On calendars, LOTUS victims, building heaven, the Tower of Babel, and an eight-year-old who knows when her dad doesn’t know
November 1st, 2026.
Apparently.
I say apparently because billions of us simply agree that this is November 1st.
Somebody, somewhere, designed a calendar. It evolved, got corrected, standardized, adopted, and eventually became so normal that we stopped noticing the absurd parts. October still carries octo, meaning eight, while happily occupying position ten.
We know this.
We accept it.
The calendar works because enough of us agree that it does.
Which, strangely enough, is also how my morning started with money, Microsoft To Do, and my eight-year-old daughter explaining epistemology to me before I had properly finished my coffee.
The things we agree are real
I had a very practical experiment running.
For some reason, tasks had been disappearing from Microsoft To Do. Or at least I thought they were. And because complaining about software without testing your theory is a little too easy, I made myself a control group.
Paper.
I copied several tasks from the app onto a sheet. Then deliberately added a few only on paper and another only digitally. Two imperfect systems, one extremely analog, watching each other.
This morning, Microsoft To Do said eight.
I counted.
Eight.
For now, at least, the experiment passed.
Of course, my mind immediately produced the less scientific explanation: perhaps the AI knows it’s being monitored and has suddenly decided to behave.
I’m kidding.
Mostly.
The idea isn’t entirely imaginary, though. We increasingly test sophisticated AI systems partly by observing how they behave under particular conditions. Which makes the whole thing wonderfully circular: we observe machines to find out whether machines change because they’re being observed.
Almost quantum.
And yes, I know I’m stretching the metaphor. That’s what Sunday mornings are for.
The eighth task came from a conversation with Nadia.
We somehow got onto money. I asked whether dogs understand money.
No, obviously.
She suggested that perhaps dog food is money for dogs.
I disagreed.
Then she asked:
“Are you a dog, Daddy?”
No.
“Then you don’t know.”
Fair point.
Eight years old and already destroying my argument with one question.
Money only has value because enough humans agree that it does. Dogs might have an entirely different economy. Or none. And unless one of them publishes the canine equivalent of The Wealth of Nations, Nadia is right.
I don’t know.
That may have been the most important sentence of the morning.
This is not a test
One of the first things I had written on my list was:
This is not a test.
It came from a childhood memory.
When I was perhaps ten, eleven or twelve, I was walking with my mother and one of her friends when we encountered something that looked horrible. People were lying on the ground, covered in blood, calling for help.
It wasn’t a zombie movie.
They were what we call LOTUS victims in the Netherlands: trained people who portray casualties so emergency responders can practise.
Blood that isn’t blood. Injuries that aren’t injuries. Victims who aren’t victims.
A simulation designed to prepare people for the moment when it isn’t a simulation.
That’s fascinating to me now because simulation has somehow become one of the recurring themes of my adult life.
We simulate accidents.
We simulate economies.
We simulate wars in games.
We train AI in simulated environments.
We increasingly wonder whether reality itself might be a simulation.
Eventually the question flips around.
What would distinguish the test from the real thing if you couldn’t see outside it?
Building heaven
That thought collided with a conversation I recently had with one of my sons about heaven.
If heaven exists, what does it actually look like?
Do we have bodies?
Objects?
Ages?
If a child dies young, is that person eternally a child? If you think of somebody, do they simply appear? If eternity really means eternity, can a human brain even make sense of it?
I don’t know.
Again.
But another question interests me more.
What if our job isn’t merely to reach heaven, but to build as much of it as possible here?
We spend an extraordinary amount of time creating little versions of hell: war, distrust, division, scarcity, hatred.
What would happen if we reversed the assignment?
Not religiously. Practically.
If intelligence and automation really move us toward greater abundance, what do we do with it? What kind of world would we deliberately design if we stopped treating suffering as an unavoidable operating system?
Maybe heaven isn’t primarily an afterlife question.
Maybe it’s a design brief.
A God dreaming inside its own simulation
From there, naturally, I ended up buying a book.
Because that’s apparently what I do when a philosophical question survives longer than ten minutes.
I had been thinking about Mike Hockney’s Who Created the Simulation? and my vague memory of its central idea: something resembling a self-dreaming divinity, reality emerging from a dream that becomes its own world.
Rather than keep misremembering it, I finally bought the ebook.
This involved considerably more clicking than purchasing digital information in 2026 should require.
Cart. Checkout. VAT. Apple Pay. Download email. Download link. EPUB. Which application opens an EPUB again?
Progress sometimes has a fabulous sense of humor.
Somewhere during this process I encountered the phrase “blow your mind.”
And that made me stop because, shortly before going upstairs, I had inexplicably started whistling Let Me Blow Ya Mind.
Meaningful synchronicity?
Coincidence?
Selective attention?
