Temporal Vertigo

At some point, maybe by mistake, humanity evolved awareness. Developed an ego. A self.

As unlikely as it may seem given hundreds of millions of cellular Earth-bound years of life before us and billions of solar years of this existence before that, the self only developed a few hundred thousand years ago. Anything resembling the human mind as we know it now is at most some tens of thousands of years old.

Something about it does feel impossible or magical or designed. But it also just sort of makes sense.

What better way to survive and pass on your genes than to be aware of mortality? To not just be a sentient automaton avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, but to know you hate pain and love pleasure. To get better at ensuring your self can avoid pain and capture pleasure. To get better at ensuring those around you, who likely share your genes, can avoid pain and capture pleasure.

To not just avoid death as a consequence of pain avoidance, but to feel an existential horror at the realization that the self can go away. That your felt existence is not permanent. You must protect your self and the selves of your kin with impunity.

This impunity led homosapien to dominate the Earth and triumph over creatures stagnant in chance evolution.

But no amount of power could make the horror go away.

I am not religious but I can understand the benefits of faith.

Early religion was very likely a direct product of response to the horror of non-existence. Hank Green recently made an excellent video covering a fictional version of primordial religion, ancestor theology. This form of religion is deeply tied to those that came before you and how they affect the world you are living in now. This is something much harder to feel in our modern lives compared to the small tribes of hunter-gatherers that existed for millennia before history began.

But as civilizations grew out of tribes ancestor theology couldn't quite cut it for much the reason it doesn't cut it for most people today. There are so many people in your life and around your life that those that came before you feel too disconnected from your sense of self to be worshiped or regarded in any sense beyond a dull thrum.

Religion needed an upgrade and over thousands of years it developed in different places and in different ways and for most people practicing some religion in the world today that resulted in monotheism. An all powerful God to instill a sense of morality in an otherwise disconnected populace. Of course disagreements about this all powerful God have led to some of the most immoral behaviors the Earth (hopefully the universe) has ever seen but that's not what I'm writing about today.

The point is that whatever religion one might practice, it's purpose, whether an individual is aware of it or not, is to protect one's self from the horror that made us the most dominant being the Earth has ever seen. There's probably a reason why so many stories going back centuries are some moral platitude about how acquiring power doesn't lead to satisfaction. Though we didn't ask for it, we traded the satisfaction of ignorance for the horror to gain our power.

I'm not sure what's different about the faithless mind that makes religion not suitable for protection. I guess the real answer is the worst one in that it's different for everybody and more complicated than you could ever imagine. So I can only really speak for myself.

I was not raised very religious. Never went to church or had religious iconography in our home. But my parent's having been raised religious did lead to a bit of that puritanical worldview rubbed off into my upbringing. I went to church with friends sometimes when that was my only option to keep hanging out rather than going home and being bored. A few times on and off in my youth I thought I was religious or at least thought it was worth trying in case the world really ended in 2012.

But ultimately the contradictions inherent in organized religion and my embrace of science led me away from organized religion entirely. I still pursue spirituality to some degree but it is always in the context of connection to the Earth, reality, my own mind, or some other way that feels grounded in material reality and not reliant on faith.

I find that an atheistic spiritual "practice" does in some way ease the horror but sometimes I wonder if I'm just kidding myself.

Most of the time I'm quite content in knowing what I know, accepting what I don't, and finding wonder in that which is unknowable.

It's that last bit that is most akin to spiritualism but most separate from modern religion. But it is very much a practice and less so a feeling. I practice wonder and calm in the face of all that is beyond the human mind. My human mind and all human minds. But do I really feel that way?

I think most of the time my coming to terms with this literal horror beyond comprehension is more just thought strategies to deflect or shield my primal ego from reality. Though I like to think my methods are more based in truth than methods involving tales of the supernatural, as compelling as those might be.

When I think about how much I don't understand about how the world works, I think about how beautiful it is to be a part of it anyway.

When I think about how small I am in this universe, I find comfort in how small my mistakes and insecurities are on that scale.

When I fear non-existence I frame it as merging back to the part of the universe I was a part of before I was born.

When I fear returning to the place I was before I was born I imagine that I am part of the lucky generation to be born at the place in the technological exponential curve where the singularity arrives in my life time.

But there's a problem with these and all the other philosophical and empirical ways that I navigate the horror of the insignificance of my ego. There is no off-ramp except in rare moments of deep meditative blankness. There is no way to shut off the questions, there is no God to ask for answers and there is nobody waiting for me on the other side of darkness. There is only the horror. The horror that only exists as long as I do.

I call these failures of my ego's defense by different names but the term that comes up again and again is vertigo.

I first heard vertigo outside the context of a physical sensation of dizziness in conversation about AI development. There have been multiple times since November 2022 where it felt very difficult to place ourselves on the exponential timeline. Where the prospects of rapid speed and intelligence runaways have made me and others connected to the community feel momentarily overwhelmed.

I've since identified two common occurrences of psychological vertigo in myself, temporal and existential, though both are tightly related.

Temporal vertigo is specifically caused by the realization of my smallness in time. I really want to emphasize the word realization here because it's not just accepting that I occupy such a small chunk of time relative to everything. It's not knowing it or talking about it. It's feeling it.

It might start with something innocuous like looking at an old photo. Thinking about how the people in that photo existed in that period of time. That that was a moment that really happened. That they had lives before and after that.

Then I think about how even calling a photo old is sort of silly in the context of humanity, it was only invented around 200 years ago. Society only started around 5000 years ago. People have only been since around 300,000 years ago. It scales backwards like this quickly until landing on the real sucker punch that all of existence is only a blink compared to the rest of existence we have left to go.

Whether we're the first universe, one of many, one in a long chain of universes, our best understanding only shows us 13.8 billion years. Even the more conservative estimates of the lifetime of the universe are many hundreds of billions of years more. Most are much, much longer than that.

None of this occurs to me logically or in order, it's more that all of these thoughts converge in a single moment and the pearl of horror my ego keeps shielded with all of it's might at all times briefly pierces through my psychological armor and in that moment I feel the crushing weight of insignificance. Sometimes my body goes cold or my heart races.

But thankfully, it never lasts more than a few seconds. The feeling subsides quickly back into rationalization and romanization. I think how yes I'm insignificant and how that doesn't matter. Because I feel existence and no matter what is true in whatever base reality is, I can just keep living.

That's really the key to escaping the feeling at all. And why it never lasts more than a moment. Because it is literally beyond comprehension. Non-existence can't be comprehended by a mind which exists. So that pearl hidden by my ego isn't so much a pearl but a vacuum, a black hole.

Try as I might to view the inside or avoid it entirely, my mind is slowly drawn in before being shot off in high speed upon near contact with the event horizon. One day, whether it's tomorrow, 80 years, 200 years, or at the heat death of the universe, my ego will finally collapse into the darkness. It will merge with the black hole at the center of the self and cease.