This is that audio I mentioned this morning (and yesterday morning). I didn’t do a LOT of editing, just truncated the silences, reduced noise, and added a bit of reverb since after all the noise reduction it felt a bit dead. I honestly don’t remember exactly what I said, though I remember the gist, and I don’t know whether I was coherent. This is a bit of an experiment, just uploading without listening. Enjoy. Or don’t, if it’s not enjoyable, I won’t try to dictate your reaction.
This is today’s blog post. There are many others like it, but this one is today’s.
I have no real idea what to write about, so I just picked an opening line (which has now become the first sentence of the headline) and then waited to see what would happen. That led me to think of a series of lines from a movie showing men in boot camp or basic training. It was not, I think, the chant from Full Metal Jacket that came to my mind; I think that one went, “This is my rifle, this is my gun. This one’s for killing. This one’s for fun.” The latter is somewhat funny, but the one I recall was much more serious about the subject, i.e., “This is my rifle. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.”
It was something like that, anyway. If anyone reading recognizes the line (or the correct line, as the case may be) please do chime in in the comments below. Or, if you can recall any related, interesting, and similar quotes, that would be welcome, too. Heck, just feel free to make a comment about whatever.
Parenthetical: the thing that bothered me most about Full Metal Jacket was probably that they called their drill sergeant “sir”. You don’t call NCOs “sir”, they work for a living! Forrest Gump got that right.
As you can probably tell, this post is very much stream of consciousness style, probably more so than most. Of course, that’s the way my blog posts almost always manifest themselves. In fact “stream of consciousness” sometimes seems entirely too tame a term in general. I think it’s usually much more of a serious river of consciousness, one that runs deep, and which is cloudy with silt and other contaminants, with way more going on below the surface than can be discerned from above and outside‒or even from the privileged place of being that surface layer consciousness.
I was tempted just now to refer to someone swimming on the surface as representing the person whose consciousness is described by the river. But that’s not a good metaphor for consciousness, because it implies that consciousness is somehow separate from the flow of the rest of the mind‒only watching the game, controlling it*, as it were‒when in fact a person’s consciousness is that surface, that visible, barely more than two-dimensional, portion of the top of a river that dwarfs the Mississippi or the Nile or the Amazon or the River effing Styx.
Or, to use Sam Harris’s storm metaphor from his excellent book Free Will, “You are not controlling the storm, and you are you lost in it. You are the storm.” (Emphasis added).
Back to the river analogy.
The river of consciousness is not always smoothly flowing, as I think you would agree. There are places where it goes into one of those river-lakes where the flow can be very slow. But then there are also terrifying rapids, where all is turbulent and chaotic and perilous for anyone trying to ride it out (my readers may be able to sympathize) as well as for the mind itself. There may even be waterfalls, though I’m not sure what situation that would metaphorically describe‒perhaps a mental breakdown? Oh, well, metaphors (like similes) are always imperfect. The only thing exactly like a thing is the thing itself.
I guess that’s pretty obvious.
Drat! I realized while writing this that I forgot to share audio that I mentioned earlier this week. I’ve set it to auto-publish today, so I don’t have to worry about that same thing happening again, but I am not going to do it at the same time as this post. I don’t want to oversaturate the “market” for my thoughts, such as it is.
I just now erased a pointless digression about floods and a river again, relating to the immediately preceding sentence. I really do seem to go all over the place, don’t I? I guess that’s just one of those things that happens with some people.
I don’t mean to imply thereby that it is an unsolvable mystery. There is an underlying causality, a system of interactions, that properly explains everything that happens regarding such streams of consciousness, but it is so involved that‒even if we can ignore quantum mechanics at the level of neural interactions, which we probably can do‒we are a loooong way from understanding it fully.
And, of course, a mind can never fully “understand” itself, because it cannot perfectly model itself within itself (see Elessar’s Conjecture) except to the extent of simply being itself. And simply being a mind clearly does not imply that one understands oneself. In fact, it is, I suspect, an absolute, mathematical law that no mind can ever fully and completely understand itself. Again, see Elessar’s Conjecture.
