Aim for the Stars
To Mare Tranquillitatis:
Hello there, me.
Lately I have been making some big decisions. The simplest way to put it: I am thinking about whether to go abroad for graduate school.
The more complicated way to put it: I am thinking about what kind of life I want, what kind of work I want to pour myself into. And toward that end, where do I need to arrive a few years from now, and what experiences and what record do I need to gather as the version of me I am today, the ticket that gets me into the next stage.
For some reason, the university I attend has this strange power. It generates an enormous pressure out of nowhere and pushes you into being busy. Busyness is a complicated thing too. People who feel they are busy for the sake of their own bright future might look down with a little contempt at the ones being shoved into busyness by their surroundings, thinking they lack any independent thought, that they are just grinding away blindly. But in truth, maybe there is no real hierarchy of meaning here at all, and no clean line between acting on your own and being acted upon. Look down from on high and everyone is a churning crowd, grinding back and forth, burning themselves up for ends that are faint and pointless. Look with sympathy and everyone is so tired, everyone is trying so hard, everyone has a dream.
Today I listened to two things and felt moved to write this. One was an episode from the podcast 余生皆假期 called "Drop the Elite Narrative, Take Part in Life Through the Small Everyday Things," and the other was from 机核: "The Man Who Led Humanity into the Space Age Was a Deaf Person Who Spent His Whole Life in a Small Town" (a side story in their series on Soviet aesthetics). At the end of this letter I have attached the full text of Liu Cixin's 2018 speech for the Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. It rewards rereading.
I have an essay of my own that I have always wanted to post but never quite finished. Its title is The Upside-Down Pyramid.
In his book A Perfect Vacuum, Stanisław Lem mentions a trick for finishing an essay you cannot finish: pretend it has already been written, then describe it through reviews or quotations of it. That way the main text appears as a sketched-out void, an outline of an absence. It suddenly reminded me of SCP-2747, which shares this brilliant conceit with A Perfect Vacuum. It is a clever, wonderful piece, and one of my favorites.
cosmology → worldview → philosophy of life → || → career planning → academic planning → whether to grind for grades, and so on
Rather than the other way around:
whether to grind for grades, and so on → academic planning → career planning → || → philosophy of life → worldview → cosmology
Why deliberately put two vertical bars right before philosophy of life? Because that is where a thick wall of cognition sits.
A philosophy of life is about caring for yourself. It is ethics, and the core question of ethics is "what is the good life?" Very few people can answer that with any decisiveness, yet every single minute we live is an answer to it, because your life itself is your answer to how you understand life. Your passion for living, your longing, your understanding, all of it decides what you are doing right now and where you will arrive later. Any decision that does not grow from a philosophy of life is a tree without roots, a blind chase after worldly value with no thought for your own value. When that external "life value" cannot line up with the philosophy of life you carry inside you, your life is bound not to be your good life, and every bit of effort, honor, and capital you have piled up will crumble the moment the two collide.
A worldview is about caring for society, for the community you live in. What do you think this world is like? What are the problems in it right now? Who is suffering, who is being irresponsible, what is good for society, and what does it harm? You say you have a philosophy of life. Then where does that philosophy come from, where does your small personal sense of meaning and value come from? Maybe it is only an echo of what everyone else says, and it rarely flows out of a worldview. Without a world, where would you live? In the end you are part of society, and whatever scale you measure by, family, friends, city, country, the whole globe, the source of your work, the destination of your effort, the wellspring of your value, all of it is "the world." The things you long for and the things you fear losing, whether love, money, possessions, recognition, rights, or honor, all come from the imagination of a community and the acknowledgment of others.
