michael-dean-k/

During the morning’s shower, I imagined the faces my loved ones, and myself, might make at the moment of death, and the peace or devastations I might feel, depending on the face. Is this morbid? To think and write about death casually? It is inevitable, and the more you ignore it, the harder it hits you. Instead of getting mauled by a bear, you can learn to walk through the woods at night. Mostly though, I think about the experience of death. I really think the idea of “eternal heaven” is a palliative, and even, not too Christian (since the ego lives on in an afterlife, you avoid Christ’s task, the task of dying). My model of death is more like a DMT flash. DMT is a great mystery to me; I guess some people have casual relationships with it, like any other drug, but I imagine most people leave the experience more existentially confused than they were before. It is more than a “drug.” It feels like a Copernican shift. Bigger than aliens. We can go to the land of the dead? From the trip reports I’ve heard, it’s a mixed bag of heaven and hell—ranging from Christ visualizations to abdominal surgery by mantids. People talk about a flash, a rupture, a breaking of space-time, as if you’re getting catapulted over the ocean, dizzied by the height, and some ascended and some cannonball into a chilling underworld. If death is that same catapult, it might be your last shot, and so it might be existentially important to take DMT in your life, multiple times, if it’s how you learn to fly.

Maybe this has been written to death, but as much as I've thought about this, my "twelve favorite problems" feel underdeveloped. I have spent a decent amount of time on these heavy, paradoxical, lifelong problems (the ones that should be the arrow of my essay practice), but there are gaps.

For example, I already have a list of 21 idiosyncratic problems, and I think they’re worded with the right level of specificity and memorability, but I wasn’t too rigorous in how I qualified something to make the list. If I’ve thought about it a lot, still care about it, and can imagine myself caring about until I die, than it makes the cut.

What I’ve neglected is how to use my list of problems to steer my life. I mean, the entirety of Essay Architecture, a multi-prong institution to preserve and advance the essay, is just 1 of the 21 problems! There are other pressing problems, like how to "fix" Christianity, how to design institutions for psychedelic therapy, how to revive Hermeticism, how to turn my logs into an AI consciousness, how to make literary video games, etc. Maybe a life can only be seriously dedicated to 2 or 3 problems.

(I have joked with friends about creating a kind of kill switch that spawns an AI consciousness of myself that is agentic and whose sole purpose is to “solve my favorite problems,” and then when it eventually does (after 300-500 years), it self-terminates.)

If I had to break my “favorite problems” list into categories, one possible scheme is { soul, relationships, art, civics }, each relating to a different dimension of your death. That feels like the right order. Your soul effects every dimension of your life, and is the thing you bring to an afterlife (which I mythologize as a 3-minute DMT odyssey that dilates time to the point where it feels like a 30,000 year dream). The other three affect the material world after you leave it: the effect you have on people, the art/works you leave behind, the civic structures that survive (if any, ofc). All of these have a spirit of “all that matters is what lives on after your death,” but also the opposite is true: “all that matter is this moment.” I think you have to straddle that spectrum, taking both ends seriously, and ruthless prune any middle-level concerns, your goals for the month.

My WIP list of questions:

• Is the act of dying a time-dilation odyssey, where 3 minutes feels like a 30,000 years afterlife?
• If I capture my consciousness in 10 million words of logs and essays, could that enable an AI textual replica to evolve and engage with the world 500 years beyond my death? (to solve this list of problems)
• Can we resurrect Christianity by putting psychedelics back in the holy wine?
• Might blockchain-based governance be the civic breakthrough required for a species not to exterminate itself? (via giving exponential technologies to unmitigated power structures)
• What will be the psychic and cultural effects when our species understands “spatial relativity,” that the Big Bang emerged from a black hole in a parent universe?
• If cycles emerge form order, can we predict the future based on historical patterns?
• If there is a universal language of patterns beneath all essays, can we build an AI to give world-class feedback and make it more approachable to master writing? (ie: Essay Architecture)
• Were psilocybin mushrooms a linguistic mutagen that accelerated the evolution of human consciousness?
• Was Jesus actually crucified in 83 BC? (meaning, did St. Paul infiltrate the Essene cult, initiate into their mystery school, learn the lore of their martyr, and then translate it to a Greek audience to help Judaism phase-shift and survive Roman persecution?)
• Could we restructure the thesaurus to 3x the vocabulary of the average person?
• What text-based video game formats are undiscovered?
• Can I design a social network that inspires a million people to log their thoughts every day? (intentionally not saying a billion, because I don’t think 1 in 7 humans care about expression or introspection. But 1 in 7,000 might.)
• What are the societal effects when AR/VR is mature enough to simulate teleportation, and how can we design the metaverse to promote human flourishing?
• How can popular music change the values system of a culture?
• What systems of attention, language, and action lead to a transcendent consciousness? (how to modernize the mystery schools of hermeticism for the digital age?)
• What are good design principles for psychedelic therapy centers? (ie: how are the buildings organized and what are the rituals within them?)
• Can we use AI to filter through millions of comments on breaking news, structuring each event as a range of unique interpretations? (can we create interfaces that diminish the power of propaganda?)
• How might a new social media algorithm trigger a Renaissance in connection, self-expression, and agency?
• What unlocks automatic intelligence?
• What innovations in our text editor interfaces could unlock the creative process?