Okay, that’s enough of this for now. I’m sure I could gabble on and on and on for hours‒and it’s not as though my thoughts stop meandering, like that restless wind inside a letterbox, after I stop writing. But you all don’t need to deal with that. How nice for you.
Seriously, though, I hope you all have a good day.
*To quote One Night in Bangkok, one of the most unpredictable hit songs ever, in my opinion. I mean it’s a white guy rapping about a chess tournament in Thailand in a musical about chess, called…Chess.
[I thought of a very stupid and sophomoric joke, inspired by a typo I made while editing. Mamifestation: when breasts are suddenly and unexpectedly revealed.]
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Awe, for self-pity’s sake!
Well, it’s Tuesday, the 23rd of June in 2026, in case any of you aren’t aware of that fact (or if you’re reading this post later…but not earlier, because I strongly suspect that it’s impossible for you to read it earlier). It’s the third day of summer and the third full day of what I rather jokingly refer to as “The Days of Awfulness” or even “The Days of Aw, Shit!”*.
The number of days in that stretch is not constant, because one of the bookends on them changes a bit every year. My Days stretch between Father’s Day and the date of my wedding “anniversary”, on June 29th. Heck, one of the regular readers here was at my wedding on that day. How cool is that? Anyway, those two days highlight and commemorate, or lament, or what have you the two greatest and most terrible of my personal failures, about the two things that have mattered most to me in all my life. They weren’t my only failures, obviously enough. But they were, have been, and are the most devastating and heartbreaking ones.
I shouldn’t dwell on them, I know. It’s not healthy. But my nervous system (i.e., me) is prone to latch onto numbers and dates and patterns and cycles and all that kind of stuff. This is part of why I tend to be so skeptical and even sometimes disdainful of people’s tendency to feel significance in truly absurd notions, like the zodiac signs and imagined alien interlopers and other such things. I recognize my own tendency to find and latch onto patterns even when they are only in my mind.
I’m fine with enjoying those patterns and even playing with them, in a sense, but I don’t want to attach some imagined significance to them. Even Newton fell into that trap, though he had more of an excuse‒you can’t be the founder of mathematical physics and at the same time know all the stuff that will only be discovered by building on your insights. That’s related to the whole “you can’t be reading my blog post before it was written” thing.
Anyway, I tend to feel pretty despondent around this time of year, because I cannot seem easily to stop thinking about those things at which I failed and which I lost. I know it’s contrary to the recommendations of the Stoics and the Taoists and the Buddhists, but I’ve never sworn loyalty or fealty to any of those -isms, I just think some of their ideas are good (and some are not, though these three are way above average in terms of signal-to-noise ratio).
I do, however, have to call attention to the fact that I am having semi-regular interactions with my youngest child, starting since after I was hospitalized with my kidney stone. We watch Doctor Who together over Discord™ and have gone to a couple of movies together, the most recent of which was Backrooms**. So, that’s very good, indeed, and those moments are the happiest ones I’ve had in well over a decade.
Mind you, my son (my eldest) still won’t interact with me at all. And I get it. Though he knows (I hope) that I didn’t do anything willfully or even willingly that caused him (emotional) pain, he still felt the pain, and that’s a hard thing to get past, especially since it’s the more recent of things (see The Peak-End Rule). Also, he’s got a stable and (presumably) comfortable and happy life, and disrupting it would be unpleasant and very stressful.
I cannot really blame anyone for not wanting me around. I know I don’t, a lot of the time. It’s been a bit of a tendency over my lifetime, for others and for me. I feel like so many people who have been around me would readily sing along with a Beatles parody called Got to Get You Out of My Life.
Ugh. Can self-hate and self-pity go together? Apparently so, and it must be a nauseating spectacle for you to take in. I apologize. I guess it’s sort of akin to Gollum hating and loving the Ring, as he hated and loved himself.
People are complicated‒brains being the most complicated local things in the universe known by us (though that could soon change). Internal contradictions don’t necessarily cause the program to freeze in people, like an old “return without gosub” error**, but there are consequences…probably.
Anyway, thank you for reading. I forgot to publish the post I had prepared with that audio file I mentioned yesterday, so I’ll do that sometime today. In the meantime, I hope you all have a good day, then double that, then double it again, and so on.
