All That Matters

Chapters

Introduction

CHAPTER I: The Essentials of Life

Determinism

The Purpose

The Greater Purpose

What's in It for Me?

The Game

CHAPTER II: Mankind

Thats Right

Mind It

What Drives Us

What Drives Us, Part II

What Drives Us, Part III

Nothing More Than Feelings

Be Lucky or Be Gone

We, The Braves

We, The Nobles

Them, The Princesses

Evil Always Wins

Memetic Faith

A World Gone Retarded

The Origin

Our Specieses

We are All Bigots

The Dark Side

White Trash

Arabs Vs. Jews

The Asian Standard

Going Global

We Dont Have a Problem

A Failed Experiment

The Final Solution

CHAPTER III: How to Rule the World

Capitalism

Communism/Socialism

Economy(cs)

Demo(n)cracy

Monarchy

Artificial Dictatorship

Cripple the State

The Satanists Tenets

(In)justice

Be Brutal

[Dont] Be Quiet!

To Arms!

Miseducation

Together or Apart

Nationalism

The Way

CHAPTER IV: Random Thoughts

Word

Hype

The Ball

Conspiracy Theories

Death

I Shouldnt, but I Do!

Lets Make Ourselves Great (for Once)

Hold on to Your Wallet

Good Old News

False Idols

Our Social Selves

Two Kinds of People

A Mistake

Obsolescence

Radicalism

Global Warfare

[Western] Diplomacy

Unbelievable

Martian Hope

Aspies

The Beginning

CHAPTER V: Life Stories

The Fly

Exorcism

Exploding Head

Remote Non-Contact

Parallel Development

Déjà Vu

Premonitions

Best Shin on a Leg

CHAPTER VI: Divinity

Is There a God?

The Signs

One Final Question

Epilogue

The End

Introduction

I am what some call a “first-principles thinker” born with Asperger’s syndrome and a severely damaged hippocampus. Respectively, that means I disregard common assumptions, building my own conclusions from scratch; I think more often and deeper than most people; and I forget pretty much everything. As a consequence, I once decided to make a list of the most relevant conclusions I’ve reached in my life, lest I forget what I believe in.

Eventually, I lost that list (unsurprisingly, I forgot to back it up). Having plenty of time in my hands, I then decided to rewrite those thoughts, this time at length, to remind myself not only of what I believe in but also why. And this is what you are about to read.

This text is comprised of my own ideas. In it, I’ll talk about things most people never seem to stop to wonder about and say what any Western person, these days, is forbidden and afraid to. I’ll address familiar subjects from a different perspective, write about topics ranging quite literally from nothing to everything, and tell you about a few extraordinary events I have experienced.

I’m not an expert in all things, so the topics presented herein are discussed on a fairly superficial level. Although all I’ve written has been logically explained, due to a lack of intelligence and information I’m as bound as anyone else to have reached at least a few wrong conclusions. Much of what you are about to read is common knowledge and parts of it have proper, referenced sources, but the present work is “food for thought” and not “scientific proof” – so take everything with a healthy grain of salt.

I should note that, when I started writing this, I assumed I would be dead within a few weeks or months at best. More than four years have passed since, I’m still here, and during this time I kept editing this text whenever any new ideas or arguments came to my mind. This has quadrupled the number of pages of what was initially a fairly concise essay and, since I talk about many different subjects, it became increasingly difficult to bundle some of them cohesively. As a result, I decided to unite the misfits under Chapter IV (“Random Thoughts”).

Many problems we face also seem to be of different natures, but they share a source or a solution, which forced me to repeat and/or reinforce certain things multiple times.

Finally, before we begin, I must ask of you a small favor: that you think about the things you are about to read. If you don’t have an opinion about any of the topics discussed here, spare a moment to form one. To you, yours is the only one that matters.

CHAPTER I: The Essentials of Life

Let’s start with the basics.

There’s something we should all be made aware of at some early point in life and yet most people seem to die without ever realizing it. I thought I had made a great discovery when I first inferred this as a teenager, but it turns out people had already figured it out long before me and it even has a name:

Determinism

To define it in my own terms, determinism is the idea that everything is part of an unbreakable chain of causality. Nothing can happen without a cause, every cause has only one possible consequence, and every consequence only one possible cause.

