I know the meaning of life.

Said no one ever. …

But I know it.

Not in the cunning ‘read my article sort of way’

I mean the real deal.

—

As a 22 year old, I often got those questions and answers and thought to myself, is anyone actually right? Famously of course is our boy Mark Manson, the master story teller who uses common language to explain stuff zen, christianity and other traditions tried to tell us about life. I kindof build upon his idea of values and knowing the meaning of life using them, and how the absence of values that we find worthy of persuing gives rise to existential dread. But I do depart from it.

…. It’s called the Q theory. Everything suddenly clicked…. the meaning of life is much simpler than anything I could have imagined before by having just one LSD trip. It began quite simply as I was completing the last laps in the swimming pool, my perception started to fizzle and the syneasthesia started to make the act of swimming mimics gliding. I felt like all the stories and patterns that I had told my self were suddenly disintegrating, the wires weren’t working as they normally did, and the several habits and nerve (grass trails) pathways that had traditionally characterised my behaviour towards qualia started to break down, slow down, fizzle out. Suddenly I had no clue how to react to the usual stimuli that I had grown accustomed to reacting to. Imagine being in London Bridge Station in Christmas, with the usual people hot women and good looking men, but slowly the crowds, the lights, the smells, start to slowly blend together. I looked into a black child’s eye down the escalators, and suddenly I became conscious of having a lessened top down categorization of the face. My ability to react to stimuli based on past experiences/ memories was weakening. I had no reaction to that face, but I just stared, into those dark swirly eyes, and no previous impressions/judgements steered in my way.

Suddenly the duality of existence , i.e. being a perceiveer separate from the perceived seem to break down. The Jubilee line, the noise in the tube, the people, the colours, all seemed to become less categorical and distinct, but rather a continuum, resembling a dream. I never quite understood the analogy that this ‘material world is a Dream’ given in Vedanta and Eastern philosophy till this hit of LSD. In dreams there appears to be a whole other world where ‘you’ are being tortured by ghosts, shrill voices and scary sounds, and your ‘mom’- is telling you ‘stop crying’. In reality, this is just a figment of your subconscious imagination, there is no separate mom in your dream telling you off. Which by the way was a constant theme in my dreams since I was a child. I do remember once sleeping next to mom and shouting ‘mom beat me’, only to be embarrassed by the lady herself waking me up and calming me down and soothing me.

Back at 13.15, Fitness First Gym, London Bridge.

I started my trip by putting the cardboard paper inside my mouth, after I tried to cheer myself up after being ditched by a friend. I could gradually experience, unlike the last trip I had which sunk me into depths of despair, a sense of lightness and breeziness as i moved through the streets of London and smelled the wonderful pizzas, cakes and cheese, and heard the sounds of City Hall and saw the dazzling Christmas market. London is the most picturesque, beautiful, proportional and visually congruent city that I have seen in my life. But on LSD, it was more than an Apple next to an HP.

16.00 Peak experience hits, and continues till 12 am.

If no one has told you before, LSD lasts really long. As I curled up on the ground, having thoughts disintegrate, ideas waver and my ability to comprehend the qualia around me (sights, sounds, noises, touch) become symphonies, operas and light shows, I found my self enjoying the process of cleaning and making things shiny. My eye for beauty, symmetry, form and detail sharpened, and as I looked myself in the mirror, I could no longer sense who or what I was looking at anymore. The stories I had told myself faltered… ‘I am a girl’. ‘I am brown’, ‘I am young’, etc, only to reveal a convergence of 3 things: experience, the playground of experience, and the abstractions that were being creating out of them.

Qualia — the individual instances of subjective conscious experience. — Wikipedia.

Now for part you have been waiting for. I reached this conclusion after coming down from peak experience wherehence just perceiving qualia (at this point everyhting was interesting in a way, lights, sounds, just seemed to ripple in my brain and I couldn't/ didnt know how to play music that I knew how to, my ability to solicit memory/ learned skills was non existent. I instead started making incoherent lines and patterns like a child on pieces of paper. I felt like a new born kid who had just popped out and new nothing about the world, a pen fascinated me so much.

The meaning of life.

