, and mythos.
But as it happens, there’s no paywall. Anyone can read this for free, including you. But a rather obscene amount of time has gone into writing this. It took a bit more background reading than usual, and then there’s the grappling with concepts that make my head hurt, to say nothing of the composition, the editing, and the worry that in the end it’s all nothing but a schizosophical word salad that doesn’t say much of interest, which concern had to be overcome in order to hit the publish button and inflict this on all of your inboxes. The point is, writing this was a long and painful process.
If you’d like to continue reading this for free, there’s nothing stopping you. But if you’d like experimental stream of consciousness schizosophy such as this to continue haunting your timelines into the future, well, there’s an easy way to keep me motivated:
And now, back to the show.
So far we’ve assumed that the Eye at the End of Time is a mere construct of the human imagination. This is necessarily so if causality is a unidirectional phenomenon: effects in the present are results of causes in the past, which are themselves the effects of causes that preceded them, in a great chain of blind mechanistic atomic billiard balls bouncing off of one another back to the meaningless initiation of physics in the Big Bang’s singularity. That’s the foundational story our social order is built upon: a blind idiot watchmaker God at the beginning of time, winding up the soulless Babbage engine of the cosmos and then abandoning it to grind out its mindless and pitiless computations, simulating meaning like a Chinese Room emulates language, with the only possible end being the frozen void of universal heat death when the relentless expansion of space-time stretches the last photons emitted by the Hawking evaporation of the last supermassive black holes to wavelengths longer than Hubble horizons.
We put physics at the barycentre of our ontological orrery, and believe that this makes mindless mechanism the master of all.
Yet the physicists themselves are not always so sure.
Back in the 80s John Wheeler developed the idea of the participatory universe. Wheeler was no crank: he coined the term ‘black hole’, worked on fission with Niels Bohr, and supervised Richard Feynman’s doctoral research. Towards the end of his career Wheeler became convinced that information, and not matter and energy, is the fundamental ground of reality, an idea encapsulated in his phrase “it from bit”.
Wheeler’s conception of the participatory universe arose from two basic observations about reality.
First, the cosmos is remarkably well-tuned for life: if any of the physical constants or laws that govern it were the slightest bit different, atoms would not form, stars would not burn, heavy elements would not be forged, chemical bonds would not cohere, and so on up the chain of precursors necessary to produce beings such as ourselves. This observation leads to the anthropic principle that has caused such great anguish in the scientific community, pointing as it does so clearly to design being interwoven throughout the most fundamental aspects of creation5.
Second, experimental quantum mechanics has shown without ambiguity that the very act of observation changes physical systems.
The two-slit experiment is well-known, and is the basis of the wave-particle dichotomy. One of the energy-information field packets we call subatomic particles – electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, etc. – is fired at a target through a barrier in which two apertures, classically a pair of narrow slits, have been opened. A particle will go through one slit or the other, and after a long series of them are fired through the slits the distribution at the target will be two blobs, corresponding to the streams that entered one or another of the slits. If the field packet is a wave, passage through the apertures will result in an interference pattern on the target: a series of bands. The remarkable result of the two-slit experiment is that whether one obtains a distribution corresponding to particles or waves depends on whether a measurement is performed at the apertures. So long as the field packet remains unobserved, its path remains an undefined superposition of all possible paths, and it acts as a wave; observation instantaneously collapses the wave to the single, well-defined path of a particle.
In the quantum realm, ontology and epistemology become inseparable. Do you observe a quantum entity? Then it acts as a particle. Do you avoid observation? Then it behaves as wave. Do you wish to know where a wavicle is? Then you cannot know how it moves – its momentum becomes undefined. Do you want to know where it’s going? It will answer – but the answer destroys any possibility of knowing where it is. The questions you ask determine not only what you know about reality, but how reality manifests as it unfolds.
While observation can change how an entity reveals itself to the observer – e.g. as a particle or a wave – it cannot change what is revealed. In the simplest case, the state of a quantum system is binary: yes or no, up or down, left or right, 0 or 1. While in a state of superposition – a wave state – the system is both 0 and 1, simultaneously; when observed, the wave-function collapses, and it becomes either 0 or 1. But while the observer can choose whether or not to ask a question, once the question is asked, there is no control over which answer is provided.
