Love after the singularity

1. 1. desperado
2. 2. esperanto
3. 3. Love

1. desperado

Our world has despair in it, everywhere you look, whether it's loud and bleeding or quiet and stuffed into a box on the bottom shelf behind the scrapwood in a shed at the back of the yard. In some sense, this is all mundane; we all have our frustrations, it's no big news, we're all already living with it and familiar with it—you cry, hug yourself, and move on. In some sense, this is all fine; pain doesn't mean life isn't good sometimes, suffering doesn't mean you can't serve others, despair doesn't mean you can't make progress on your other goals.

But in another sense, all that despair is a divine, cosmic tragedy. Every human is born with God in her eyes, with God flowing out of his forehead upon the world. A real despair is a sliver of God dying—or at least, laying down in an open grave and falling asleep.

Sometimes a despair is not just a death of a sliver of God. Death is bad, but it is peaceable. Sometimes a despair is a hole in your mind, a splinter expanding, a dead zone, a rotting zone, damaged tissue that has to be routed around and that blocks flows, whose gravity bends your agency and mind around it, whose vacuum pressure worms its way out through cracks and sucks things in. It's active, or at least, it's active in the context of the rest of your agency and mind—like a black hole emitting scrambled radiation when something falls in. It can turn to rage or spite, or unquenchable thirst, or a consuming flame. If no one loves me, then shouldn't I burn the whole world down—then they will at least fear me, which is a fragment of love—or at least, no one else will be loved, when everyone is gone? If my husband is dead, and I'm ripped in half, with pipes spilling and vents billowing smoke and wires sparking, my intestines dragging out behind me and sawdust getting inside me, then I'm not viable anymore, right? If I can't have children, then the world already ended, and I may as well tear it apart for any chance that I can cut a miracle out of it, yeah? If my sky—the overarching community of souls I thought I was living as a member of—actually never existed, then shouldn't I grab people and shake them harder and harder until they participate in that community?

2. esperanto

All despairs should be healed. Then there would be no black holes. That may be impossible, because some people have already died.

Still, it would be good to heal some despairs. How do you do that? A simple answer is hope.

Despair (radix.ink/despair) comes from "dis-" (indicating reversal) and "esperer" ([hope], like "Esperanto"), from Latin "spes" ([hope]) whence also "prosper", from PIE "*speh₁-" ([to prosper]), whence also "speed" and maybe "space". The opposite of despair is hope.

What I'm going to say next is a bit playing with fire. I'm going to say that one can, in some cases, derive some healing hope by thinking about what things could be like after the singularity. This is playing with fire because usually one should not put things off until the singularity. If you put things off, that can register not as hope but as a trick and a denial of your despair.

So I'm not saying (and mostly don't think) "Don't worry about this despair, we'll fix it after the singularity.". Instead I'm suggesting: Consider X as it is today, now, for you. Consider all the ways X is painful, impossible, grating, demoralizing, tradeoff-bearing, heartache-inducing. Then consider what X could be like after the singularity. Think about it in some detail, as if it's a continuation of our world, but where there is truly radical empowerment of humane values. How would you relate to X in that world? Do you see what you could do? Now—can you carry that vision into this world? If that vision is a cloud, far far above your head, with lightning of joy in it, is there any spot nearby on the ground, where some of that charge might flow down? Maybe you can't realize even 1% of that vision, but can you realize .1% of it? Can you aim for .01% percent of it, with .1% in mind and with 1% and 10% sitting above your head or on the horizon? If you can see the vision in outline, can you fill in the detail in one small corner of it, in real life?

3. Love

As an example, maybe a central example, which I hope will illustrate the sort of possible action of [showing oneself how to have concrete hope through far-away hope]: Concretely, what can love be like after the singularity?

Imagine:

• You can travel anywhere, instantly.

  • This means you can meet anyone who wants to meet you. You can spend a little time together. Also, there's no big rush. You can ease into it, enjoy it, take it slow. You don't have to rush off to anywhere.
  • You don't have to have one or the other person sacrifice some big thing related to location. If she wants to sometimes hang out with her friends on zeta.15512.outer.outer.new808, that's no problem at all. You can still have a house, or a hyperhouse or whatever, together—it's just as though she's out for an afternoon stroll.
  • You can see the universe together. You can explore and discover together.
  • You can see friends, family, meet new people, travel between subcultural vectors.

• There's far more Slack, in almost all ways.

