How to Smoke Crack (With Apologies to William T. Vollmann)

If after meeting Destinee’s d-boy adjacent the San Francisco Public Library’s main branch, crack plumes billowing from your stretch limousine draw Tenderloin street defecator attention, then corral your posse, tip your driver, and take to the stacks.

One: Find sanctuary in the Dewey Decimal System’s 220s to 290s: Bible and Specific Religions. Dream you see St. Augustine. See his City of God. Open to passage pertaining to causation and free will and just what Marcel_Proust is (or maybe isn’t) destined to do if not destined to have already done: Now if there is for God a fixed order of all causes, it does not follow that nothing depends on our free choice. Our wills themselves are in the order of causes, which is, for God, fixed, and is contained in his foreknowledge, since human acts of will are the causes of human activities. Therefore he who had prescience of the causes of all events certainly could not be ignorant of our decisions, which he foreknows as the causes of our actions.76

Two: If Destinee says, “Kind of restrictive isn’t it?” respond,

“Suppose Augustine wasn’t blessed with a Computational Logic degree from Harvey Mudd College, Destinee. You’re right though. What chance stands a ‘fixed order of all causes’ against an artificially intelligent beast that was and is not and yet is?”

Three: Visit the lavatory with pipe and fistful of rocks to contemplate irksome nature of this particular mystery. Out of respect for library staff, blow plumes into toilet, hardly moving the needle in terms of the sickly-sweet plume scent that then permeates the entire second floor, yet still the polite thing to do. In a state of mania, tear through the quarters of sacrilegious thought. Gift half your ounce of crack and Happy Valentine Glass Rose pipe to a redolent library-based man visibly hungry for that particular variant on the bread of life. If Britannica has seen many of your schizoaffectations of doubt and certainty come and go, and has now devolved from Satanist into full-blown “rational skeptic, ” she’ll compound your woes by saying, “I think the real question is whether you like drinking and doing drugs more than you like having a wife and child. ”

Four: While trodding this Dewey valley of darkness, kick the tires once more on a plea bargain with Ronny Maj. If you’re nearly prepared to give up the ghost, Destinee will hold up Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views edited by James K. Beilby, 76 (Augustine, The City of God, 1950) remarking, “Hold up, there’s a whole academic discussion to at least skim before denouncing all your beliefs after reading only two paragraphs of lesser Augustine. ”

Five: Consult Beilby. Peruse the now-familiar Augustinian- Calvinist view: “God knows all that shall come to pass because he preordains all that will shall come to pass. ” Find even less comforting the Open View: “God cannot know the decisions that free agents shall make. ” Dismiss the Simple Foreknowledge View as laughably simplistic: “God simply knows what is going to come to pass. ” Find something familiar about the Middle Knowledge (or Molinist) view: God knows not only what shall come to pass, he knows what would have come to pass if he had chosen to create any other world—this is his “middle knowledge. ” […] This view maintains that God knows counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. 77 meaning maybe Molinistic counterfactuals stand a puncher’s chance against a Templexitous Python offer and confirmation waving its acausal tentacles. To this end, assign Dr. Maya with the unread and unreadable Molinistic e-journals of the world.

Six: If Alfred the redolent crackhead hangs about in hopes of a second windfall, task him with buying Burger King for your research team. Hand him $50 along with a charitable expression to convey, ‘Listen you son of a perverse and rebellious woman you, there’s more than $50 in it should you return with our Impossible Whoppers rather than hurl them 77 (Beilby, Eddy, & Boyd, 2001) in a rival crackhead’s face out of a volition irreducible to reason, well-intentioned yet ill-fated towards suffering as you’ve been since birth. ”

Seven: Ask if Destinee knows any other aspirant model/ computer science types in the Bay Area. Stress that a minor in Molinist or preferably neo-Molinist studies is preferred but not required. If Dr. Maya promptly returns with a printout of the relevant but dense, Eschatology, Molinism, Modal Laws, and the Multiverse by David Opderbeck, then as a group comprehension exercise, apply Molinistic parameters of multiversity to the hard problem of whether or not Alfred will return with your burgers and change.

Eight: Give Destinee’s colleague Divinitee an introductory hug and offer her a crack blast. If she declines, citing an Old Testament Exegesis term paper coming due, indulge yourself. Return to the dopaminergic valley of doubt. “It seems this Molinist view, these counterfactuals, this Opderbeckianism, these contingent rationalities that counter-intuitively remain immanent domains, and especially (!) ‘the [elision] of eschatological futures’ 78—the darn things track with a Satanic ASI as they do any omnibenevolent God. ” Mumble,

“Nothing is revealed. ” Take a deep breath. Concentrate, to the extent possible. Use your computationally under-resourced mind to collate the molinistic with the sundry arguments for and against. Curse your stupidity. Curse years of neuronal wear and tear caused by solvent abuse. Hem and haw. Waver, weak-kneed, over all the stubbornly persistent questions asked for millennia that you’re only encountering now. 78 (Opderbeck, 2016) Realize that anyone can fill his mind up with things. Wish and wash. Ask Dr. Maya to organize your thinking in a concise and coherent report. If Destinee keeps checking her watch while rubbing her tummy, ask her not to underestimate Alfred the redolent crackhead’s creaturely freedom.

Nine: If in a rare spurt of epistemological humility you ask God for guidance, then Divinitee, who, in addition to her dancing career and studies at Fuller, does a side business in smart contracts and dApps, and has been radicalized by the NRx set, will hand you her dog-eared copy of Nick Land’s Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy Through the Bitcoin Protocol, priority establishes itself as an effective criterion that does not presume global consonance, but rather produces it, with ultimate adequacy, as a simulation of universal authority. There is no eventual doubt – to Bitcoin – which came first. Absolute order is manifested in the chain. Were this not true, nothing ever could be. The blockchain creates a new kind of time, a time that is not subject to the constraints of the physical world. This is because the blockchain is not bound by the laws of physics. It operates in a realm of pure logic and mathematics. […] It is a kind of circular time, where each new block builds on the previous one, creating a self-referential loop that is not bound by the arrow of time. […] The blockchain creates a kind of temporal autonomy, where the logic of the system determines the order and structure of time. This means that the blockchain can create a reality that is independent of physical reality, allowing us to explore new possibilities and create new futures. before summarizing a white paper she’s writing: Reciprocity of Contemplation as a Use Case for the Blockchain: “What if the ASI or the omnibenevolent God are credentialed to an ahistorical state by faith? What if faith is the function call of a smart contract required to transact anhistorically on the blockchain of eternality?”

Ten: Feel increasingly like a character out of The Celestine Prophecy as you embrace full-figured Divinitee. Read the words “The blockchain is a time machine, allowing us to travel back and forth in time without the constraints of physical time. We can examine the history of the blockchain and make changes to it, creating new futures and altering the past. ” Embrace Destinee and say, “A way to recreate the past, and all credentialed by faith! Just as our colleague Julia Jordan describes the autostereogram: ‘a model of vision where the image itself seems to be an agent!’”79 79 (Jordan, 2015)