In the 70s Wheeler proposed a gedankenexperiment called the delayed-choice experiment. This was a variation of the two-slit experiment in which the choice of whether or not to measure the wavicle is postponed until after it has passed through the apertures. Wheeler predicted that even in this case, the wave-function should be collapsed, a prediction which was confirmed in an experiment performed in 2007 by the Nobel laureate Alain Aspect. A reasonably comprehensible account of the experiment and its implications can be found here6.
On the surface an obvious interpretation of the result of the delayed choice experiment, and an extremely controversial one, it that somehow the conscious act of observation reaches back through time to retroactively alter the history of the field packet. This is far from the consensus interpretation, and wasn’t necessarily Wheeler’s, either. Another interpretation, one that preserves conventional causality, is that the signals sent to the present from the past simply remain undefined until such a time as they are observed. In this scenario, it isn’t so much that the past is changed, as that what the past yields to the present changes depending on how the present interacts with it.
From these two elements – the anthropic principle, and the role played by the observer in shaping reality – Wheeler constructed his participatory anthropic principle. Far from being an ultimately inconsequential and meaningless epiphenomenon of matter, consciousness, Wheeler suggested, is a fundamental property of the cosmos.
He illustrated his model of the cosmos as a self-excited circuit with a famous sketch. The capital U stands for Universe; one arm of the U is thin, indicating the Big Bang; the line gradually thickens, corresponding to the expansion of space-time out of the primal mother atom; ultimately the conditions necessary for organic life (or, really, any kind of observer) emerge, that life looks back on the history of the Universe, and the observer’s observations bring into being precisely that history that is necessary for the observer’s existence, including the primal event of the Big Bang itself.
The mechanics of Wheeler’s participatory model are clearly much more intricate than implied by his simple schematic. There is not one Eye, but an uncountable number of eyes, each making their own observations which collapse parts of the past in certain ways, which then become the unalterable reality of other observers whether contemporaneous or following (or preceding?) in time. Further, the eyes are moving points: the cosmos continues to evolve after the first observers come into being, after all. There’s the question of what counts as an observer: a human mind? An animal? A single-celled organism? An atom? There’s the sticky issue of simultaneity raised by the finite speed of light, and what ‘now’ means within a causal web in which the present of any one spatiotemporal event lies in the future of everything it can see and the past of everything it can’t. There’s the question of primacy: is there a hierarchy of observers? Do the far-reaching and minutely detailed observations made by a Kardashev III civilization override the myopic, bleary glimpses of the cosmos obtained by its neolithic seedlings, in some sense constraining the parameters of the cosmos the neolithic tribes observe? What is really happening when we stare back with the James Webb Space Telescope at the earliest galaxies as they emerge into view at the reionization horizon?
Wheeler addressed some of these questions in his 1989 paper Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links. Wheeler’s concern was to explain how a lawful cosmos could emerge without law – law without law, in Wheeler’s formulation. Or as the Freemasons might put it, order from chaos – Ordo Ab Chao. A moment’s thought shows the necessity of such a process, since physical law cannot be explained by invoking yet more physical law, a tactic that results in a logically impossible infinite regress, a ‘tower of turtles’ without end. The only alternative to this is a self-excited circuit of the type Wheeler suggests: “Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics.” In other words, quantum physics means that observers define reality with the questions they put to it; the participation of observers in defining reality creates the information content of the universe; the information contained in the universe generates quantum physics.
Wheeler noted that a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the total information content of the universe yielded an answer of order 10^88 bits7, a number far too large for the observer-participants that have existed between the Big Bang and now to have produced. To resolve this discrepancy, he suggested that the observer-participancy burden be distributed throughout time, into the deep future. In other words, the observations of future generations – potentially, perhaps necessarily, including entities of far greater capability than human – play a role in determining the reality of the past. Quite likely a much larger role than played by us or our predecessors.