*This is a reference to or parody of the stretch of days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Jewish tradition, which are sometimes referred to as The Days of Awe.
**I highly recommend both the movie and the earlier YouTube channel series by Kane Parsons, the now-twenty-year-old (!) who directed the movie.
***I don’t know what more recent error messages are. I haven’t done any real programming since college.
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Summertime, and the living is…
Well, it’s Monday‒one day after the Summer Solstice, and thus the 2nd day of official summer‒and here I am writing another blog post.
It’s funny how weird the perception of time can be. Why, it seems like just yesterday that I was writing my abnormally long blog post from Saturday, when in fact it was a full two days ago. Weird, huh?
All joking aside, it was quite a long post that I wrote on Saturday. I wonder if anyone actually read the whole thing. I mean, I read it, course; I wrote and then edited it, after all. I don’t remember it all that well right now, but that’s because I wrote it down and I know where I can find it if I want to revisit it.
Working memory and narrative memory and all that are useful, powerful attributes of human minds, and my own copy of both of those systems is better than those of the majority of people I have encountered. But I do still have fundamentally limited internal memory, so there’s no need to clutter my hard drive with the contents of all of my blog posts. I know where I can find them, in general.
Though this triggers a thought that I’ve had before: I was thinking of doing some audio recordings of me reading some of my blog posts and sharing the audio here and as videos on YouTube. What do you think? I would love to hear input from any long term (or short term) readers as to which posts they might nominate for such a treatment.
Oh, yeah, in the latter part of last week I did a voice recording, this time about AI as an attribute-weakener for humans. It’s somewhat related to what I said recently about humans becoming‒in what is nearly the best case possible scenario‒the “pets” of future AI. Anyway, it’s pretty short, so I’ll probably edit it rather quickly and share it here and maybe do a “video”.
The annoying thing is, it ought to be quick and easy to use Microsoft’s basic video editor just to add a picture to the audio for the video, but now they have it where you need to sign in to your Microsoft account to use the program. That means mucking about with accounts on the work computer, and that’s stressful. So, I don’t know. I’ll try to think of some other solution.
Speaking of solutions and things not necessarily working the way they ought to work, my smartphone‒on which, by the way, I am writing this post‒is starting to be a bit laggy and somewhat herky-jerky* in its operations. It may be that it just needs a restart‒I haven’t done that in a while, because it consistently slips my mind.
On the other hand, the phone has a finite time of operation, meaning it will eventually stop working, as will all things that are not constantly maintained (and even they will almost certainly all fail eventually). At that point, I would need to get a new smartphone.
I really hoped not to need to do that ever again. It’s such a pain. I really hoped that I would not live long enough to need to get a new smartphone. I had various intentions regarding that, but so far they have not yet come to fruition‒as witness, the fact that I am writing this blog post.
I’m certainly feeling much less verbose right now than I was on Saturday morning. I don’t know what circumstances and local forces are behind that, but of course, I’m pretty darn sure that there are good explanations available. It’s just hard to gather and trace all the innumerable threads of the web of causality even for the tiniest of behaviors in any given moment or event. I’m no Laplace’s demon (nor is anyone or anything else, as far as I can see). All I can say for sure is that all of those events lie in the past light cone of the event itself.
Okay, well, this is getting to feel tedious to me, though I don’t know how it is for you, so I’m going to wrap it up and leave this blog post near the left end of the bell curve for word length of posts, whereas Saturday’s was nearer the right end**.
I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the week.
*Please excuse the technical jargon.
**That tail of the curve can’t really go off toward infinity, even if a mathematical description of such a curve does, because I cannot actually write an infinite number of words…though I fear sometimes it might feel that way to my readers. On the other end, the low end of the curve cannot get below zero, since a blog post with a negative number of words is like a house whose rooms have negative lengths and widths.
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Don’t make such a phus, you Sisy
Well, it’s Saturday and, as I predicted, I am writing a blog post. I’m writing it on my smartphone, because I felt lazy about bringing the mini lapcom along with me when I left the office yesterday.
I’m still in pain, of course, but it’s not as bad as it was Thursday, and combinations of NSAIDs and Tylenol and some cbd related medicine makes me able to tolerate it‒though the latter leaves me a bit loopy and slightly foggy.