A cosmology is about caring for humanity, for the fate and the direction of the whole community. From something as small as a single family to something as large as all of human society, on the scale of a worldview you can naturally treat it as a thing that runs on its own. You try to understand the rules it runs by, you adapt and take part, you become a moral and decent citizen. But on the scale of a cosmology, what you have to think about is the deeper first principles and the future fate of the community. Is humanity headed for the sea of stars or for the metaverse? How do we keep human society from being destroyed, whether by natural disaster or by contradictions born inside ourselves? How do we pursue sustainable development that actually works? The UN's Sustainable Development Goals, carbon neutrality and peak carbon, environmentalism, racial and gender equality, none of this is just so-called "bleeding-heart virtue signaling." These are real, concrete concerns, and being politically correct is, first of all, about being correct. Go deeper still and you run into the existentialist absence of a founding principle, into the line from Laozi and Zhuangzi that "heaven and earth are not benevolent." Philosophy is the ground color of any cosmology. The exact border between cosmology and worldview is not clear, but a worldview is finite, while a cosmology reaches out in thought toward a distant infinity and the bedrock of the mind, recursing without end into the deepest and most abstract places.
In one sentence:
A cosmology comes from somewhere infinite. The cosmology decides the worldview, the worldview decides the philosophy of life, and the philosophy of life goes screaming all the way down to decide what time you get up tomorrow.
Keep your pyramid right side up. Do not let it stand on its point.
As for what your actual thoughts and understandings are at the level of philosophy of life, worldview, and cosmology, that matters less than you would think. What matters is that you have done some real reflecting, that you have dug down toward the deepest part of yourself.
You will find that thinking this way actually keeps you from sinking into endless self-consumption. Once your philosophy of life is clear, a lot of things you used to think were so important turn meaningless, and you can pour your time and energy into what is genuinely worth doing. And a cosmology and a worldview can open up new vistas for you, letting you see how many possibilities there are to explore beyond your own narrow little life, how many different and remarkable lives, how many vast and awe-inspiring things waiting for you to witness them.
So, with all that said: aim for the stars.
Yours sincerely, Mare Tranquillitatis
Appendix 1: Liu Cixin's 2018 Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society speech (full text)
Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.
I am very honored to receive the Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society.
This award honors imagination, and imagination is a capacity human beings hold that seems as though it should belong only to the gods. Its significance reaches far beyond what we can imagine. Some historians have said that the main reason humanity was able to rise above the other species on Earth and build civilization is that we can create, inside our own minds, things that do not exist in reality. In the future, when artificial intelligence holds intelligence greater than ours, imagination may be the one advantage we still have over it.
Science fiction is a literature built on imagination, and the work that first left a deep impression on me was Arthur C. Clarke's. Apart from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, Clarke's work was among the earliest modern Western science fiction to reach China. In the early 1980s, China published his 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama. The Cultural Revolution had just ended, the old life and the old beliefs had collapsed, and the new ones had not yet been built. Like other young people, I felt lost. These two books activated my imagination for the first time. My mind opened up enormously, like a small stream flowing into the sea.
The night I finished 2001: A Space Odyssey, I walked out of my house and looked up at the sky. China's sky was not yet badly polluted then, and you could see the Milky Way. In my eyes the starry sky had become something completely different from before. For the first time I felt a sense of awe at the vastness and mystery of the universe, a feeling almost religious. And Rendezvous with Rama, which I read afterward, made me marvel at how imagination could build an imagined world so vivid it felt alive. It was exactly these feelings, the ones Clarke gave me, that later made me a science fiction writer.
Now, more than thirty years have passed, and I have gradually come to feel that those of us who were born in China in the 1960s may be the luckiest people in human history. No generation before us ever watched the world around them change so enormously. The world we live in now is already a completely different world from the one we knew as children, and that change is still speeding up. China is a country full of the feeling of the future. Its future may be full of challenge and crisis, but it has never been as compelling as it is now, and that gives science fiction fertile soil and an unprecedented level of attention here. To be a science fiction writer born in China in the 1960s is luck within luck.
When I first started writing science fiction, my goal was to escape an ordinary life, to use imagination to touch the marvelous times and places I could never actually reach. But later I found that the world around me was becoming more and more like science fiction, and that process was accelerating fast. The future arrives like a downpour in high summer, hitting us in the face before we can even open an umbrella. At the same time I discovered, to my dismay, that when science fiction turns real, no one finds it marvelous. It quickly becomes just another part of daily life. So all I can do is push my imagination into ever more distant times and spaces to find the marvel of science fiction. Science fiction will keep turning into ordinary life faster and faster, and as a science fiction writer, I think our duty is to write these things down before they turn ordinary.
