cameron/colby

"MC Mechanic" / Shane WillisA few months ago, I arrived home from vacation to find an unmarked package from Göteborg, Sweden, sitting on my desk. Inside the package was a very mysterious book entitled Being or Nothingness. The package contained no return address, but only the handwritten message "Will tell you more when I return" in its place. That's where the story begins...

At first I thought the package must have been sent by a friend. As I opened the book inside, I was greeted with a letter written to Douglas Hofstadter. I glanced just over the book's cover to look at my own copy of Hofstadter's GEB, sitting no more than two feet away on the table. It had all the markings of a book a friend would pick out for me.

A curious co-worker wasn't satisfied, and went to look for the book on the internet. He found nothing but a blog post in Portuguese he couldn't read. As I walked by his computer, he closed the browser window, and in the last second my eye caught something. I had him re-open the page to find that the photos in the blog post pictured the exact envelope I had received, complete with the same stamps and handwriting style. The book had also been sent to Brazil...

In the time since, I have been in contact with a half-dozen or so other individuals who have received the book.

Observations:

• The book appears to have been delivered to a fairly small number of targeted individuals.
• These individuals are all over the world: UK, Iran, South Africa, Australia, US, Canada, Brazil
• They speak, work, and write in different languages, Farsi and others difficult to web translate
• They all work in philosophy, logic, mathematics, AI, or neuroscience
• Apart from their interest in the subject matter, little connection exists between the individuals.
• The book contains hidden references, double entendres, puzzles?, words cut out, misquotes, riddles, and a variety of suggestive and confusing material that centers on self reflexivity
• To understand the book at all, one would have to know the inside stories of referenced works
• Even then, it is difficult to gather the meaning of the book (readers have diverse opinions)
• No one yet knows for sure who wrote the book, why, or what it means
• It is written in British English, not American English
• A Swedish IP from the right area visited at least one of the recipient's blogs
• The book is hardback, and elegantly made, not for sale publicly
• Someone has gone to considerable effort, expense

The book is called Being or Nothingness (not Sartre's Being AND Nothingness).

Escher's drawing hands on the cover. Joe K is an anagram for Joke, as well as a reference to Joseph Knecht from Hesse's work mentioned in the book.

The book claims to be a lost manuscript of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, recently translated into English from a copy found in Sweden. It makes special reference to Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, as well as a number of other famous existentialist authors, philosophers, and logicians. It also includes a ton of seemingly nonsense riddles and quotes, at least some with creative and hidden references.

There are explicit or implicit references to Sartre (title), Douglas Hofstadter (front cover, letter), Escher (front cover, letter) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (letter) Hume (p4) Godel (p4) Hermann Hesse (p6) Eckhart, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault, Krauss, Einstein, Ibsen, Hobbes (pp 9-11) Douglas Adams (p13) Pythagoras (p13) The Bible (pp16, 17, 19, 20) Solzhenitsyn (p20) John Donne (or Hemingway) (p20), etc.

Even the format of the book itself is a philosophical trick.

It has been conjectured on the internet that the purpose of the book is either:

• Part of a viral marketing scheme (but no viral component or clear message)
• To convert people to some religion or philosophy (but no clear philosophy)
• To serve as a Head hunting puzzle for a job offer
• To destroy "smart people's" minds 
• Part of an assassination attempt from the Illuminati

I have no clue. But if any of you do, please let me know.

In lieu of other explanations, I believe it is an artistic statement, delivered to its intended audience. When read metaphorically, the book is an abstract exercise in mystery and understanding.

Portuguese blog post: http://muriloq.com/blog/2008/09/being-or-nothingness-marketing-viral-bizarro/

Back cover claims that it contains the lost manuscript of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Update: Last weekend I was at a tech conference in San Jose, and ran into a Ben I know who specializes in AI, matching a post on the blog entry. Sure enough, he received the book, and the Portuguese blog author is an employee of his. This is the first known connection between two recipients. Do you know anyone else who has received it? I am hoping that this post will bring about something. I do have two strong leads, but haven't had the time to pursue them.

If you get a chance, pass this on to anyone who you think might be the right demographic to receive this book, or perhaps to know someone who did. If they did not catch that blog post, its unlikely they would have known about the other recipients and the larger plot.

Perhaps something, perhaps nothing but an elaborate joke. Regardless, I think it is a curious story.