As an aside, Wheeler was no friend of parapsychology – he tried (unsuccessfully) to get the Parapsychological Association kicked out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science – which is a shame, because parapsychologists have performed some fascinating retrocausal experiments.
has an excellent overview of the subject in It’s About Time. He describes evidence for involuntary physiological responses to disturbing stimuli such as gory images manifesting just before the images are displayed, and results indicating that studying a subject after being tested on it improves one’s performance on the test. Was Mozart a master composer because he started life as a musical prodigy, or was he a prodigy because he devoted his life to composition?Wheeler left his participatory anthropic principle as an unfinished work, a set of open questions for others to build upon.
picked up Wheeler’s ball and plowed it through into the end zone. Summarizing Langan’s Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe is well beyond the scope of this essay. If you want the gory, neologistic details you can find a readable overview of the CTMU here, and Langan’s original paper here.Langan’s ambition with the CTMU is to assemble a comprehensive reality model, usually referred to as a Theory of Everything. The CTMU goes beyond the merely physical sense of unifying quantum mechanics, the standard model of particle physics, general relativity, and Big Bang cosmology in which ToEs are usually conceived. It is, after all, an undeniable fact of reality that it is cognitively self-referential: since reality contains, at the very least, human minds, reality perceives itself, and models itself. The CTMU therefore includes cognition at a foundational level, accounting for the existence and properties of Mind and therefore minds of escalating sophistication, up to, including, and beyond minds with the ability to generate a ToE. As such the CTMU claims to include a mathematical proof for the existence of God, and therefore to provide the basis for a metareligion: a rigorous mathematico-philosophical superstructure that can be used to tie together the world’s religions8.
The CTMU starts with the reality principle. Essentially, reality is entirely self-contained, by definition: if the ‘reality’ you’re talking about includes something external to reality, your definition of reality is incomplete. This then leads to the self-determination principle: if there is nothing external to reality, there is nothing that can act on reality except reality itself. In other words, the only thing that determines what the cosmos will do, is the cosmos.
Self-determination then leads to teleology, which plays a central role in the CTMU. God has a plan, and that plan is to actualize God – to draw Himself forth from the primal chaos or, in Langan’s terminology, UnBound Telesis (UBT):
In CTMU cosmogony, “nothingness” is informationally defined as zero constraint or pure freedom (unbound telesis or UBT), and the apparent construction of the universe is explained as a self-restriction of this potential. In a realm of unbound ontological potential, defining a constraint is not as simple as merely writing it down; because constraints act restrictively on content, constraint, and content must be defined simultaneously in a unified syntax-state relationship.
The basic idea of UBT is that nothingness in its purest sense is utterly unstructured – no matter, no energy, no space, no time – meaning that it includes no constraints, since constraints are a form of structure. You might sum this up as, “Nothing is free”. That’s the ‘unbound’ part. The unbound nature of nothingness means that there is nothing to stop constraints from popping into being, including the grandest constraint of all – God. That’s the ‘telesis’ part.
has a concise discussion of the concept and its consequences in Convergent Cosmogony.
Langan holds that for the Actual to retain its internal coherence, it must obey certain rules – it must be internally consistent. Since unconstrained nothingness is the ground of Being, consistency requires that Being retain at its core the wild spirit of the primordial Nothing from which it emerges: the null set must always be present. From this we get free will. Since UBT is embedded at the core of every part of reality – just as every natural number can be decomposed into a set of null sets – reality cannot tell its parts what to do; each must do as it will. The catch is that only that which is consistent with the whole is retained in the larger structure.
There’s an isomorphism between Langan’s UBT and our oldest cosmogonies. In the Proto-Indo-European tradition the primal state was one of nothingness, as in the Rigveda:
There was neither non-existence nor existence then
there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond...
There was neither death nor immortality then.
There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day.
Or in the Völuspá:
Sea nor cool waves nor sand there were
Earth had not been, nor heaven above,
But a yawning gap, and grass nowhere.