Anyway, it’s Saturday, and I won’t be working as late today as during the week, so that’s good as far as it goes. It’s not much good, though, because the day is pretty much still used up, especially given my commute. One certainly cannot rest very well. Then, of course, tomorrow is the one day in which I can get things done around the house‒or around the room, as I should say, since I live in one room with an attached bathroom. So, Sunday is laundry day, among other things, and then it’s back to work on Monday.
What a lovely boulder that is, Mr. Sisyphus‒but what on Earth do you mean to do with it? It’s not actually doing anyone any good, you know. Initially, constantly rolling it up that hill made your body stronger, but you’ve long since passed the point of diminishing marginal returns and entered full-tilt into the negative returns stage, where you’re wearing yourself down.
It’s sort of like a ballistic arc: for a bit of time it goes up nicely, but it slows and slows, then it goes around the point of zero velocity and starts going down at an ever-accelerating rate. We all know the eventual outcome. As Radiohead sang, gravity always wins.
Forget Atlas Shrugged. What about Sisyphus Shrugged? It could be a story about what happens when people give up on just rolling their daily boulders to the top of the hill only for them to roll back down again, to start everything over again.
Of course, what’s-his-name‒Camus, that’s his name‒would argue, indeed he did argue, that though Sisyphus’s actions are ultimately futile as well as futile from moment to moment, Sisyphus is okay. I think his (translated) words are “we must imagine Sisyphus happy*”
Must we? I don’t know, maybe. Certainly he has a felt purpose. He has been given some drive to push the boulder up, over and over, and it’s clearly an overwhelming drive. I suppose acting on such an impulse can at least give one the satisfaction of being able to act on one’s drives**, which is almost certainly better than having strong drives and being unable to act on them. See Harlan Ellison’s classic, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
Have pity indeed for a truly celibate priest, though at least he imagines he will be rewarded for his abstinence (though I’m pretty darn sure his only reward will be oblivion…which is not without its charms). Have even more compassion for those who are truly starving.
Or, if you want the personal experience, turned up to eleven, you can try having someone waterboard you. Cutting off one’s ability to follow the urge to breathe, even for a few seconds, is (empirically) the most terrifying and stressful situation for humans. Trust me, if you ever want to have all other concerns vanish from your mind, just start suffocating*** for a few seconds‒true perspective fall on you like a very massive boulder indeed.
Anyway, even if Sisyphus does have this drive, this motivation, and can act on it, that doesn’t guarantee any form of happiness. If you’ve ever known anyone with bad OCD, you know that having irresistible and pointless drives does not tend to make someone happy. It’s not joy such people are feeling, it’s profound anxiety, which let’s face it, is just a comparatively pretty term we use to try to polish the turd, fear.
And fear is, by nature‒I almost could say by design‒unpleasant. It’s not evolved for you to be able to ignore it.
But people with OCD don’t get any lasting satisfaction by carrying out their rituals; they just get a brief lessening of their fear. That is undoubtedly better than non-lessening fear, or worsening fear, but that isn’t saying much. Losing a toe is better than losing a whole foot, but you would rather avoid both if you could.
I don’t know what point I’m making; these are just my random, stochastic thoughts. But they do seem focused on the fact that people are somehow able to keep going and doing like Sisyphus does, despite there being no evident point or benefit, and indeed, despite their existence and actions seeming like an almost comedic curse from the non-existent gods.
Some people console themselves with fairy tales about Heaven (and Hell, of course, because humans always want a “bad guy” in their stories), and maybe that’s not horrible, as long as they don’t fuck around with other peoples’ lives as part of their delusion. As far as the afterlife stuff, well, if they’re right, and it’s a good one, then hey, that’s great for them. Thumbs up. And if they’re wrong, they’ll never know it, so “whatevs”.
But it would be nice if people overall could reassess the nature of our existence, now that we’re not solely constrained by the blind idiot god, Evolution. Maybe we can develop actual, real purposes that will make people feel joyful but won’t be driven by fear‒though I suspect this will not be an “evolutionarily stable strategy”, whether for biologically evolved minds or even other kinds of minds one finds.
