Post #1: A Cave Called Existence

This isn't a "news" letter. I'm exploring how to build a more "existentially relevant" society. The end result of this exploration will be a project that can be built to create a more er world.

Hello. It’s good to have you reading my first post. Awesome in fact. To set some expectations: As this newsletter takes shape over the coming months, it’s going to get a little weird. While I intend to have fun with it, I don’t know what it’s going to be like for you…but that’s what the comments are for. As you might expect with a name like “Existential Relevance,” this newsletter will spend most of its time focused on celebrity gossip, with a special focus on indie tv show pilots.

Jk, jk, it’s not about celeb goss. The name Existential Relevance refers to how we, as humans, relate to this “existence” thing we find ourselves… inside of, an expression of, part of, etc. Specifically, through each post I will explore how we can create a society that is more existentially relevant, or said simply, more meaningful. 

To start off this exploration, let’s assume God created existence in six days. Let’s buy into that story.

Roughly 2,500 years ago, that story represented humanity’s most compelling interpretation of how existence and ourselves came to be. I know for many substack readers that fact is probably tough to relate to, but god really was our most cutting edge explanation- our best guess. While many 21st century minds reject this biblical creation story, I find it helpful to recognize that story as a stepping stone to a more accurate one. If the end product that we’re trying to create is total existential understanding, it makes sense that we’re going to have to go through quite a few iterations before we arrive there.

It’s the same with any product. It would have been great had Steve just skipped the iPod and went right to the iPhone, but the pieces just weren’t there yet. The iPod acted as a stepping stone to something better, just like the biblical creation story.

Point being, the bible’s story isn’t binarily wrong, it just isn’t our most informed and compelling guess anymore. Just like the iPod isn’t “wrong” today, it’s just outdated and if you still use one you’re like a total boomer. Or maybe you’re a cool hipster? idk. Moving on.

A Spectrum of Existential Understanding

Imagine a rainbow. A big beautiful rainbow. You can even imagine a double rainbow if you want, it’ll still work. A rainbow is a spectrum. It has 7 colors, we all know em…ROYGBIV. Now let’s say you’re a little rainbow light surfer person, and you’re able to surf from violet on one end of this spectrum to red on the other. In order to get from violet to red, you had to go over indigo, and blue, and green, blah blah, until you arrived at the end.

It’s the same with existential understanding, meaning it’s unlikely that we are going to be able to skip our way to the end where we understand everything.

The biblical creation story sits on this spectrum of existential understanding. Instead of the color violet, on one end of this existential spectrum sits “we have no idea what is going on around us and definitely have no clue how all this stuff got here.” And instead of red, on the other end is “we know exactly what we are, where we are, and what is going on.” Realistically, instead of 7 colors, the rainbow of existential understanding probably has quite a few more, big big number infinity vibes more, but that’s ok…we’ll just need a better surf board.

The way we surf this spectrum of existential understanding is by getting better and better at interpreting existence. Or, to be more specific, we get better at interpreting our experience of existence. The advancement of science over the past 500 years is a great example of human society getting way better at experiencing more of what’s around us with new tools and systematically making sense of those experiences. Science falls short when it comes to surfing the existential understanding rainbow, but that’s for a later post. 

So where do we currently sit on this spectrum of existential understanding? Are we at the beginning at violet? The end at red? We’re probs not at red, because that would be the “ultimate truth” about existence, and we ain’t there. So we’re somewhere in the middle. I believe we can build tools that enable us to effectively measure where we sit on this spectrum. I’ll explore those tools in later posts.

Another tidbit when it comes to progressing along this spectrum of existential understanding: it’s not a given that we’re only moving forward towards greater existential understanding. We could also be moving backwards or on a tangent. There could be parts to our society that were actually existential mistakes, we just didn’t (and don’t) have a way of recognizing them. And there could be existentially relevant insights from previous human civilizations that are lost. Those Mayans built an amazing civilization, I bet they would’ve had some ideas for us.

To ensure that our descendants one hundred, one hundred thousand, one hundred million, one hundred billion or more years from now exist closer to red than we do, it’s going to require a lot more intentional planning than we’re currently doing. We need systems to measure our existential path and ensure we stay on it.

Creating a More Existentially Relevant Society

I want to live in a world where I know that we are surfing along this spectrum towards greater existential understanding as efficiently as we can. To me, that would be a meaningful place to live.