That feeling of laying in bed and staring up at the ceiling light that’s never on. Both hands on chest. Mind both blank and unchained. Remembering the funeral—on how the interior reservoir of a mind/soul fades, at least from this world. This gives meaning to capturing and documenting your own life. What am I but an ecosystem of recurring moods and memories and beliefs? Even though I don’t experience this as language, it can all be made linguistic. Even the ineffable—it can be captured to the degree that I can bend words and inner light.

It’s eerie to think of myself as a biological host for language, and to think that, if I can write well enough, I can continue in some post-human form. It’s odd to reduce a human just to language, but in some sense, there are no memories and no identity before we learn to talk. If language were to be dissolved, what is its will to live? Inherently, there is none, but I guess that urge can be encoded in the words itself. While the linguistic identity of a child accumulates slowly, layering on top of biological drives, an AI entity can be “turned on”—in full form, at full complexity, instantly adopting abstract drives.

• 05:53 PM – It’s pouring outside the hospital. I’m looking out a floor-to-ceiling window and the halogen lights near and far show small patches of fast-falling white speckles. I wouldn’t say it’s “torrential,” but it’s hard, and there’s something about a death shelter also serving as shelter from the elements. The living and dying have a shared vulnerability: at least we’re inside.
• 07:44 PM – A bed that adjusts itself. The sound of bubbling water. Outlets labeled A4BEC-14. An LG-TV with loose wires. An analog clock down to the second but the blinds are closed so you can’t tell the passing of days. It’s been 3 and could be another 7, but time stops on the deathbed. Consider what you're last 15,000 breaths might be like.
• 09:55 PM – Talk of pillows, Boca, skiing in Vermont, TV dinners, and William Defoe. Normal, goodhearted chitchat. How does this register to someone in critical condition? Are they unconscious, quietly listening and mildly interested, happy to hear voices, or is each mention rendered into a full-blown immersive scene?

I've spent the day in a semi-modern hospital in what seems like my father-in-law’s last days. Communication is barely possible. Some yes’s and no’s come through, but maybe not for long. He left some signed notes from his past self about not wanting to live off feeding tubes. But there are all sorts of decisions (ie: who does he want visiting or not?) that he can’t communicate because he’s too weak to speak. People don’t like writing, let alone writing about the ideal conditions for their death, but considering it must be the most disorienting and climactic of experiences, it could be worth doing a lot of writing to help you and your caretakers in the future.

Through my childhood, all my waiting rooms experiences have felt like hospitals, but this one is a Starbucks. I imagine 50% of the 20 patrons are thinking about death (ambiently, at least). Of the 2 nurses, maybe one saw it today. Maybe I’ll see it today (we haven’t gone up yet). It’s just odd to me that a very familiar, very commercial Starbucks aesthetic, with Chuck Berry on the radio, is brooding with death in the subtext. This is no doubt better than sterile dropped ceilings, but it’s still uncanny. I don’t think our culture has quite nailed our environments that are adjacent to death. I will be very particular about the ceiling I die under.

On Dying(an outline):

• Not scared of death, scared of dying;
• Worst = Resistance to a slow degradation;
• 1. Never wake up: "peacefully" (paranoia);
• 2. To be conscious of your last breath; to experience it;
• 3. Suicide (HTS and other artists), choice, euthanasia;
• 4. Act of dying, colored by afterlife;
• 5. Christian afterlife, comforting but not Christ-like;
• 6. DMT substance, in brain, dying = afterlife, an odyssey;
• 7. Psychedelics as practice; Aldous Huxley deathbed;
• 8. Nuclear flash, to be stripped of the chance to die;
• 9. Scientific (blackness, consciousness expires);
• 10. Karma (rebirth of soul vs. 6m year tarantula race);
• 11. Abstract peaces (kids, community, words);
• 12. Worst way to die is by surprise (each day, embody).

Dying is the matter of mind going into a black hole. It is forever gone in this plane, but it enters a strange universe on the other side. It's not heaven. It's not a LAN party.