Logic – the coherence between cause and effect – is the most fundamental pillar of our universe; it is the common denominator of everything that exists in it. Logic supersedes the very laws of physics, because without it there are no patterns, no rules. Without it, everything would be random and inconsistent, with the same repeated actions and interactions constantly leading to different results. And nothing could last in such a scenario. Nothing could live or function in it.

Try to imagine something that happens without a cause – a miracle.

There’s none, because “miracle” means “something impossible,” “something illogical,” “something non-deterministic.” If you managed to imagine one, you made a mistake. Think it over and you’ll see (there is actually one exception, which I’ll talk about later).

Things move because a force is applied to them, otherwise they don’t. They shine because they emit photons, otherwise they wouldn’t. They are warm or cold because their atoms are more or less excited. We can feel temperature because we have tact, and to have tact we need a nervous system. We have such a system because without it we wouldn’t be able to interact with our environment to find food and avoid death. We need food because fuel must be burned to generate energy, and we need energy to be able to find food (just ignore this apparent redundancy for now). And we are alive simply because our universe creates life when the appropriate chemical reactions occur.

We choose to eat a hamburger instead of lasagna because, when cued to make a choice, our neurons responsible for storing information about the first are more active than those responsible for the second. Someone likes chocolate and hates asparagus because the combination of their palate and how their brain interprets taste leads to a more pleasant result when they eat the first. A person opts to go left instead of right simply because the electrons in their brain flowed one way instead of the other.

We don’t choose anything. We are just made aware of our brains’ natural and inevitable output. Just like everything else, our very minds follow the laws of physics; they follow a mathematical equation we didn’t create, don’t understand and cannot alter.

Even the most incomprehensible occurrences have a logical explanation. What frequently happens is simply that we cannot see it – we lack the reasoning and/or the information necessary to properly link a consequence to its cause. But our ignorance is just a flaw in ourselves; it has nothing to do with how the universe actually works. Everything does make sense, regardless of whether we, humans, can make any out of it or not.

Try imagining something that happens without a cause, again.

Got anything?

Determinism is an extremely simple concept (obvious, in fact), but it won’t sink in until you question it yourself. Think about any concrete scenario, as many of them as you need, until you realize none exists that cannot be logically explained. Just remember that you don’t need to be right in your conclusions (you are not omniscient); at present, all you need to do is to come up with one plausible, even if vague, explanation for any event. “Maybes” are enough to show you what I’m trying to.

Do that until you have an epiphany. When you feel that a bunch of things that never made perfect sense all suddenly do, you’ll have understood it.

Once you succeed at doing the above, realizing that every and any thing that happens in the macroscopic world can be explained, you’ll likely appeal to quantum physics to disprove the deterministic nature of our universe, as you should, because that niche of science teems with proven facts that seem to violate all common sense. And then things get a little fancier.

Before we dive into the quantum world, note that, since everything we can actually see, touch, or interact with in any direct way functions logically despite the bizarre behavior of fundamental particles, what we are looking for here is a way to disprove determinism, and not to prove it, because the existence of a direct relationship between cause and effect is otherwise evident to any of us.

As one potential argument against determinism we may consider double-slit experiments. Physicists say the results yielded by these are random: any unobserved particle shot through the slits has a chance of ending up here, there or over there. But that’s actually a misinterpretation of the results (not to mention that the resulting patterns are always the same.)

If we could repeat the same experiment more than once, using the same particle, in the same state, against the same slit, in the same lab, at the same point in time, reason dictates we should end with the exact same result – every particle-subject would end up landing on the exact same spot they did the first time. If the experiment could be conducted under the exact same parameters more than once, there’s no reason to believe its results would vary.

But we can’t replicate the exact same conditions. We can’t accurately determine each fired particle’s inner state, and we cannot currently alter them at will to fit our designs, at least as far as I know (Heisenberg’s principle alone should suffice to deny us this). We get “random” results simply because we repeat the experiment with different particles, with varying configurations that we cannot accurately detect or alter. And if the parameters of each individual particle fired vary, where they end up landing must logically vary as well.