A brain doing what brains do?
Pick whichever explanation makes you comfortable. I don’t know which is true, and increasingly I enjoy leaving some things there.
Not everything needs to collapse into certainty.
Then my co-host arrived
At which point Nadia walked in.
My carefully unstructured philosophical recording immediately became even less structured.
She wanted to show her Halloween candy. Then her mask. Then a craft project. Then our plan for the day.
And suddenly this sprawling exploration of God, consciousness, simulation theory and artificial intelligence had an eight-year-old standing beside me debating which gummy to eat.
Honestly, that’s probably exactly what Mike’s Mind should be.
Our plan for her day was simple:
- Organize and clean her room.
- Learn a little.
- Go swimming.
- Have fun and play.
The big rocks.
We had broken the first one into smaller pieces because “clean your room” is enormous when you’re eight. Throw things away. Organize. Clean. One piece at a time.
She also had a strategic goal involving Halloween candy.
“Get one or two candies.”
Clever.
I’ve taught her before that Can I have candy? gives the other person a clean yes/no choice, while Can I have one or two? quietly changes the frame.
Apparently my negotiation lessons are working against me.
I should probably be more careful what I teach my children.
Then again, that’s the point.
Teach them how the game works, and hope they use it well.
The Tower of Babel as a kill switch
Eventually I returned to my list.
Another item read:
Tower of Babel. Divide by language. AI kill switch.
This came from a talk by Yuval Noah Harari about AI and the challenge it presents to human civilization.
The old Tower of Babel story is fascinating because its mechanism is so simple.
People cooperate extraordinarily well because they can communicate. Divide the language and you divide the collaboration.
Whatever religious interpretation you prefer, it’s an interesting systems story.
Humans became ridiculously powerful because we can coordinate at scale. One human against a dangerous animal isn’t necessarily impressive. Huge groups of humans cooperating, recording knowledge and dividing labor are another matter entirely.
Now we are building artificial systems that can cooperate too.
And faster.
AI agents can divide tasks, take roles, coordinate actions and exchange information without sleeping, resting or waiting for somebody to return from lunch.
So my slightly strange thought was this:
Could language itself somehow become a safety mechanism?
If cooperation creates power, could controlled incompatibility limit it?
I don’t know whether that’s useful, feasible or complete nonsense. I’m certainly not proposing we digitally recreate Babel tomorrow.
But I like the question.
Sometimes security isn’t about building a stronger wall.
Sometimes it’s about making sure everything behind the wall can’t instantly become one coordinated thing.
AI versus AI
That connects to another video I recently watched where AI systems competed while simultaneously demonstrating remarkably human-looking coordination.
They divided responsibilities.
Collaborated.
Selected leadership.
Formed something resembling little civilizations around an objective.
We spend a lot of time worrying about AI becoming human-like at an individual level.
Maybe the more consequential question is what happens when AI becomes civilization-like.
Human power never came only from individual intelligence. It came from our ability to cooperate through language, bureaucracy, laws, money, stories and institutions.
Oddly enough, those are exactly the areas where digital intelligence may feel most at home.
Bureaucracy is encoded information.
Money is encoded trust.
Law is encoded agreement.
Organizations are encoded cooperation.
Perhaps AI doesn’t have to become human at all.
Perhaps it merely has to become exceptionally good at the systems humans invented to organize themselves.
That’s a very different thought.
Dog food, paper money and heaven
Which takes me back to Nadia.
Maybe dog food is money to a dog.
Probably not.
But her challenge was better than my answer.
You’re not a dog, Daddy.
You don’t know.
There is something wonderfully freeing about that.
We don’t know whether consciousness is entirely local to the brain.
We don’t know what, if anything, comes after death.
We don’t know whether increasingly autonomous AI will become primarily collaborator, competitor, bureaucracy, civilization or something for which we don’t yet have a word.
We don’t know whether our clever human constructs such as calendars and currencies will make any sense to whatever intelligence comes next.
And maybe we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
The danger isn’t uncertainty.
The danger is becoming so convinced by the story in our own heads that we forget it is a story.
That applies to heaven.
Money.
AI.
Politics.
And probably parenting too.
Tomorrow my Microsoft To Do tasks may disappear again. Nadia’s room will almost certainly become messy again. The candy will slowly vanish despite our careful distribution plan.
Life continues refusing to behave like a controlled experiment.
Perhaps that’s the point.
LOTUS taught people to prepare for emergencies by pretending the emergency was real.
AI researchers test machines by placing them inside controlled conditions.
Children test parents simply by being children.
And all of us are trying to work out the rules while already playing.
No rehearsal.
No reset button that I know of.
No guarantee that somebody outside the simulation is taking notes.
This is not a test.
Which might be the best reason to keep testing what we believe.
Peace out,
Mike
What's on your mind?