The Norse called this primal state Ginnungagap, the gaping abyss. The term has etymological connections to the Greek Khaos, whence the familiar English word ‘chaos’. To the Hellenes χάος did not mean randomness or disorder, as in contemporary English usage; rather, it also had the sense of vast, empty, formless abyss, as in Hesiod’s Theogony:
In the beginning there was only Chaos, the Abyss,
But then Gaia, the Earth, came into being,
Her broad bosom the ever-firm foundation of all,
And Tartaros, dim in the underground depths,
And Eros, loveliest of all the Immortals, who
Makes their bodies (and men’s bodies) go limp,
Mastering their minds and subduing their wills.
From the Abyss were born Erebos and dark Night.
And Night, pregnant after sweet intercourse
With Erebos, gave birth to Aether and Day
In each case we see the same fundamental concept, of the primal nothingness before space and time as a sort of Cosmic Egg. An egg, of course, is laid by a female, and indeed the Greeks characterized Khaos as a feminine deity, from whose womb sprang the Earth, the underworld, darkness, night ... and Eros, the god of erotic love. It is surely significant that Love was one of the firstborn of the gods, emerging seemingly fully formed from Khaos ... and it must be equally significant that Eros took as his lover Psyche, the human soul.
Gaia, the Dʰéǵʰōm Méh₂tēr, the Earth Mother, is the firstborn daughter of of Khaos, and recapitulates Khaos’ generative function, bringing forth all the good and bad things of the Earth. She does this together with her consort Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr, the celestial Sky Father whose all-seeing eye is the Sun, and who fertilizes her soil with gentle showers and raging thunderstorms alike. Do not be fooled by the stern visage of Jupiter Optimus Maximus seated in his temple, wielding a thunderbolt. Though his wrath is certainly terrible, Zeus is no jealous God of the Old Testament; he does not sit in brooding judgment over the world, bending it towards his monomaniacal will, living only to chastise and smite it. He is by temperament genial and generous, a gift-giver and a feast-thrower, delighting in everything joyous and festive. He doesn’t just love the world, he lusts after it – he literally wants to fuck it. Remember – Eros is an older god than Zeus.
Neither Sky Father nor Earth Mother created the world. They’re simply aspects of the world, creating and recreating itself. Indeed the Hellenistic pantheon records a succession of deities: Khaos to Gaia to Demeter; Ouranos to Kronos to Zeus. Both the feminine and masculine, the chaotic and the ordered, are present at all times; the essence always remains, though the form changes.
Humans in Langan’s CTMU are a subset of a general class of entities he calls telors: purposeful, agentic observer-participants in Reality. The full set of telors would include any sentient, self-aware, creative entity: on Earth, this might also include dolphins, corvids, perhaps elephants, and possibly certain cephalopods; in the wider universe it doubtless encompasses a stunning variety of xenoforms; machine minds of sufficient complexity might also one day be included in this category.
Telors play an essential role in co-creating the universe, since it is their decisions that determine what happens. Ideally, telors align their actions with the high-level goals of Reality – the Will of God – but due to the free will built into the basic structure of existence, they don’t have to. As with any other element of Reality, if telors fall sufficiently far out of coherence with it, they will be erased, in order for Reality to retain its internal self-consistency. Just as ignoring physics risks terminating an entity’s physical existence, setting oneself against the Will of God risks the end of one’s psychic continuity. Hell is where your soul gets melted down for spare parts.
The Indo-European cosmogony does not dwell upon the roles played by Mother Chaos and Father Order, but emphasizes the pivotal action of humans. In the primordial myth reconstructed by the philologist Bruce Lincoln, twin brothers sacrifice a cow, from which they fashion the plants and animals. The brothers are Manu, the ancestor of Man (and for whom we are named), and Yemu, whose name meant ‘twin’. Manu sacrifices Yemu, and from Yemu’s flesh fashions the different types of men – priests from the head, warriors from the heart and arms, workers from the sex organs and legs. In the Norse version of this story, the giant Ymir takes the place of one of the twins. Odin and his brothers slay Ymir, and fashion Midgard from his body: the ocean is his blood, the mountains his bones, the trees his hair, the clouds his brain, the heavens his skull. We see this echoed and historicized in the Roman founding myth, in which Rōmulus murders his twin brother Remus before building Rome.
