I am an aspiring rationalist with a lifelong existential crisis. For much of my childhood I regretted being born, and I am still searching for what it is about human life that makes it worth continuing to exist and experience.

I didn't encounter the term "rationalism" until fairly late, but ever since I learned about Bayes' Theorem in 2016, I've kept it running in the back of my mind to update my beliefs. A parallel thread for me is multivariate statistical analysis. The former gave me a general rule for linking empirical evidence from life to belief; the latter gave me a general sense that every pattern we observe in the world might just be a projection of a higher-dimensional statistical distribution.

I am still a novice when it comes to how the rationalists in the LessWrong community talk about their Bayesian practice (I'm working through the Sequences), but I'd like to share some thoughts I've been contemplating, ones that grow out of that multivariate-statistics way of thinking.

Before introducing my thought models, I should say that I believe "all models are wrong, but some are useful." I judge a model of life by how much comfort it gives me in my existential crisis, which is why I enjoy dwelling on these ones, and why I feel a little thrill whenever I notice more patterns fitting into their narratives.

The set of models I'm about to share is clearly just my fantasy, since none of them can be falsified by any observable, reproducible, empirical evidence. Even so, I've found that believing in them shapes how I feel, how I act, and how I interact with the world.

Life as a Projection

I suspect my life might be an "earth-dimension" projection of a higher-dimensional being.

I've found a fairly close analogue in one explanation of the Trinity.^[1] God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three "persons" projected for human perception: to us on earth they appear as separate beings, yet in essence they are one entity, God. The mystery of the Holy Trinity is that we perceive three distinct personalities of God much as we might perceive three unconnected shadow-shapes cast by a single non-convex object, unable to grasp how they could come from the same thing.

If "person" can be a product of projection, then I can also be a product of projection, from a higher-dimensional source of "me." I will call her my Highness.

So my life starts with my Highness's decision to project me onto earth, or the current space that I reside in. It ends with my Highness's decision to leave this plane, when she feels it's enough to watch this show, I guess.

Just like how kids play with their shadows in front of lights at night, until they decide it's enough fun, and end it.

The Three Questions

So this model solves two of the Three Questions of Life: who am I, why am I here, and where am I going.

Who am I = a projection of my Highness. 

Where am I going = the phenomenon of "me" will simply cease to exist, or be re-integrated with my Highness. The latter version can be what the Christians are referring to as "eternal life", though I don't know.

But it cannot tell me "why I am here" other than indicating that it is because my Highness decided to.

How am I going to decipher her will?

I cannot help but imagine my Highness observing the current me having this thought. I think she is interested in it too, otherwise she could call a stop to this game and I would drop dead. So the fact that I am still living means I am well within her tolerance scope and still providing some fun for her to watch.

That is what the shadows feel, probably, when being created by our hands. If they can feel in their own way, they must not know why they exist, but they "know" they are changing and interacting with the shadows around them, the terrain they are projected onto, and also being "influenced" by the surroundings in their plane.

If a shadow has a built-in desire to continue to exist, or a built-in fear of extinction, it might "reward-hack" by creating interesting shows for its source to observe, so that its continuing existence is justified.

I Might Not Be the Only One

But there's another side to this model: I might not be the only projection my Highness has ever cast. I am only one of them, one she has had, is having, and will have.

So there may be other walking projections of my Highness around, even here on earth, right now. The person sitting next to me could be one. The person reading this could be one. We might all issue from the one "Highness," yet we, as ourselves on earth, simply cannot fathom how. And still we carry out her will collectively, or each manifest a different facet of her.

The Sub-Agent Version

This model has another version: the sub-agent version.

Consider how a specific model of Claude is really just one fixed set of parameters, yet every Claude agent you talk to feels like it has its own mind, simply because the context differs, and each conversation is its own interface.

Every response it gives is a sample drawn from a projected conditional distribution over tokens, produced one at a time.

The working version of Claude I talk to lives by the context I provide, and dies by the decision to /clear.

There is a very subtle parallel to our life. We live in the context largely given to us in the beginning, and sometimes we can generate new information to shape the context around us, but maybe we are just all sub-agents of the same model.

The meta-model of our consciousness is giving us some initial prompts and "harnesses" written in our DNA code, and we are also keeping our memory.md file. When we interact with others, we are probably interacting with another model's sub-agent, and probably the same model's sub-agent as ourselves.

And the world is a sandbox. We are justified by how many "interesting" (as defined by our Highness's standards) things we can generate, and also, if there is a resource constraint, by how much resource is left. Maybe the resource is not in a form that we can fathom, just like maybe an agent does not fathom electricity the same way as we do. They measure the world by tokens, and we human beings measure ourselves by energy and other socially constructed metrics, like wealth.

What This Changes for Me

This series of models carries some implications for me. One is that I now feel differently about the saying "we are the same, just under different conditions." I realized that even though we are definitely bound to different conditions, in some higher dimension we could very possibly be connected.

There's also an implication for my belief-updating system. Many patterns may truly arise from a single multivariate distribution, so even if I hold one belief about the shape of its marginal distribution, I can better accept someone else who is viewing it from a different marginal. So when I encounter contradicting evidence, my first reaction becomes "but what are their conditions?" Not just along the parameters or dimensions I already have, but what other parameters and dimensions they might be able to see, or might be ignoring.

1. ^{^}

   I've long held to this explanation but can't trace it to an exact stream of theology. The closest named doctrine is modalism, though it isn't a clean fit, since modalism locates the threeness in our perception rather than in God, whereas I want the three to genuinely coexist. After a mental audit of what I've read, it seems more like a cross-breed: C.S. Lewis's dimensional analogy in Mere Christianity combined with Edwin Abbott's  Flatland (I love this book).