• The most real thing that can be perceived, when senses and their perception are broken down, are qualia.(sights, sounds, smells)
• Let’s call it Q -just qualia, without any judgement of its quality as being either good or bad, or assigning any other characteristic to it.
• When the Big Bang occurred, there was just a massive soup of Q0.
• Life, or the ability to experience qualia started on a small blue planet.
• It started replicating and evoluting — Suddenly we have qualia, and its perception. Call it Q1- To the first degree, this is experienced in plants and ameaboa. Good qualia - sun- phototropism. Bad qualia- no water- hydrotropism. (Q1- qualia with characteristics)
• Animals start creating abstractions, becoming creators (like God) not just perceiving qualia as Q1 — qualitatively like good, bad, neutral, etc., but by creating their own way of interacting and influencing the Q1’s. Let’s call that ability Q2 or 2nd order qualia.
• Human cultures develop- Q3, abstracting over Q2. No longer is food just for powering the body, it is now for taste. Elaborate peacocking in terms of dress so that not only is our physique a sex signal, but how we adorn it shows our place in the hierarchy of desirable traits. An unparalleled organised system of influencing Q2 is developed, leading to increased qualia manipulation (Q3 or 3rd order qualia- Human cultures).
• Multiple Q3’s occur in different parts of the globe, mimicking biological evolution that took charge years back where qualia were just influenced by R and K evolutionary theories of reproduction for about 10,000 years. Some developed armies to preserve its mode of qualia manipulation, e.g. Gengis Khan’s empire, others spread out, preserving lower order qualia manipulation e.g. Australian aboriginals.
• Q3west — western civilisation achieves a qualia manipulation system that evolutes others out of existence/ amalagamates them in a span of 500 years leading to today, from when the enlightenment and exploration ages started. Remember that Qualia manipulation is just the creation of more and more abstractions upon basal qualia, from water, light, gravity, to those of language, food, routine, and rythm and finally advanced forms of civilization. Meanwhile, we do have to recognize that qualia abstractions are also just called ‘ideas’. Calling a banana a ‘banana’ was not pulled out of the hat, it was a creative idea of someone to join two or more lower order abstractions to to create another abstraction based on a need or circumstance. To trace this abstraction of language down to the basics, I’ll give the example of two words baboa and Kiki, where to a greater level of statistical significance, people assigned a curvy shape to the first and spiky shape to the latter of the words. This suggests that visual and auditory syneaesthesia enabled the formation of qualia interations that affected the way humans in turn affect more qualia around them through their ability to interpret those abstractions and in tern coordinate to create even more asbstractions on top of them. This process of abstracting over other abstractions is expressed throughout history in several maxims, such as “Great artists steal” and Newton’s famous “Standing on the shoulders of Giants”. This ability to abstract also what enables the scientific method to make breakthroughs, and computers work. It enables simple on and off electric currents... i.e. 1 & 0s morph into to higher order abstractions that are enough to enable me to transcend space and time and convey my thoughts on the internet right now.
• By consequence, cultures optimise for qualia manipulation through the morphing and evolution of a culture that outlives the individual orgnanism (ie. human lifespans are 80 years max, but the culture outlives most through knowledge transfer by a factor of more than 25 in the current one — 2021AD/80yrs). The abstractions (the ability to abstract more and more is virtually endless), and there seems to be a correlation between intelligence and creativity, or the ability to permutate, combine and logically use lower order qualia to create a higher ability to manipulate Q2 so as to be conductive to good stimulation. Take the ratio of the prefrontal cortext to how well the specie / culture gives rise to art/ culture/ size of population.
• The culture of computer science, a Q3 has been able to transcend and outlive the fathers of computer science like Alan Turin, and is better than biological life at constructing its own abstractions. Talk of machine learning and AI defeating humans in optimisation tasks.
• By the looks of it, either by biologically optimising for intelligence (as I like to call it Q infinity abstractions) or culturally doing so, or even both, should maximise the qualia manipulation continuity that we find meaning in outliving our own individual existences.
• Death anxiety of the approaching creator gap end road (or your lifespan in relation to the universe) is what prompts us to participate/create any Q3.
• Two things are fundamental to meaning (aka creative orderliness); a) A Q3 that outlasts death b)and which fits your creative instinct. A failure to achieve any of those causes depression/suicidal thoughts.
• Delineating further: a) a Q3 that outlasts death —If you realise that your marriage that you believed would outlast your death ends in a divorce, you get depressed. If a company you built from the ground up is failing, you get depressed. If you believe that climate change can no longer be stopped will kill our civilisation, you get depressed. b) The Q3 appeals to your creative instinct — if you are a teenage girl who thinks she isn’t thin enough, your inability to participate in the Q3 of the glamour world causes depression. ‘I am not enough’. Some teens commit suicide (the Q3 and the world is best served without me, or i am parasitic- which explains lots of senecide cases) while others try to find another Q3 where they feel they can realistically participate given the constraints on beauty, intelligence, or other ability.
• For artists who commit suicide, like Avicii, Robin Williams etc, after attaining the Q3 they hoped for, they feel as if the creative instinct to create more abstractions won’t be satisfied and no other Q3’s could satisfy them, and therefore the death anxiety that fueled the creativity morphes into death wishing/phillic force, and they bring an end to life.
• Meaning, is when a given life form or Q inifinite, (both as a consequence of previous ideas/creations and thoughts of other order qualia/life) optimises its qualia manipulation, either by creating its own third degree qualia (Q3 — culture such as a business, like apple outlasting Steve Job’s death, religious sect — Muhammed / Jesus, or even an Object — Like the Taj Mahal or getting married and having kids and family that would outlive your own death)
• Which explains the lack of meaning when we do not see our self creating/being part of a Q3 that would outlive us. And Elon Musk’s dream to land on Mars, and idea or Q3 that he is willing to sacrifice for because according to him it is the best idea or Q3 that has chances of outliving him.
• The meaning of life is therefore to optimise for the Q3 that has the highest chance of survival / longevity after your own death and which you can actively feel like you creatively contribute.
• For me, the meaning of life is clear, optimise for creative intelligence, because it has the highest chance to outlive human lifespan has the ability to create infinite Qualia abstractions. Q4 will create abstractions over human cultures (Q3). It may or may not involve robots, like James Lovelock’s idea of the Novacene, or aliens in different planets, and could possibly involve infinite Q2 stimulation and creation.

Q = Qualia

Infinity = Infinite abstractions over qualia (more than just Q3 where Human Cultures stop)

Infinity power= Life forms/ agents of infinite abstractions