Agony and death and blood, the horror of the world, are the raw stuff from which the world is created, and this generation through tragedy takes place through the hearts and hands of men. It cannot be otherwise in a self-contained cosmos: with nothing external to reality, reality is necessarily autophagous: it has nothing to feed on but itself. For new things to come into being, old things must be destroyed, dismembered, and digested. Yet reality wishes to persist, it exists because it says Yes to existence; and in a world of beings that say Yes to existence, of creatures that wish to survive, to persist, to live, for one to live another must die. Creation must always also be destruction. Birth and tragedy are inextricably intertwined.
In the modern sense, tragedy simply refers to a senseless accident – the tragic death of a teenager in a car crash, for example. The ancient understanding of this word was far richer. The tragic was the disaster that comes about through unavoidable necessity, often due precisely to the strengths of the hero – not as consequences of flaws in his character or mistakes in his judgment, nor as some random misfortune, but as the logical and inevitable results of his best and wisest action. Crucially, the tragic always culminates in a higher order of things – it is a passage through Hell that is transmuted, via a twist of fate, into an aperture to Heaven.
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.
– T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Ovid’s Metamorphosis contains a passage in which the girl Philomel is raped, and in the depths of her despair (and after getting her revenge) transforms into a nightingale – the bird with the most beautiful song. T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland contrasts this with the convention in Elizabethan theatre of writing the nightingale’s song as jug, jug – a rendering entirely lacking in melodiousness. Eliot was dwelling on the slaughter-soaked mud of the Great War’s trenches, where it seemed that the shining heroism of aristocratic warfare had gone to its ignoble death9; he was shining a spotlight on the contrast between the ancient sense of the creative and therefore redemptive potential of tragedy, and the despairing nihilism of modernity in which suffering can only produce suffering. At least as regards the psychology of the modern, he was prophetic. Can you imagine the reaction of a leftist should their dirty ears hear you suggest that something good might come from rape?
It is the failure to grasp the necessary generative function of tragedy that twists the Eye at the End of Time from a heavenly father gazing benevolently down on Creation from a throne of light, to a blood-drinking demon king glowering hatefully from a tower of darkness.
To the cult of the Eye, the horror of the past is simply that – horror, without the possibility of redemption, and therefore beyond any forgiveness. Nothing good can have come from the bad. It has no creative power. The sins of the present are the product of the sins of the past, and so, to correct present sins, the past must be undone. The slate must be wiped clean. The gaze of their deified Eye says No to that which has been, and so it is trapped in a paradox: its very existence is a product of the historical chain of events that produced it, and its hatred of the past must therefore be a hatred of itself. If you want to imagine their future, picture a teenage girl, cutting herself, forever.
If the past cannot be redeemed, yet is responsible for the suffering of the present, then to address that suffering the past must be burned out. Thus the perpetual Current Year Zero; thus their interpolation of equity-seeking racial others into historical epics in which their ancestors played no role; thus the editing of classic literary works by sensitivity readers attuned to the Modern Audience; thus the expulsion of dead white males from the curriculum; thus the erasure of men’s names from the scientific constants and laws those men defined and discovered; thus their iconoclasm.
The Eye that looks back on the past with resentment can only ever be the eye of destruction, ultimately, necessarily, of its own destruction. By undoing the past it undoes itself. By refusing to accept the chain of events that led to its own existence, by insisting on overwriting uncomfortable truth with fashionable falsehood, it destroys its coherence with the world, and gradually undoes itself.
But if the Eye truly possesses retrocausal powers, as implied by Wheeler, Langan, and others, can it not then alter the past? The answer is that it cannot. Once the measurement has been made, the wavefunction collapses; fluid potentiality becomes concrete actuality; the quantum state can no longer be altered by observation; what has happened, has happened; indeed, what has happened must have happened for the present state to exist. One either accepts the result of the measurement, records the datum, incorporates it into one’s model of the world, or one rejects it, pretends that a 0 was a 1 or a 1 a 0, and gradually one’s model ceases to correspond to reality and dissolves into the hiss of a radio tuned to a dead channel. Past a certain point of decoherence, the reality debt becomes unpayable, and the world forecloses. That which erases its own past erases itself.