What I just argued can’t quite be proven, at least for the time being (due to us being unable to replicate the experiment with the same particle at the same point in time). But we can at least say it’s possible that the results of two or more identical double-slit experiments would be identical as well, because none of the evidence we have dismisses this possibility. Au contraire, everything we all know about the macro world we live in – the one we understand much better and which is, despite minuscule intricacies, a direct result of fundamental particles’ behavior – dictates that an identical result should be the outcome. Thus, the results of double-slit experiments do not disprove our universe’s deterministic nature.

Another argument against determinism may come from virtual particles, as one may claim they “appear out of nowhere.” But they don’t. They must arise from some quantum fluctuation we cannot see or something else we cannot detect. Out of the blue they do not spawn, because that would be axiomatically impossible – nothing can come from nothing. Zero plus any number of zeros is always equal to zero. Thus, virtual particles do not disprove determinism either.

I think I’ve had more similar mental-discussions with myself, but those are the only two quantum-based arguments that come to mind right now. I’m sure any physicist could give me a run for my money on this but, after more than twenty years questioning determinism every time I learned something new that might cast some doubt on it, none of it managed to actually do so. By now, I’m quite confident nothing can.

We can only doubt the deterministic nature of our universe by choice. To do so, we must ignore everything we know, create a fantasy to explain what we don’t, and believe in this fantasy instead. That would mean to guess; to disregard the evidence; to bet against overwhelming odds; to be unreasonable; to be insane.

If you want to go deeper into trying to disprove determinism, you may want to consider double-double-slit experiments, or perhaps quantum teleportation. I couldn’t make much sense out of what I briefly read about those, but you might.

As far as I can tell, there are only two “limits” to determinism:

1 – That which we do not know and/or understand (which can make us wrongly doubt the inviolability of the bond between cause and effect);

2 – And that which is inherent to how our universe works, like logic itself or the very existence of tridimensional space and fundamental particles.

The things comprised by point 2 simply are what they are. They are not part of the chain of causality per se, but what makes the chain work as it does – they are pure facts.

“One plus one” leads, deterministically, to the result “two.” If a person has a candle in one hand and a second candle in the other, they’ll be holding two candles. But the fact that two is two is just natural – it simply is. Though it’s a little difficult to imagine, one plus one could be three instead, in some alternate reality.

Life is another example. Why does it sprout when certain chemical elements combine under adequate conditions? There’s the deterministic aspect of it – such conditions must be met – but the result itself is something else. A clay bowl full of shiny purple mush could spawn from them instead, so why is life the result? Because it is. There’s no explanation for it, not because we don’t know what it is, but because one doesn’t exist. In our universe, such a combination of factors leads to life instead of something else. It’s just a fact: life happens.

That may not make perfect sense at first but, if you give it some thought, it will.

I urge you one last time to consider everything I have said so far. Comprehending determinism is fundamental. Once you do, it will affect how you see everything.

Hopefully, you did think about what I said, had an epiphany, and now you understand existence a little better. Assuming so, I’ll mention some things that can be inferred from a deterministic nature.

Luck is everything. Someone once said, as I remember my father quoting when I was a kid, that “50% of everything is luck.” But he and whoever he quoted were both wrong, because the true number is 100%. Since neither us nor anyone else can interfere with our universe’s chain of causality, being unable to actually change anything, all that happens to us is a matter of pure chance.

True randomness is a myth. In practice, “random” simply means “something we cannot predict” – it doesn’t mean something is unpredictable. And even if I’m wrong and there actually exists something that is truly random in this universe, this doesn’t change anything, because the process “Input > Algorithm > Random Output” is just as deterministic as any that leads to a non-random result. Albeit unpredictable, that output is still the inevitable consequence of the input.

Destiny is real. The whole future has, indeed, already been written. From the very moment our universe was born till the nanosecond it dies, everything is linked together, creating an immutable and indestructible chain that directly connects all beginnings and ends. If it were possible for someone to have enough intellectual capacity to assimilate the current state of every particle in our universe and at the same time accurately calculate all the interactions they’ll be a part of in the future, that someone could predict everything that will ever happen. Theoretically, that can be done; the possibility does exist. But we, humans, can’t do it and will never be able to.