  • Aging is measured in trillions of years, not in years.
  • You can be less urgently desperate in many ways. There's plenty of time, so you don't need to try to short-circuit processes of finding and flirting and courting; you don't need to be deceptive, or to try to contort or deface yourself to be appealing. You won't be sent on downward spirals that spread to logistical problems and basic needs. You're generally more robust, so you can take more hits; and you can focus on learning to love and be loved, rather than treading water to stay alive.
  • Many little itches and toe-stubs can be wiped away. You can both fart without having to smell each other's farts, or tensely assure each other that you really don't mind (whether or not you do). (Or just get rid of farts altogether. But that decision poses subtle and complex questions about what it means to be human, so I will put off that decision until I have a few centuries to consider it.)
  • You aren't a burden on him, and he isn't a burden on you.
  • If you need to pause and think, but she needs to talk right now, that can work—she can just pause herself for one turning of the spheres.
  • There's no rush. Really, there's no rush. There's so much to do and so much time.
  • Your children don't have to destroy your fundamental bodily functions for a year. You will demonstrate, affirm, express, exert, exercise, and enact your love in all the ways that really matter; you don't have to set yourself on fire.
  • In some ways this can be more lonely. You don't always need each other as much. You aren't as much forced to contend face to face with the other. You can't feel needed with all the same urgency. But, you will also learn what you truly, essentially, eternally want or need with other people—and then learn to have that with other people—which is an infinitely deeper and stronger foundation than material need (not to at all demean the material, material need, material success, cooperation for material success, and love that comes with that cooperation).
  • There's no terrible irreversible disasters that actually demand most of your lifeforce. You can let your lifeforce breathe and expand and learn what it wants.
  • You're not wasting each other's time.

• You're together for the long haul.

  • It's now so obviously worth figuring out how to be so good for each other in so many ways, in an unbounded range of ways. There's time and Slack to deepen everything, carefully, thoroughly, kindly, strongly, idiosyncratically...
  • Love becomes an infinite endeavor, or rather, it can fully flower as the infinite endeavor it always was conjecturally.
  • You can experiment with things that could really strain a relationship. You're both fundamentally safe in most ways, though you can still hurt each other's souls insofar as you are intertwined. But you have time and space and Slack to repair damage and learn from many mistakes. And it's worth learning from even very complex mistakes and learning to repair even major damage because you have so much together and it keeps growing and it will keep growing.
  • You can construct shared consciousnesses that take one or more aeons to construct.
  • You can invest in each other mostly without worrying about whether the investments are too lopsided and can't be paid back or the other person is a credit risk.

• Not everything is easy, or solved, or risk-free. You can still be intertwined and then be hurt by separation, by the loss of possibilities that came from being with specifically that other mind. There's "essentially / infinitely complex" aspects of relating between people. It will always be possible to be a dick, and piss each other off.

• There's an unimaginably loving community.

  • There are people to love you and for you to love, and to think with you, even if it's not a climaxed love relationship. You can learn to love and be loved there through friendship and care.
  • There are always people to catch you when you're perturbed. They have Slack. Some of them are wise and skilled and healthy, and they all love you.
  • On longer time horizons, with people who have more Slack and more intention to work out how to live well in the very long term, we'll accumulate wisdom and understanding around relating. There are many pieces of understanding and skill (e.g. with empathy, or with handling emotions, or with thinking through symmetries, etc.); these tasks are difficult and require culture and science-like processes, but the pieces of understanding exist and we will accumulate them and make relating safer and also more fun and meaningful.
  • Your knots and tangles and trauma and drama will seem like a four-year-old's meltdowns—it's real suffering and it's about something real, and you may have to go through some of that in order to work it out, but your consciousness has grown so much more twined around your whole self, with the help and wisdom of the community, that this too is for the good, loops will be closed (and new ones opened), knots untangled (freeing up material for new and more interesting tangles), and so on.

• Kids will still be a challenge, but an appropriate challenge—figuring out how to guide a new soul in its self-creation; not so much of the suffering for failed IVF rounds, risk of death and disease, unpreventable pain, stymied opportunities.

• Gaps can be learned to be bridged.

  • You can explore other ways of being, including moving along dimensions to understand the ones you love. You can learn what it's like to be them, and to be all the types of person that they are.
  • You can finally truly communicate to the other how you feel about them. You can know that they know how you feel about them, and how you don't. And you can truly know how they feel about you, and know that they know that you know.
  • You can read each other like (changing, growing) books.
  • Condivergence—others continue to grow and learn and change, as you do, so you diverge and explore off in your own directions; and at the same time you grow together, knowing each other more, intertwining; you expand both the symmetric difference and the intersection simultaneously; an infinite endeavor; a paradox, a tension, but perfectly feasible. We have so much in common and we love to generalize across contexts. E.g. skiing and snowboarding are different but it could be really fun for a skier and snowboarder to go down the mountain together holding hands; there's enough shared between the activities that the two hill-go-downers could share many experiences, and there's enough difference between the activities that they each get to have their own experiences.