This is why Nietzsche emphasized that one must make peace with the Eternal Return. Imagine that everything that has happened, will happen again, and again and again and again after that, ad infinitum. Every ecstasy and agony, everything beautiful and hideous, everything wondrous and monstrous, all of it repeating in an unending series...
A filth-caked starving child crying for his dead mother in the shattered rubble left by a strategic bombing campaign...
The midwife walks out into the antechamber, as though in a trance, blood dripping from her arms, soaking her dress, her eyes hollow and glistening; before she says anything, he knows, but as her mouth opens to speak he wishes more than anything that she would stay silent, for the moment she gives voice to what he already knows it will become real and he wants nothing more than to stay in this moment, to freeze time here, when he does not yet know for sure...
A train of broken wretches being led away in chains from the acrid ashes of their burned-out city...
The buzzing white noise of a maelstrom of flies churning above a stinking corpse pit where heaving swarms of rats feast, heedless of the pox...
“Sorry, Dad.” He stands, numb, looking at tangled wreckage wrapped around a tree, encasing the wet meat that used to be his firstborn son, nothing but a cryptic text message to explain what was going on in his head...
The point here is not that the future will be an exact replica of the past – time is not really a flat circle, but a bending spiral; history rhymes, but it does not repeat. Nietzsche’s purpose is psychological: by repositioning unalterable experience into unavoidable destiny, he changes the past from an ordeal that has been escaped to an obstacle that one must face again, and by doing this he poses a question: do you have the strength to go through all of that not just once more, but an infinite number of times, to say Yes to existence knowing perfectly well its full horror? Can you look back on all the awful things that have happened in your own life, and say not “I should have done that differently”, or “I wish that had turned out some other way”, but rather “I would do it all exactly the same way again, everything turned out exactly as it should have, for had I not done it in that fashion I would not exist”? To see the past as it is, unfiltered through the beer goggles of romanticism or the flattering Instagram filters of fabulism, and to cherish it nonetheless, is absolutely necessary if you are to avoid the trap of nihilism ... of becoming the voice that says No to life.
You might think this is all just an elaborate excuse for slavery, colonialism, and genocide; a shrug, a smirk, an insouciant suggestion to the left that they grow the fuck up, and there’s something to this: being held responsible for the supposed crimes of the past is irksome. Shrugging them off is easy enough for such as us, but no one escapes this demand to look back on experience without flinching. You men of the right: can you look at the lockdowns of 2020, the immigration invasion of Europe, the moral decay of the West, the mass rape of little girls by Pakistani grooming gangs in England, the humiliation of diversity-equity-inclusion, the looting of the industrial base by the parasite lords of Wall Street, the White Death of Oxycontin and fentanyl, and all the rest of the catalogue of war crimes committed against our people, and say – Yes, in the grand sweep of history, this was necessary, this happened because it had to, there was no other way it could have transpired, and therefore it was good, because that is existence, and existence is good? I do not mean that you should not also be angry. You must hold onto your anger over these things: anger is also necessary, it is also part of existence, and therefore also good. Anger is the fire in the engine of change. But still ... think how much you have learned, by living through these experiences, by witnessing all of this. Would you rather be ignorant? Is this not reason for gratitude?
The human eye is not meant to gaze too long upon the abyss. Blank nothing provides nothing to hold onto; unable to gain purchase, the mind slides off of it. It is easy to contemplate the void of chaos, see within it only horror, and judge it to be the fountain from which the world’s evil springs; reasoning from this, it follows that its opposite, order and concrete structure, that which is stable and tangible, which can be seen and grasped, is the source of the world’s good. When the primal null and the eschatological absolute are moralized in this fashion and arranged in a temporal sequence, one at the world’s beginning and the other at its terminus, as in some sense they must be, one immediately falls into the error at the heart of progressivism: that because the past was chaos, and chaos is evil, the past was ‘worse’, and the future will be ‘better’.
