How do you keep score?

Sometimes life feels like a video game where you don’t know the rules, you don’t know how the score is kept, and you’re just cruising around figuring stuff out as you go. There are different levels of the game, such as childhood where you play the game according to whatever rules your parents settled on. Next comes adolescence, where you listen more to the rules your peers are exploring. Later you form the first version of your own ruleset, but it’s usually not really yours. It’s jam packed with cultural, social, and religious biases. Most people hang out on this level until they are no more and that works out okay for them. The rules they’ve settled on make sense if you don’t look too closely. They can keep score well enough with their bank accounts, their religious devotion, there list for friends, their celebrated accomplishments, the number of men/women they’ve enjoyed, the experiences they’ve had, and so on and so forth. Again, nothing wrong with any of that. They played their game and probably found a few nuggets here and there of genuine unique inspiration to reveal an easter egg or two within the Matrix reality complex we call consciousness.

When I look a little deeper, I start to see something else. A vibration or energy or pattern that continues fractally out to infinity and inward to the null which also is infinity. Something more to be discovered and known, a deeper “truth” if you will. I’m not alone in feeling its presence, surrounding and binding everything becuase it just might BE everything. Separation itself might be the illusion. As a living organism on this blue dot, humanity, with all its separate groups (organs), communication networks (nervous system), and cells (individuals), gyrates internally like the many unseen battles and dramas endlessly playing out within the human body. And quite possibly also between stars and solar systems and galaxies?

The deeper truth might be to seek out a deeper truth.

Just as artificial intelligence algorithms are trained not by being told the rules of the game but through a constant process of evolution and growth through trial and error, might we also be AIs (for lack of a better term since we are in the age of computers, and it is our nature historically to describe ourselves via our best known technology at the time)? If we knew the rules of the game, would it defeat the purpose? Maybe we are meant to discover the rules and not only that, teach something above about them to those above us at higher densities/dimensions just as studying the complex interactions which evolved within our bodies informs us about healthy living.

I find these thought experiments fascinating as they focus in on something important:

Keeping score.

One thing AIs are given, if not the rules, are final goals or final values crafted into
value functions. These are how the score is kept. If we don’t set useful value functions, we will evolve out of the system into irrelevance and non-existence. It’s critically important to define success before you chase after it. It’s tempting to take short cuts and borrow rule books from others, but the entire point is to figure out something new and important yourself. You are unique, all the way down to your genetic blue print. You’re not duplicated data to be compressed and removed.

You matter.

So what’s your value function? How are you keeping score?

I think, for me, I’m still exploring that, but it has something to do with creating a world we all want to live in. I interpret that as less democide, more autonomy and freedom within the boundaries of the non-aggression principle and mutually preferred behavior. It’s about more awareness with less entropy in our consciousness. Less fear, more capacity for love. It’s about the little things. And the big things. It’s about flow.

I hope you find the vibration you were meant to resonate at, and by so doing, educate the absolute unbounded oneness, the abiding non-duality, something new about itself.

Something new about yourself.

Here’s to everyone out there, gathering data for The Big Computer (you can say god, if you like), working daily to be less wrong and learn something new.