But in another respect, the world has been moving in the direction opposite to Clarke's predictions. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, by the year 2001, which is now behind us, humanity had built magnificent cities in space, permanent colonies on the Moon, and huge nuclear-powered ships had voyaged out to Saturn. In the real 2018, no one returns to the Moon, and the farthest humanity travels in space is about the distance a high-speed train covers passing through my city in two hours. Meanwhile information technology has advanced at a speed beyond imagination. The network covers the whole world, and inside the ever more comfortable nest that IT has built, people have slowly lost interest in space. Compared with real space exploration, full of hardship and danger, they would rather experience virtual space in VR. As one saying goes: "You promised me the sea of stars, and all you gave me was Facebook."
This reality is reflected in science fiction too. Clarke's gorgeous visions of space have slowly receded. People have pulled their gaze back from the stars, and today's science fiction imagines more about human life inside a networked utopia or dystopia, and pays more attention to the problems we run into in the real world. The imagination of science fiction has gone from Clarke's breadth and depth to the narrowness and inwardness of cyberpunk.
As a science fiction writer, I have always tried to carry on Clarke's imagination. I believe the boundless reaches of space are still the best direction and the truest home for human imagination. I keep writing about the grandeur and mystery of the cosmos, about interstellar exploration, about life and civilization in distant worlds, even though among today's science fiction writers this can look a little naive, even a little out of step with the times. As Clarke's epitaph reads: "He never grew up, but he never stopped growing."
Contrary to a common misunderstanding, science fiction is not predicting the future. It only lays out the various possibilities of the future, like a heap of imagination's pebbles set out for people to admire and turn over in their hands. Which one of these countless possible futures will become real, science fiction cannot tell us. That is not its job, and it is beyond its power.
But one thing is certain: over a long span of time, among all these countless possible futures, no matter how prosperous the Earth becomes, every future without space travel is a dim one.
I look forward to a day when, like the science fiction that once wrote about the information age, the science fiction that writes about space travel will also become ordinary. By then Mars and the asteroid belt will be dull places where countless people make a living, and Jupiter and its many moons will be tourist destinations, the only thing keeping people away being the steep price.
But even then, the universe will still be an existence too large to imagine, and the star nearest to us will still be out of reach. The vast starry sky can carry our endless imagination forever.
Thank you, everyone.
Reflections from teacher 42
Setting aside the joke that so many people seem to fixate on, "you promised me the sea of stars, and all you gave me was Facebook," the speech itself is also an answer to all the arguments about science fiction in our information-age society, including both the excessive dismissal of science fiction and its excessive deification.
As a lover of cyberpunk science fiction, what I most want to point out is Liu Cixin's phrase, "the narrowness and inwardness of cyberpunk." In an age when the very concept of cyberpunk has been thoroughly overused and cheapened, this is a precious and necessary criticism. When thought turns closed and singular, which is the opposite of the spirit of science fiction, science fiction bursts out with a fierce rebellious energy. That is the inner reason cyberpunk was born, the source of its charm, and at the same time the warning its success leaves us. Just as cyberpunk so completely rebelled against the optimism and grandeur of the Golden Age, when even in our fantasies we sink hopelessly into human despair and pessimism, science fiction alone will spread its wings again and soar high into the open sky. That is the inner impulse that makes science fiction what it is.
If you cannot see the boundary, go find the boundary. Once you find it, cross it. This is the work of human imagination, the work of humanity, the work of civilization.
May the glory endure.
