Joyful Mysteries

There's something incredible, ineffable about being alive. Sure, there are the cliches, like savouring the beauty of a sunset, the sweet taste of a ripe strawberry, or the awkwardness of a first kiss. But then there are the joys found in seemingly impenetrable pain that are nothing short of miraculous, like falling in love again even though you swore it was impossible, or beating the odds with cancer free test results and getting a second chance at life.

Life is filled with never ending magic. Graceful shining moments scatter across our daily lives constantly. And yet, they land like glitter on an overtrodden dance floor. Swept away without a second thought, these little sparkles of joy are quickly discarded. Before we know it, memories of the magical times we connected to something bigger, something meaningful, are long forgotten. All we see is mess. 

Collectively, that’s where we are today. 

Turn on the news and you’re bombarded with moaning, moaning, moaning about humanity’s big old mess and the depressing nature of our existence. Go to work and you’re strong-armed into discussing how disappointing humans are compared to machines. Yikes. It’s so garishly despairing, the sweat-inducing rhetoric is enough to make almost anyone forget about the reality of what is. 

So before we truly forget the joyful mysteries of life, this essay provides another way to see. Here are three reminders of the magic and mystery of what it is to be you.  

Hold My Hand

There are moments in life when words, and analytics, lose their value. When the chips are down, when we’re in crisis, when we’ve lost control, we long for something more than the mind can provide. What we want is someone to hold our hand, look into our eyes, and tell us that everything will be ok. 

It might sound naive, but imagine for a moment that you’re on your deathbed. What is it that you want? A robot to share the details of your illness, an LLM to chit-chat with endlessly, a virtual reality headset to see the beach? Or is it someone that you love, who loves you too, sitting by your side, holding your hand? 

There’s nothing simple about this innate desire. We want it, not because we’re sentimental fools, but because it’s the most complex and best option available, by far. 

Just pause for a moment and think about what it takes for you to hold another’s hand. Your brain has 86,000,000,000 neurons and generates around 600,000,000,000,000 synaptic connections. Your eye has over 100,000,000 light-sensitive photoreceptors that convert light into neural signals for the brain. Your hand contains 27 joints aligned with over 20,000 sensory nerve endings, all supported by your heart beating around 100,000 times a day with over 40,000 neurons of its own. These still-not-fully-understood systems work seamlessly together, using less energy than it takes to run a lightbulb, all for you to be able to extend a hand out to another. And when someone takes that hand, these interactions compound to numbers far greater than the number of particles in the universe. 

We are, without realizing, touching infinity. 

Only we seem hellbent on ignoring this, instead marveling at AI tools like ChatGPT that replicate a mere 1,000,000,000 neurons by pooling much of the world’s financial and natural resources. While it’s an impressive feat of computer science and economic empire, it’s inevitable that we will soon remember a simple fact: there isn’t enough water in the world to scale a silicon replica of the simple yet momentous actions we take for granted. 

Go Within

We hurry hurry hurry to produce, and yet, amazingly, humankind has never been able to create anything more impressive than what already was. No artist has created a colour that didn’t already exist, no michelin star chef has created a dessert more complex than a raspberry, and no climate technologist has invented a product more effective than a tree. 

At our most powerful, we only ever showcase nature’s magnificence.

Sure, we can make incredibly sophisticated things, like create lamps, architect a skyscraper, and design ever more complex machines, but we can’t make the electricity, we can’t make the energy itself. We can create total artificialities, like ultra-processed foods, medicines, and bombs, but we can’t make the compounds, we can’t make the matter itself. Energy and matter, the building blocks of reality, only ever come from nature. 

Like it or not, nature is the genius behind all innovation. 

That’s why our greatest human accomplishments merely revere the natural world. Take mathematics, on the surface it may seem that it’s a field dedicated to human prowess, but look again. At its highest level it’s a form of archeology, a field dedicated to marvelling at mystery. In each major discovery, whether it’s pythagoras theorem, euler’s identity, the fibonacci sequence, or the fourier transforms, mathematicians unearth a fragment of a beautiful truth beyond ourselves, a universe we can never truly experience.

In the unknowable, ordered universe, nature is infinitely more intelligent, and more capable, than us. While this seems to frustrate us deeply, while we hallucinate that we can create isolated machines that overthrow us, we forget that whatever this genius is, we are of it. We cannot be removed from genius, or create beyond it, because it is us.

A deep understanding of this means recognizing that we can never be truly destroyed. This original, inseparable material is within us, and is of us. Now, and forever.

Embrace Miracles

We live in a world where miracles happen. That’s just a fact. Miracles, in their simplest forms, are fundamental shifts in trajectory that go well beyond scientific explanation. Of course, some may call them serendipity, anomalies, or chance, but however you want to call them, whatever they are, they happen everywhere. People go into spontaneous remission, money appears from out of the blue, the infertile have children, individuals proclaimed dead on the operating table come back to life. 

The impossible happens all around us.

We just don’t know why. 

Myths, stories, and studies galore have appeared throughout millennia to explain this phenomenon, and yet the answer remains elusive. We’re so dumbfounded by miracles, and by how to categorize them, that our secular scientific world simply ignores them, bucketing them into religious woo-woo tropes. It’s just too difficult to face the truth that miracles reveal: that human life is innately unpredictable.

Remember, statistics don’t matter to the individual. When you’re the 1 in a million - which by one count or another every human walking the earth is - probability becomes meaningless. And yet, it’s precisely this unknowability that forms the essence of human thriving. It’s exactly what makes life worth living. As naive as it sounds, each of us long for circumstances that cannot yet be seen. A car. A relationship. A job. Peace. Justice. Abundance. Whatever it is, it’s our fundamental nature to desire and experience events beyond our comprehension. 

To be human is to be a dreamer, in a world of infinite potential. 

And what is AI if not the greatest raindance humankind has ever created? 

Our AI industry is almost entirely based on automating probabilistic generation of word sequences, even though we know that the probable is no good to us. Probabilistically, we’re heading for climate catastrophe. Probabilistically, we’re heading for nuclear war. Probabilistically, we’re heading for economic collapse. We’re all on the same page here - we really don’t want what’s probable. We want what’s possible. We want a miracle. Only, without knowing how to ask for miracles in a secular world, we’ve digitized the act of throwing our hands up, surrendering, and asking for help from something greater.

Save the World

These three examples are among thousands of instances that remind us how little we know about life, and, frankly, how incredible it is to walk this earth. We don’t understand how trees actually work, how our body really processes food, or how exactly penguins dive so deep. And above all, we don’t understand consciousness itself, the most complex and most powerful phenomenon there is. 

Thankfully, we don’t have to understand everything to enjoy its wonders.

Of course, some may say that it’s naive to focus on the joys and delights of life, when we’re being called to defend against an existential catastrophe. How could we be so frivolous, in the face of so much potential suffering? But really, when we’re honest with ourselves, how has engaging in the hysteria and fear mongering actually helped? Hasn’t it made the situation worse? Hasn’t it fueled our desperation, and increased the danger? 

Neurologically, we know that what we focus our attention on grows. 

We already know, scientifically, that the most effective way to dissolve today’s techno-induced chaos isn’t to argue, debate, and battle with the darkness, but to embrace the joys of who we are. To be willing to see the situation differently. Because, ultimately, all it takes to save the entire world from ‘AI taking over humanity’, is to change the way we view humanity. 

This, today, is the bravest thing an activist can do. As Marianne Williamson so eloquently wrote:“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us".