Humans will probably be replaced by AI, anyway, and it’s looking like it’s going to happen sooner than expected. Even if AI ends up being entirely aligned with human interests‒a very tiny region in the space of possible or even likely AGIs‒it will still be doing the thinking, the designing, the making, the growing. Humans, previously the cleverest things they knew, will become little more than pets in such a scenario. They could be beloved pets, maybe‒pampered and even spoiled‒but still just pets.
Maybe some people would be okay with that. It’s certainly not the worst possible outcome. Most other possibilities are not nearly so nice, and we don’t even really know how to steer the future toward which kind of AGI we want because we don’t know how to know what kind of AGI we want. We don’t even know how to make our own**** wants align with each other’s wants, and we don’t really know in detail what’s happening inside these minds we’re growing so aggressively and haphazardly (not much more than we know our own or others’ more typical minds).
Oh, well. Whataya gonna do? Civilization: it wasn’t very nice while it lasted, but it was probably better than what preceded it and what’s to come, at least for those not running on huge banks of GPUs. But by all means, old Sisyphumans, let that boulder roll.
*I originally made the typo “we must imagine Sisyphus bappy”, which is a whole ‘nother way of thinking about Sisyphus.
**Utterly unrelated parenthetical: I had a weird thought just while writing this sentence about whether there are any raps in a true 3 / 4 time signature, since it occurred to me that even the ones that had patterns of three syllables repeated ended up being something like three beats and a rest beat or two beats then a half note (a held double beat), but remained in 4 / 4 time. It turns out that there are a few, but it’s said (by Google’s AI) that such a time signature is not as popular because it produces difficult songs to which to dance. Evidently, rap fans don’t like the waltz.
***A crucial part of this is the inability to blow off CO2, since that is the primary and almost sole driver of respiration, not the absence of oxygen. This is why, in a pure nitrogen atmosphere, people don’t even realize that they’re suffocating, or asphyxiating, or whatever the official term is. All their CO2 is getting breathed out nicely, so they feel no panic or horror as they merely get lightheaded and lose consciousness and…well, that’s it, unless they are rescued. It doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?
****I know, I know. I’m speaking, just for the sake of argument, as if I were human.
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I’m back, but not to save the universe
It’s Friday now and I’m writing this post on the lapcom*. According to the list of my saved blog posts that auto-fills as I write in the new file name, I wrote a post using the lapcom on this date last year, though that was a Thursday and this is a Friday. That day mismatch by one is the sort of thing that tends to happen, since the “normal” year is 365 days, which gives 52 with a remainder of 1 if you divide it by 7 (the number of days in a week, in case that was unclear).
That’s a bit interesting (though only just) because of my tendency in recent time to write mostly on my smartphone; it’s relatively uncommon for the same dates to appear on the smartphone’s saved list two years in a row. I think my smartphone-writing tendency was well in place since at least last year, but I am far from sure. I have not been keeping track of that development precisely over time, so I’d be building my impression de novo if I were trying to recall the specifics.
Of course, I could just look through my list of “blog post for x-x-xxxx Xday” from the last years, sorted by date, and I would see how many posts I wrote on the lapcom in 2025 versus the number I wrote on the smartphone, which are saved to Google Drive. That’s not exactly a difficult task, but it’s also not very interesting, so I don’t intend to do it.
I’m sure it’s also not very interesting for you all to read about, presumably**, so I’ll drop that topic now.
I did not write a post yesterday, in case you were wondering, because I did not go to work. I was not “ill” in the sense of having a contagious disease; rather, I was in very severe pain and the meds I was taking to try to combat it were making me feel physically ill at various levels, so I tried to stay back at the house and rest.
It’s not very comfortable there, and I don’t especially like being there, but at least I don’t have to try to do work while feeling crappy, and I can lie down to rest my back and try to nap a bit. I can also try to pass time doing some distracting things, though nothing really entertains me or even catches much of my interest anymore. I’m just passing time all the time.
I haven’t played guitar or keyboard (nor sang) in over a week, maybe almost two weeks. My left hand fingertip calluses haven’t significantly faded, but if this goes on too long, they will. Of course, guitar calluses aren’t as impressive as cello-related ones, which I had for probably nearly twenty years back in the day. Sometimes you could see those without even having to look too closely.