(Source: Gcores - a side story in the Soviet aesthetics series)
以星星为目标吧
To 宁静海：
你好哇，我自己。
最近我在进行一些重要的决定，最简单地描述方式是：我在思考将来要不要出国深造。
更复杂的描述是：我在思考自己未来想要什么样的生活，为了什么样的事业付出努力。为了这一目的，我在几年之后需要抵达什么地方，现在的我有需要积累什么样的经历和成绩，作为下一阶段的入场券。
不知道为什么，我所在的大学有一种很神奇的力量，它会产生巨大的不知从何而来的压力，逼迫你忙碌起来。忙碌也是一个很复杂的东西，觉得自己是在为自己的美好未来而忙碌的人，或许会很嘲讽地看着那些被环境推搡着忙碌的人，觉得他们缺乏独立思考，只是在很盲目地卷。但实际上，或许根本没有意义的高下之分，在主动和被动之间也没有明晰的界限。高高在上的看，所有人都熙熙攘攘，卷来卷去，为了一些飘渺而无谓的目的燃烧；同情地看，大家都好累，大家都很努力，大家都有梦。
今天我听了「余生皆假期」的《丢掉精英叙事，在日常小事中参与生活本身》和「机核」的《苏联美学演义 番外 | 带领人类走进宇航时代的人，是个一辈子活在小镇的聋子》，有感而发写下这篇文字，后文附上了刘慈欣 2018 克拉克想象力服务社会奖演讲全文，长读常新。
我有一篇自己写的随笔，一直想发出来，但是一直没有完工，它的标题是《倒立的金字塔》。
莱姆在《完美的真空》一书中，提到过一个可以完成一篇完成不了的文章的方法——假装它已经被写完了，然后利用书评或引用去描述它。如此一来，正文便会以一个被勾勒出来的虚空的方式被呈现。我突然想到了 SCP-2747，它和《完美的真空》共享这个绝妙的构思，是我特别喜欢的一篇精巧精彩的文章。
宇宙观 → 世界观 → 人生观 → || → 职业规划 → 学业规划 → 要不要卷绩点 balabala
而不是反过来：
要不要卷绩点 balabala → 学业规划 → 职业规划 → || → 人生观 → 世界观 → 宇宙观
为什么要刻意地在人生观之前加两条竖线呢，因为这是一个很厚的认知壁垒。
人生观是关心自己，是伦理学，伦理学的核心问题是「何为良好生活？」这个问题很少人能很果断地答出来，但是我们所有人所经历的每一分每一秒都在回答这个问题，因为你的生活本身，就是你如何理解生活的答案，对生活的热情、向往和理解，决定了你现在所做的事，将来会抵达的地方。不来自人生观的任何决策，都是无根之木，盲目地追求世俗的价值而不去思考自己的价值，当这个外部的"人生价值"没法和你内生的人生观相符合的时候，你的生活必然不是你的良好生活，你积累起来的所有努力、荣誉、资本，在这两者触碰的时候都会土崩瓦解。
世界观是关心社会，关心自己所处的共同体，你觉得这个世界是什么样的呢？现在这个世界上的问题是什么？谁在受苦受难，谁在不负责任，什么事情是对社会有益的，什么事情是对社会起到负面效果的？你说你有人生观，那你的人生观，你的个人的微观的意义和价值从何而来呢？或许不过是人云亦云而已，很少会从世界观引申而来。没有世界，你活在哪里呢？你终究是社会的一份子，不管你的尺度是家庭、亲友、城市、国家、全球，你的工作的来源，你的努力的去向，你的价值的源头，都是"世界"。你渴望的事物、害怕失去的事物，不论是爱、金钱、物质、认同、权利、荣誉，都来自共同体的想象和他者的认同。