Free will is an illusion, as I had previously implied. Our own brains follow a physical chain of causality, leaving no margin for us to exert any influence over our thoughts. They control us, not the other way around. All of our ideas, decisions and actions are consequences of the logical and inevitable interactions between the particles, fields, atoms and molecules in our brains. “To make a choice” would mean “to arbitrarily violate the laws of physics,” such as by making electrons flow and interact unlike they do, thus causing us to bend reality and truly opt. Nothing we know can do that, and there’s no reason to believe the human brain is an exception.

Regret is nonsensical. Nothing that ever happened or ever will is our fault, since we cannot deliberately cause or avert anything. We are tools, not guiding hands, and it’s futile to rue anything we’ve done or, rather, anything that happened to us.

Given that all things emanate from the same source (the Big Bang) and, sooner or later, in one way or another, directly or indirectly affect all others, changing anything changes everything. If a single fundamental force of physics were slightly stronger or weaker than it is, stars wouldn’t exist, perhaps matter couldn’t coalesce as such, and life wouldn’t be born. If the amount of energy in the tiniest corner of the singularity that gave birth to our universe were slightly higher or lower when the Big Bang occurred, the uncountable consequences of that minuscule change could lead to entire galaxies not existing or to entirely different ones now occupying their spots in the sky. Since all things emanate from the same source and they eventually directly interact or indirectly interfere with all others, a single change to anything, however minor or seemingly irrelevant it may be, would affect everything else.

For you to not have broken your toe when you tripped over your snoring dog, something way back then, within the singularity that birthed our universe, would have to had been different. Following a Big Bang exactly like the one we had, you’d always have had tripped and broken your toe, just like you did. For your life to be any different, the entire universe would have to be as well. It would have to start over from scratch with a different pre-Bang configuration. So do not waste your time with “what ifs,” because any “what if” involves the dissolution of existence as we know it. And we are incapable of computing what would have to had been different for our desired outcome to materialize. In fact, that outcome is most likely literally impossible even if infinite universes exist – it’s extremely unlikely that any 14.5-billion-years-long chain of causality leads to any one of the things we so often wish were different in our lives becoming true, because any primordial change would likely result in the person doing the wishing not existing and, if they somehow still lived, they’d be a different person who would then be wishing for something else.

As a final point that will probably sound particularly confusing to those who haven’t truly comprehended determinism yet: as Dr. Manhattan says in the movie Watchmen, “All things that can happen do happen.” At the same time, all things that don’t happen can’t happen. These are opposite ways to say the same thing. Everything that doesn’t happen is impossible because whatever gives cause to them never did or ever will come to pass, and everything that is in fact possible does eventually occur.

If that didn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. Just notice that I’m not alone in this whole thing since, among many others, whoever wrote the script for Watchmen (probably a pretty smart person) also realized the deterministic nature of our universe. So you can’t use the “this guy is crazy!” excuse to slip away from trying to understand it as well. (Just find another one, if you insist.)

You may find what I said above hard to accept. You want to be heard, you want to be relevant, you want to shape reality to suit you. We all do. But none of us can. And accepting that this is how our universe works actually changes nothing for you – your future remains a mystery, you’ll keep on living, you’ll continue to have hope, and you’ll still enjoy what can be enjoyed and suffer what cannot be avoided. Regardless of how you see things, you’ll keep feeling, you’ll keep wanting, and you’ll keep trying.

It seems our universe takes living beings’ intellectual capabilities into account, and I find this very intriguing. The whole future is predictable, but no one will ever be able to predict it. We all toe the line and live just as we are meant to, but we still live. We get no say in it, but it doesn’t feel this way. We can know all of this, and nothing changes.

From a human perspective, the magic lies not in how things are but in how we are unable to comprehend how they come to be and to anticipate what they will be like in the future.

It is our own ignorance that awes us.

My point has been made, but I should also mention that, in some contexts, people use the word “deterministic” as opposite to “probabilistic,” focusing on the predictability of something rather than on its inevitability.

Albeit ironic, in physics it’s considered correct to say our universe is non-deterministic because we cannot accurately predict the outcome of our quantum mechanics experiments – our predictions are mere probabilities, thus being uncertain. Others will tell you a dice throw is non-deterministic as well, for the exact same reason, even though by having all the data about a throw – such as the dice’s face positions, the strength and vector of the toss, the resistance of the air, the angle at which the dice hit the surface, etc. – we can predict exactly how the dice will land every single time.