Fuck Yeah Fridays! Awesome 80s Movies, Video Clips From the Vault, Free Will & Destiny Article Sneak Peek, Chapter 1 of Road to Omega Novel for Paid Subscribers

Miscellaneous content for Friday and Saturday nights at home. If you like what you read then 'like', share, and support this Substack with a paid subscription.

It’s that time again — another Fuck Yeah Fridays (!) post for all those neuromantics who are home on the weekend and seeking a psychedelic rabbit hole to fall down.

Tonight I’m watching the gem of an 80s flick Big Trouble in Little China (1986), directed by the legendary John Carpenter. It’s one of my favorite films from my childhood, and it is more stylized than I remembered, which was a nice surprise. I didn’t realize John Carpenter directed it, the master of 80s horror and suspense, and also composed the soundtrack, which has a lot of really neat 80s-style synth/darkwave pieces — which Stranger Things made trendy again with their theme song. The theme actually has some really interesting Eastern philosophical elements, mostly surrounding the Taoist balance between dark and light, which is actually the main theme of the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism (which is actually the closest philosophy to the cosmic philosophy in my book The Romance of Reality, I’m learning). If you haven’t seen this movie, do yourself a favor and check out it out this weekend. There’s really nothing like it that has been made since. Years ago I remember seeing speculation over a reboot starring The Rock, though that has yet to materialize.

The other super strange and trippy 80s movie I watched this week was Legend (1985), starring Tom Cruise and the girl from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, who disappeared after those films. It was directed by the great Ridley Scott, who made the original BladeRunner and the sci-fi horror classic Alien. Legend didn’t impress critics, but to me stands out as a unique fantasy in that it has no pop culture references and no cheesy moments — it is just this pure story of an ancient world that feels like it could’ve really existed.

I remember waking up as a child around age 4 and seeing the devil from this film on the TV in our living room and feeling like I was having some sort of bad dream I couldn’t wake up from. This demon is played by Tim Curry, who also played the psychotic clown in the original It. The soundtrack is nothing less than a masterpiece, composed by prolific German electronic/prog band Tangerine Dream, whose unfathomably complex music appears in some of the most memorable 80s movies. I listened to this soundtrack and other TD albums to get into a mystical state when writing The Romance of Reality. Check out the film and soundtrack when you’re looking to tap into something magical and ancient. This film also explores the same philosophy as Big Trouble in Little China, the age-old archetypical conflict between dark and light — which is not just represented in the yin and yang, but also the Hegelian dialectic.

Once long ago, before there was such a thing as time, the world was shrouded in darkness. Then came the splendor of light, bringing life and love into the Universe, and the Lord of Darkness retreated deep into the earth, plotting his return to power....by banishing light forever.

But precious light is protected, harbored in the souls of Unicorns, the most mystical of all creatures. Unicorns are safe from the Lord of Darkness, they can only be found by the purest of mortals....Such a mortal is Jack, who lives in solitude with the animals of the forest. A beautiful girl named Lily loves Jack with all her heart. In their innocence, they believe only goodness exists in the world.

Together they will learn that there can be no good with- out evil....No love without hate....No heaven without hell...No light without darkness. The harmony of the Universe depends on an eternal balance. Out of the struggle to maintain this balance comes the birth of Legends.

Pretty deep, no?

Over the last couple weeks I have been uploading Instagram reels of content that a lot of people haven’t seen. These are from past interview or presentations that distill big topics into 90 second clips. I try to upload new content almost daily during the weekdays, so if you’re on Instagram you should follow me @bobbyazarian. If you subscribe to this Substack and shoot me a DM I’ll follow you back. In the coming weeks I’ll be making explainer videos for IG reels on topics like complexity, consciousness, and cosmic evolution, and also short vids about politics and other themes that are Road to Omega-related. My homie @curtistalls is helping me with some of the graphics and editing, so the content will get better and better as we find our signature style and aesthetic.

In this clip, Joe asks why the universe is growing more complex and why reality has this as a tendency. I explain that the process of cosmic evolution seems to have an end-state or goal — that goal being what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point. This point is “a theorized future event in which the entirety of the universe spirals toward a final point of unification.” At this moment, something that could be described as a ‘cosmic mind’ presumably emerges, with the computational power of a god. Curiously, this process critically depends on intelligent life. Neuromantics are those individuals who make a vow to in some small way help facilitate this process. For those of you wondering what the name of this Substack means, now you know. Now you are on the road to Omega.

In this clip, Joe questions whether such an idea is egocentric. As he puts, “We are this tiny speck that’s riding on one planet that is but a molecule in the vast infinity of the universe. Why is consciousness even important?” My answer: It only looks that way because we are at the very beginning of the cosmic self-organization process. In the future, the universe will be teeming will sentient life.

In this clip, I explain a principle that is in my book (The Romance of Reality) called “Popper’s Principle, named after the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper. The principle simply says that “problems create progress.” This means that the complexification process, though it does lead to human progress, will never get us to a utopia. And that’s a good thing. If the problems stopped, so would progress. This means we will always be going through cycles of chaos that threaten a breakdown of the system, but ultimately lead to new levels of organization, functionality, and social consciousness. We are currently going through such a cycle — and are in the midst of a social phase transition. This concept is central to the mission of Road to Omega.