One might simply invert the moralism, and think this would correct the error. After all, is not the unboundedness implicit in chaos, the limitless potential pregnant within it, the source of the world’s creativity and freedom? Does order not imprison this potential within the iron cage of law, callously cutting off the limbs of infinite possibility in order to fit reality within the Procustean bed of the actual, in which time is immobilized in the frozen hell of an unalterable past where so many beautiful things died unborn as unrealized dreams so that the mundane and the monstrous might have their day in the Sun? Who is really the villain here? If chaos is good and order evil, then the past was good and the present, evil. This is what the Rousseauian romantic does.
The reactionary makes his own error via inversion of the temporal sequence. The past is seen as the domain of order, the future that of entropy, and history is understood as one long, desperate, doomed struggle to delay the inevitable slide down the gradient from an exalted initial state of structured unity and coherence into the final dissolution of all differentiated form in the black soup of universal heat death. The reactionary actually agrees with the progressive, preferring the harmony that seems to come with control and structure to the blind uncertainty of chaos. Both agree that chaos is a bad thing; they merely differ as to where the chaos is to be found.
None of these really work. The cycle between order and chaos is not only a temporal sequence; both are present at all times, and in all places, embedded in every moment, inextricably bound up within every phenomenon and process. Unbound Telesis is a unitary phenomenon.
The only possible answer, for such beings as we are, is to reject moralism.
We must discard the concepts of good and evil entirely when contemplating chaos and order, void and absolute, past and future. They are category errors. They simply are as they are.
The past was not worse in every way than the present, as the progressives hold. Neither was it better in every way, as the reactionaries insist. It was simply different from the present, in some ways ... and exactly the same, in others, because the basic structure of reality is invariant. It was imperfect, because the world is always flawed; yet it was also flawless, exactly as it needed to be at every moment in time. This is a contradiction, yes, but it is a contradiction that is built into reality at the most fundamental level. How can it be otherwise, in a world in which everything built itself out of nothing?
Rather than look back upon the past with hatred, resentment, and judgment, we must regard it with love: seeing it as it was, accepting it on its own terms, not attempting to alter it or forget it. We must not flinch from the pain, but rather take that pain into ourselves; yet neither may we lash out at the past, blaming it for the pain it inflicts when it tells us that the world was not as we might wish it to be. Nor may we allow ourselves to imagine it was better than it was, to project upon it some Edenic state that it never possessed. Reject the virgin/whore dichotomy. Pedestalize a woman and she will learn contempt for you, but it does not follow that she will pedestalize you if you treat her with contempt in turn.
Regard the past in this fashion, with generosity for its flaws, with gratitude for its lessons, with love by accepting it for what it is, and you will find that the Eye at the End of Time no longer freezes your soul with the baleful stare of the Basilisk, but looks upon you with the warm gaze of a lover.
This turned out to be a lot longer than I expected it to be when I first started writing it. To be honest it still feels incomplete with much left implicit and unsaid, but at 10,000 words it’s already bloated to an excessive length. I thought about breaking it up into more manageable, bite-sized chunks, but in the end decided that it was best experienced as a complete work. Besides which I’m sick of looking at it, usually a sign that it’s time to pull the trigger. If you’ve read the whole thing, then I applaud your heroic attention span, and also thank you for your precious and irreplaceable attention.
I’d also, and especially, like to thank my paid subscribers. You’ve waited patiently for a few weeks now without having received anything in exchange for your generosity. This essay has been agonizing to write, but not, I hope, agonizing to read. One of the things I like about Substack is that it changes the incentive structure of blogging: since subscribers are notified as soon as a new work is published, and authors are supported directly by their most appreciative readers, there’s no need to maintain a constant stream of clicks to keep advertisers happy. That means authors can spend more time polishing their work; ideally, this incentivizes quality of writing over quantity of ‘content’. Over the long run, perhaps this will make our cognitive environment less cacophonous.