A phrase, cut out from the page, can be solved by placing the letter behind. Easy puzzles appear designed to arouse your suspicion to look for more subtle clues. Inside, Letter to Douglas Hofstadter, written in anticipation of "I am a strange loop". The book is a strange loop.

From my cousin's house in Spain.

Travels in Nairobi, Safari at Ngorongoro, TED Conference in Arusha, Tanzania.

This evening I attended a lecture on Ethics at UMKC with keynote speaker Randy Cohen of New York Times and All Things Considered Fame. The event was sponsored by the Center for Practical Bioethics, and I was rather expecting a focus on biology, but the issue never so much as came up.

Randy is the go-to guy for the nations ethical issues, though he would be quick to denounce the height of his own ethical standards. Moreover, he generally discounts the impact or even existence of personal character, and believes his success is due quite entirely to luck and social advantage, not any aptitude he might posses. Randy is a believer in the idea that the community a person is surrounded by determines the moral choices and ethical behaviour of an individual rather than the character of that individual -- not just during youth, but from moment to moment.

The best indicator of your income is your parents income level, and according to Randy, the best indicator of your behaviour is the behaviour of the person sitting next to you at the time. Essentially, there is no moral superiority or individual responsibility, but rather a systemic community responsibility bound to those with power to create an environment that encourages people to be ethical. Randy cited numerous statistics and research studies to back up his claims. The outcome of his conjecture is that people are mindless and flighty automotons who mirror behaviour and can neither be congratulated nor held responsible for their choices in the vast majority of cases. From time to time there may be independently ethical individuals, but such behaviour is often inconsistent and exceedingly rare, and we cannot rely on it to create an ethical society.

He spoke for some time about poverty (and prosperity) not being indicative of character, but rather being indicative of the economic circumstances in which one is in. When Randy's argument was countered by a speaker he said something to the effect of 'that would be nice to believe, but it is not my opinion that statistics support the existence of individual character'.

He pointed out that cheating in school, plagiarism, and music downloading are due to changes in technology that encourage these activities rather than any sort of moral decline, and that they continue due to our lack of creating innovative solutions to address them. Note I said address and not legislate -- Randy is against RIAA lawsuits and school zero tolerance and affirmative honor codes. He stresses that harsh penalties actually lead to more crimes because people refuse to turn others in or to convict them with such extreme penalties in place. Rather he asserts that there ought to be easier better alternatives to cheating created, and that there ought to be simple low-impact ways to discourage it.

A few experimental examples he referenced include:

• Subjects were dramatically more likely to help an old lady in need if they serendipitously found a dime in a pay phone before hand.
• Subjects were led across campus to an unimportant lecture event. When they were told that they were very early and had time to waste they were quite likely to stop and help a man in dire need of medical attention. When given no mention of time constraint they were moderately likely to help him, and when told they were in a hurry, they were extremely unlikely to help him. Being minutely late to a superfluous event dramatically affected ethical behaviour.
• Subjects being interviewed in a room in which smoke was coming from the vent were dramatically less likely to report that the building was on fire, if other individuals were in the room did not appear to notice the event (diffusion of accountability, assumption that others must know what's going on).
• In the Stanford Prison Experiment, normal people were committing prisoner abuse and sexual humiliation within 6 days on their own. The soldiers at abu-girab were just normal people who had a failing of leadership to address a steadily declining situation. People will adjust to anything over time as their expectations and justifications and peer-acceptance evolves.

The most immediately obvious thing about Randy is that he is quite a humorist and a rather vocal leftist. He also seemed to be a bit down on America and its lack of upward mobility, citing that it is worse than Europe/England. (I'm not sure I believe that, but he didn't reference a stat, so I can't specifically dispute it).

When he could brush his political opinions aside, he gave some strong insight into ethical behaviour. What he did not do, is point out very many solutions. Several audience questions, including that of my friend Airick West, ventured into the realm of "okay, so then what do we do about it". Fortunately, after the event I was able to catch a Thai dinner with two surprisingly action-oriented UMKC professors and a few bright young entrepreneurs who were apt to discuss just such issues.

During the course of this discussion we ventured into cultural, social and economic development plans which I will save for another day. Perhaps if I'm "lucky", you'll hear about them as part of a cohesive plan. In fact, if a number of us aspiring citizens are extremely "lucky" day in and day out for a number of years, you may even see dramatic results. ;)

(Well, I suppose now that I've gone there, I might as well refer back to Lucky or Smart.)