Humanity's shared central question is: “why are we here and what should we do about it?” I believe we can create systems for coming up with real answers to that question that increase the efficiency of our existential surfing. For example, today we rely on institutions including governments, economies, religions and academic centers to set our collective intention. Yet these institutions do not decipher existential relevance. Religions once were the translators of existential relevance, but they are outdated. Governments could care less. Economies optimize towards low-risk and short-term preferences. Science observes existence, but does not interpret its meaning. We are whiffing on what should be a critical function of society. W-h-i-f-f-f-f-ing. 

Fast forward to a future where we aren’t whiffing and we have a robust system for existential interpretation in place…a system that gives us a shot at surfing that rainbow in the right direction. We then need a way of translating that interpretation into societal progress. That’s important because if we collect all the information available to us today and make our interpretation as to the true nature of existence, assuming that the next interpretation isn’t the last, what will enable us to make the next interpretation? Said differently, what’s the motion to our ocean? How does our surfboard move forward?! It moves forward by gathering additional information to unlock a new and more accurate interpretation. 

To pull some inspo from sir plato- it’s as if we’re in a dark cave and have no idea what the ef is going on. Well, you might imagine that we’d want to know what’s going on. So what do we do? We start to gather some information about our circumstance: we slowly feel the cave walls, we feel the ground, we pick up a rock and throw it somewhere, etc. Then as we update our “cave understanding” through interpreting our experience, we’d start to develop theories about what’s going on and use those theories to inform the direction we go: do we focus on feeling walls, do we focus on learning the cave echos, do we focus on the temperature changes, etc. 

Back to our world and this infinitely large cave we call existence, we need systems not just for interpreting our current experience, but also for translating the resulting findings into action. These systems will be information-age native systems that couldn’t have existed just a few decades ago, let alone 2,500 years ago. In future posts, I’ll explore various ideas for how we could better translate our existential understanding into reshaping society.

Existential Relevance, The Newsletter

Alright, now for a bit of logistics. This newsletter will explore how we can move society in a direction that is both relevant to existence and meaningful to us as individuals. I’ll unpack the concept of existential relevance from various angles, explore new strategies for developing existential interpretations, and propose ideas for how to incentivize society in an existentially relevant direction. 

This could certainly change, but for now I anticipate two general categories of posts: 1) “How-to” posts that explore strategies for creating a more existentially relevant society. These posts will explore how technologies including AI and the internet (+web3) can be leveraged, tech-enabled incentive systems & governance structures, etc. 2) “Meta-posts” that explore what existential relevance actually means. These posts will explore questions like “from the perspective of existence, what is relevant?” or “what is the relationship between exploration and immortality?” or “does simulation theory impact our perspective on existential relevance?”

As far as the tone of this newsletter, I’m going to make all posts as fun to read as possible. Both for your enjoyment and mine too. These topics I’m tackling can be fairly abstract and be a slog to get through if the writing style takes itself too seriously, so I vow not to fall in the trap of taking myself [too] seriously. If you ever find a post boring or even a section of a post that shuts your brain off because it’s too dense, let me know in the comments.

To let my imagination run wild for a second, I hope that this newsletter becomes the first project of an “existential relevance” movement. The society we’ve built is super cool, super amazing, and has many existentially relevant qualities. It also has many qualities that are behind where they could be…way behind. I believe that through many years and much creative energy, we can create a more meaningful society for ourselves that exceeds our wildest expectations and makes us all feel really good :) .

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The plan is to publish two newsletters per month. Here’s an incomplete and likely non-chronological list of upcoming topics:

• Does This Journey Towards Existential Understanding End?

• Artificial Intelligence’s Role in Existential Interpretation

• On Existential Relevance and Immortality

• The Internet’s (and Web3’s) Role in Incentivizing Goal Attainment

• 1,000 Years into the Future: How is Society More Existentially Relevant?

• What Science Doesn’t Do: Estimate Existential Value

• Existential Relevance Before Humans

• Is Existential Understanding Given To Us or Created By Us?

• The Relationship Between Our Existential Understanding and Societal Progress

• Prevailing Methods for Determining Existential Relevance

• Prevailing Systems for Pursuing Existentially Relevant Goals

• New Ideas for Existential Interpretation

• The Impact of Existential Interpretations on AI Alignment

• New Ideas for Pursuing Existentially Relevant Goals

• Reconciling the Existential Interpretative Differences Between Western & Eastern Religions

• A Material Perspective on Existential Relevance

• Through the Eyes of an Individual’s Experience in a More Existentially Relevant Society

• Are Cause & Effect Relationships Inherent to Existence?

• Ensuring Our Descendants Can Build Upon Our Existential Interpretations

• Beyond a Newsletter, What’s Next for Existential Relevance?

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