Unlike Warby, who you should read and subscribe to, I’m not endorsing Lindsay. Prescriptively, he’s an old woman who seems to think it’s possible to just turn back the clock to and then stop it at the halcyon liberalism of the 1990s. Descriptively however, he shows flashes of brilliance. Credit where it’s due. He’d be much better if he stopped chasing clout with the respectable academics he claims to oppose by constantly getting in girlish squabbles with everyone to his political right.
The hideous gaze of the Eye does not depend explicitly upon any particular sect of ethnic masochism. In principle the soul of the Han, the Persian, or the Bantu might be as equally frozen by its stare as the soul of the Westman.
Which didn’t stop bomb-throwing irrationalists, for instance, moi, from talking about it.
The answer is obviously our duelist ancestors.
In an effort to avoid confronting the necessary conclusion that the cosmos is the product of design, some physicists suggest an infinite multiverse, a cosmic landscape of parallel cosmoi, each with its own physical laws, in only a vanishingly small number of which is life possible; since life can only exist where it can exist, it follows of necessity that we find ourselves in one of the cosmoi with life. This scenario has severe philosophical problems. The cosmoi are all perfectly isolated from one another, meaning the theory is axiomatically untestable, therefore unfalsifiable, and therefore not, strictly speaking, scientific. Which is fine, but they should be honest about this. It also fails Occam’s dictum to avoid the unnecessary proliferation of entities: an infinite number of universes with an infinite variety of physical laws is certainly among the most extravagant proliferation of entities one might imagine.
And yes, the author is a Marxist, I know, I know, no need to tell me in the comments. This is probably why he advocates for a ‘block universe’ model of time – a wholly deterministic understanding in which past, present, and future are an inseparable and unalterable four-dimensional solid, with the future being every bit as fixed as the past. Marxists do love their inevitable arc of history. No one worships the Eye at the End of Time more enthusiastically than they do.
A more recent estimate, relying only on the number of bits in each baryon rather than the total entropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation left over the by Big Bang that Wheeler used for his estimate, yields the much smaller but still stupendous value of 10^80 bits. For reference, we’re currently creating something like 120 zettabytes of data per year; at that rate it would take 10^56 years to create as much information as the universe contains.
Or at least those aspects of them which are reflective of deeper spiritual truth, and not the fever dreams of schizo-anankastic prophets as described by
, or the self-serving distortions emanating from priestly venality and elite social engineering, which ’s metaphysics series provides a bracing description of.Junger would disagree; it is perhaps not accidental that it is only now, a century after Storm of Steel, as the philosophy of exhaustion that Eliot was critiquing is finally exhausting itself, that Junger’s perspective is gaining currency in the West.
Wow, like drinking from the fire hydrant. Well done.
I don't have any quibbles or profound insights to add, just some supporting references that you might find interesting.
First, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put will as the foundational basis of the universe. In his terminology there are grades of will, from the will to exist which rocks have, to the will to action which animals have, to awareness and self awareness (higher grades of will) which people have. I find his metaphysics much more reasonable than the dead-matter-clockwork-universe that is our current religion.
Second, Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for his work on disapative structures. Basically, self organizing structures that create and maintain themselves in chaotic environments by feeding off an energy gradient. For all intents and purposes an emergent property of the universe that creates order from chaos, a yang to entropy's yin.
Third, Oswald Spengler, in his Decline of the West, mapped a lifecycle onto civilizations. Civilizations are born, grow into themselves, then fossilize and die. In his framing they move from becoming to being. Becoming is an active process. It is where all the magic happens. Being is just a state, effectively dead but not yet melted down for spare parts.
Lastly, John Michael Greer put the whole thing well. From memory, "It is hauntingly beautiful. Life feeds on life. From animals eating other animals to plants eating photons from a dying star. And it is incredibly elegant that everything in this world gets to eat many times, but only has to be eaten once."
Put all of those things together and you get this lovely essay back from complementary sources. So, I it looks to me like you are on to something here.
Just one comment. This quote:
"Past a certain point of decoherence, the reality debt becomes unpayable, and the world forecloses. That which erases its own past erases itself."
Struck a nerve. It feels like an apt discription of the current world, incoherent with a reality debt due. And as such, an ominous forecast for the future.
Eye = AI = ai = 愛 = love.