And here is a clip from a fireside chat with nantoechnology researcher Kostas Kostarelos at the Puzzle X conference in Barcelona from 2022. In it, I discuss the potential emergence of a global consciousness from the collective interactions of billions of humans on Earth, connected by wireless devices. There is already some sort of global intelligence to humanity as a whole, but a global consciousness with a subjective, first-person perspective is very likely an emergence that has not happened yet. So in some sense, Teilhard de Chardin’s “noopshere” is already here (humans have formed an integrated computational system), but whether or not the global network of humans and AI agents can ever spawn a planetary-scale consciousness is an open question. But if neuroscience’s highly controversial Integrated Information Theory is correct, then it’s just a matter of time.

In this clip, I discuss the “hard problem of consciousness” and whether our machines could someday be conscious. But the truth is we don’t know. I do think that before we crack the problem of how to program consciousness, we will probably merge with our technology. If we do that, we may not care about making conscious machines, or want to.

Lastly, I wanted to give the neuromantics a glimpse of the major theme of my next book — tentatively titled Death, Life, Consciousness and Cosmos: Surely You’re Joking Dr. Azarian! — whose opening paragraphs were posted in the last Fuck Yeah Fridays (!) post, though that opening has been revised quite a bit since then (though it does give you a glimpse of where my head is at).

This major topic will be the compatibility between free will and destiny. Essentially, I am arguing that nature has a fundamental randomness to it that allows for free will (randomness + cybernetic control = free will, see below), but at the same time, I’m arguing for a “global determinism” — that the evolution of life and the universe as a whole has a direction (toward higher complexity and consciousness) and an end goal (the Omega Point).

Typically, scientists and philosophers argue that we lived in either a determined where no free will is allowed, or a universe with randomness that allows for free will, but hardly ever for a determined universe where free will is possible. The trick lies in the “global determinism” part, because this kind of determinism only exists at the macro, not micro, scale (see the Turing Church interview with Emily Adlam for an introduction to this extremely exciting ‘global determinism’ concept).

I pitched this story to the website Big Think who I’ve written for in the past, who accepted it but then shortly after told me they had already spent their budget for cosmology-themed essays, and that it would have to wait until later in the year. Being the impatient person that I am, I pitched to another favorite site of mine to write for — one of the rare publications that publishes essays as long as 4k words (and pays quite handsomely too, for all. your freelancers out there) — Noema, who fortunately accepted! So that should be coming out in about a month. For now, here’s the pitch:

Dear editor,

I'm writing to pitch a story that will be the theme of my next book, and it is something that has never been written about, at least not in a pop article. 

It is essentially an article arguing that in the universe we find ourselves in, there is randomness and free will, as well as “global determinism” that determines a specific type of “goal state” that the universe is headed towards as a self-organizing system. 

In the first portion of the article I will argue, like many have before me, that we do have agency or free will, due to fundamental randomness in nature, combined with the fact that we are adaptive systems with what is called cybernetic control. We always hear that randomness is not enough to give you free will, and that is true. Randomness is just a precondition for free will — the freedom comes from the control that organisms have due to the information embedded in their structure that gives them causal power. 

I argue for this in detail in my book, as well as in these two Psychology Today articles (Finding the Freedom in Free Will and Free Will is Real and We Can Lose it), which were widely shared by the top academics who are part of this debate.

What makes this article unique is that this is just the first part. The next part argues that there is a telos to cosmic evolution, or the unfolding of the universe over time. That is to say, the universe is becoming increasingly complex, and approaching some maximally integrated, maximally computationally-powerful state. This argument for a telos has been put forth by some of the most respected philosophers, like Thomas Nagel, and most recently by Philip Goff in his new book, which was well received. Technologists like Ray Kurzweil and Kevin Kelly, as well as neuroscientist Christof Koch and complexity theorist Stu Kauffman, have made similar arguments. David Deutsch makes an argument along these lines in his two books as well.

This would suggest that there is a kind of determinism in nature, which Kurzweil calls a "destiny" to the universe. 

So the picture we see is not one of "superdeterminism," where there is no randomness at all and the future is determined but headed towards heat death. 

In this picture I’m proposing, there is true randomness in nature at one level, but at a higher level, there is  what philosopher Emily Adlam calls "global determinism." However, her global determinism doesn't argue for an end-goal that is a maximally complex state. 

So basically the future is determined at a large scale, but at the level of individual agents, there's freedom. We can see where things are headed, but even a creator wouldn’t know exactly what's going to happen. There will always be room for surprises.

So the overall argument is that free will and destiny are not incompatible. Its a very cheery picture for life because we would then have both freedom and purpose.

I write about this in the last chapter of my book The Romance of Reality so it is not as abstract as it sounds. I can write a draft of the article first if you'd like to see that. 

Well, that’s it for this Fuck Yeah Fridays post if you’re not a paid subscriber. Please “like” and share this article if you enjoyed it, and consider becoming a patron. The more support I get, the more I can write — it’s that simple. Thank you for reading, fellow neuromantics.

We are many, and we are one.