宇宙观是关心人类，关心共同体的命运和去向。小到一个家庭，大到整个人类社会，在世界观的维度上，你自然可以将它视作一个独立运行的事物，你试着去理解它的运行规则，进行适应和参与，成为具有道德的良好公民；但是在宇宙观的尺度上，需要去思考的，是更底层的第一性原理和共同体的未来命运。人类是走向星河还是走向元宇宙？如何防止人类社会因为自然灾害或者自己内生的矛盾被毁灭？如何真正有效的进行可持续发展？联合国的可持续发展目标、碳中和碳达峰、环保主义和种族性别平权，这些当然不仅仅是所谓的"白左圣母"，而是实实在在的关切，政治正确首先是正确的。往更深里说，我们会遇到存在主义的"创始原理缺失"，遇到老庄哲学的"天地不仁"，哲学就是宇宙观的底色。宇宙观和世界观之间的具体界限并不清晰，但是世界观是有限的，而宇宙观则会在思考上抵达遥远的无穷和思维的基底，向最深最抽象处无限递归。
一句话概括来说就是：
宇宙观来自于无穷之处，宇宙观决定世界观，世界观决定人生观，人生观一路呼啸向下决定你明天几点起床。
让你的金字塔保持正立，不要让它倒立。
至于你在人生观、世界观、宇宙观的思考是什么，理解是什么样的，这反而不是很重要，重要的是你进行了真正的反思，向你的内心深处挖掘。
你会发现，这样思考反而可以避免自己陷入无限的自我消耗之中，一旦你明晰了自己的人生观，那么很多原先认为很重要的事情都会变的毫无意义，你可以将自己的时间和精力专注到真正有价值的事情上。而宇宙观和世界观，则可以为你打开新的视野，让你看到自己狭隘的个人生活之外，有多么多的可能性可以探索，有那么不一样的精彩生命，有宏大的令人敬畏的事物在等待着你去见证。
以上，所以，以星星为目标吧。
宁静海谨启
附件 1：刘慈欣 2018 克拉克想象力服务社会奖演讲 中文全文
先生们、女士们，晚上好：
很荣幸获得克拉克想象力服务社会奖。
这个奖项是对想象力的奖励，而想象力是人类所拥有的一种似乎只应属于神的能力，它存在的意义也远超出我们的想象。有历史学家说过，人类之所以能够超越地球上的其它物种建立文明，主要是因为他们能够在自己的大脑中创造出现实中不存在的东西。在未来，当人工智能拥有超过人类的智力时，想象力也许是我们对于它们所拥有的惟一优势。
科幻小说是基于想象力的文学，而最早给我留下深刻印象的是阿瑟·克拉克的作品。除了儒勒·凡尔纳和乔治·威尔斯外， 克拉克的作品是最早进入中国的西方现代科幻小说。在上世纪八十年代初，中国出版了他的《2001 太空漫游》和《与罗摩相会》（《与拉玛相会》）。当时"文革"刚刚结束，旧的生活和信仰已经崩塌，新的还没有建立起来，我和其他年轻人一样，心中一片迷茫。这两本书第一次激活了我想象力，思想豁然开阔许多，有小溪流进大海的感觉。
读完《2001 太空漫游》的那天深夜，我走出家门仰望星空，那时的中国的天空还没有太多的污染，能够看到银河，在我的眼中，星空与过去完全不一样了，我第一次对宇宙的宏大与神秘产生了敬畏感，这是一种宗教般的感觉。而后来读到的《与罗摩相会》（《与拉玛相会》），也让我惊叹如何可以用想象力构造一个栩栩如生的想象世界。正是克拉克带给我的这些感受，让我后来成为一名科幻作家。
现在，三十多年过去了，我渐渐发现，我们这一代在上世纪六十年代出生于中国的人，很可能是人类历史上最幸运的人，因为之前没有任何一代人，像我们这样目睹周围的世界发生了如此巨大的变化，我们现在生活的世界，与我们童年的世界已经完成是两个不同的世界，而这种变化还在加速发生着。中国是一个充满着未来感的国度，中国的未来可能充满着挑战和危机，但从来没有像现在这样具有吸引力，这就给科幻小说提供了肥沃的土壤，使其在中国受到了空前的关注，做为一个在 1960 年代出生在中国的科幻小说家，则是幸运中的幸运。
我最初创作科幻小说的目的，是为了逃离平淡的生活，用想象力去接触那些我永远无法到达的神奇时空。但后来我发现，周围的世界变得越来越像科幻小说了，这种进程还在飞快地加速，未来像盛夏的大雨，在我们还不及撑开伞时就扑面而来。同时我也沮丧地发现，当科幻变为现实时，没人会感到神奇，它们很快会成为生活中的一部分。所以我只有让想象力前进到更为遥远的时间和空间中去寻找科幻的神奇，科幻小说将以越来越快的速度变成平淡生活的一部分，作为一名科幻作家，我想我们的责任就是在事情变得平淡之前把它们写出来。
但另一方面，世界却向着与克拉克的预言相反的方向发展。在《2001 太空漫游》中，在已经过去的 2001 年，人类已经在太空中建立起壮丽的城市，在月球上建立起永久性的殖民地，巨大的核动力飞船已经航行到土星。而在现实中的 2018 年，再也没有人登上月球，人类的太空中航行的最远的距离，也就是途经我所在的城市的高速列车两个小时的里程。与此同时，信息技术却以超乎想象的速度发展，网络覆盖了整个世界，在 IT 所营造的越来越舒适的安乐窝中，人们对太空渐渐失去了兴趣，相对于充满艰险的真实的太空探索，他们更愿意在 VR 中体验虚拟的太空。这像有一句话说的："说好的星辰大海，你却只给了我 Facebook。"
这样的现实也反映在科幻小说中，克拉克对太空的瑰丽想象已经渐渐远去，人们的目光从星空收回，现在的科幻小说，更多地想象人类在网络乌托邦或反乌托邦中的生活，更多地关注现实中所遇到的各种问题，科幻的想象力由克拉克的广阔和深远，变成赛博朋克的狭窄和内向。
作为科幻作家，我一直在努力延续着克拉克的想象，我相信，无垠的太空仍然是人类想象力最好的去向和归宿，我一直在描写宇宙的宏大神奇，描写星际探险，描写遥远世界中的生命和文明，尽管在现在的科幻作家中，这样会显得有些幼稚，甚至显得跟不上时代。正如克拉克的墓志铭："他从未长大，但从未停止成长"。
与人们常有的误解不同，科幻小说并不是在预测未来，它只是把未来的各种可能性排列出来，就像一堆想象力的鹅卵石，摆在那里供人们欣赏和把玩。这无数个可能的未来哪一个会成为现实，科幻小说并不能告诉我们，这不是它的任务，也超出了它的能力。
但有一点可以确定：从长远的时间尺度来看，在这无数可能的未来中，不管地球达到了怎样的繁荣，那些没有太空航行的未来都是暗淡的。
我期待有那么一天，像那些曾经描写过信息时代的科幻小说一样，描写太空航行的科幻小说也变得平淡无奇了，那时的火星和小行星带都是乏味的地方，有无数的人在那里谋生；木星和它众多的卫星已成为旅游胜地，阻止人们去那里的唯一障碍就是昂贵的价格。
但即使在这个时候，宇宙仍是一个大的无法想象的存在，距我们最近的恒星仍然遥不可及。浩瀚的星空永远能够承载我们无穷的想象力。
谢谢大家。
42 老师的读后感
除去似乎很多人聚焦的笑话"说好的星辰大海，你却只给了我 Facebook"以外，这篇演讲本身也是对现阶段的信息时代的社会中围绕着科幻的种种讨论的回答，包括各种对科幻的过度轻视和对科幻的过度神化。
作为一个赛博朋克科幻小说的爱好者，我尤其想要指出的是刘慈欣说出的"赛博朋克的狭窄和内向"，在这个赛博朋克概念全面滥用和庸俗化的时代，是一种可贵而必要的批判。当思维走向封闭和单一——也就是科幻精神的反面——的时候，科幻就会迸发出十足的叛逆精神。这是赛博朋克诞生的内在动因，是它的魅力所在，同时也是它的成功带给我们的警示——正如赛博朋克如此彻底地反叛了黄金时代式的乐观与恢弘一样，当我们就连在幻想中也无可自拔地沉溺于人类的绝望和悲观时，唯独科幻会重新展翅高高越入长空，这是科幻之所以为科幻的内在的冲动。
看不见边界就去找到边界，找到边界就越过边界，是为人类的想象力，是为人类，是为文明。
荣光长存。
（来源：机核网 - 苏联美学演义 番外）