My cello calluses are long gone—though there’s a “ship of Theseus” style question of whether one should consider my current calluses to be anything but the same ones, or on the other hand (no pun intended) if one can consider any calluses the same ones over time, since the skin cells turn over and so do the very atoms in the underlying living cells.
It doesn’t matter, but sometimes such philosophical questions can stimulate thought and train one to be careful and rigorous in the way one thinks, and so perhaps make one less prone to certain kinds of mental errors. They are probably worth your time if you’re interested.
Anyway, I’m going to work today, and I should also be working tomorrow, so you’ll get probably five posts this week, at least, though not contiguously. You also won’t be getting one of my altered Shakespeare quote headlines. I do those on Thursdays, out of a sense of…nostalgia, I guess, for the times when my blog was only posted on Thursdays, and was meant as a promotion/author’s note on what was going on with my fiction writing. I’m not doing any fiction writing now—and I don’t just mean “at this very moment” because that’s all too obvious—and I don’t know whether I will ever again, any more than whether I’ll ever sing or play an instrument or anything like that again.
Oh, but I did come up with and write down a rather silly story idea yesterday, for the first time in a while. It concerned the expression “time flies when you’re having fun”, but takes the point of view that “time flies” could be some form of supernatural insect. The main character could be someone who is cursed such that, whenever he was becoming joyful or satisfied with his life, these supernatural insects would begin to swarm him and eventually transport him through time to some random place whence he’d have to start all over.
It’s a goofy notion, I know.
I actually prefer the idea I had apparently written down most recently before that. It concerned a scientist who invents a truth serum or device or combination thereof that makes a person under its influence always tell the truth—even truths that they did not know before. For instance, you can ask them what the weather is like in Kuala Lumpur at the moment and they will tell you and it will be correct, even if they are in Jakarta or Tannu Tuva or Massachusetts or Poughkeepsie or some other entertainingly named place.
But the more rarefied the information is, the greater toll it takes on the mind being questioned. I proposed the possibility of asking someone what the next day’s winning lottery numbers would be, but the sheer improbability of specific answers and the fact that they are in the future overstrains and severely damages the brain of the person involved. But they would get the numbers right if they survived the process. I wonder what might come of such an invention.
I am not, by the way, giving anyone permission to use those ideas by sharing them here. You do not have permission, and I might well be inclined to bring down truly horrific vengeance upon you if you steal them in any sense. However, if I should die without ever writing either story, then after that, you should feel absolutely free to use them. You don’t even have to give me credit; I’ll be dead, I won’t care (though the present person I am thinks it pleasant to imagine being given such credit, so do with that what you will).
Anyway, that’s enough for today. As I said, I expect to write a post tomorrow, barring (as always) the unforeseen***. I hope you all have a good day today, and that you have a good weekend and so on. Heck, carry that forward as far as you can.
*I wrote Tuesday’s post on the smartphone, by the way, for those who took up my challenge to try to see if they could tell whether that had been the case or I had written on my lapcom.
**Though we must be careful with such presumption, because as we all know, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”. In the past, being a “pres” could have been a good thing, at least to some degree, but that time is gone. Nowadays, I’d rather assume than presume, since I’m often an ass entirely on my own, anyway.
***I tried to find a pithy Latin phrase that would encapsulate that expression, since I use it so often—you know, something like ceteris paribus for “all other things being equal”—but the attempts I have made so far produced cumbersome phrases that didn’t quite truly mean what I had intended when I reversed the translation process. Alas.
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Since “Evian” is “naive” spelled backwards, are its drinkers wise and sophisticated?
(This post has nothing to do with the headline, just in case you’re wondering.)
I’m not quite ready to reveal the truth about yesterday’s blog post; I’m kind of hoping that someone who doesn’t usually comment might throw their hat into the ring* and make a guess. I don’t know who such a person might be, but it would be nice to have ever more comments.
For this post, though, I will reveal that it is being written on my smartphone. I didn’t bring along the lapcom because I was very fatigued by the end of the day yesterday. This was mainly mental fatigue, but that translates into low physical energy as well, since it’s the functions of the brain that largely determine the movement of the body.
Which is not meant to imply that the brain is not part of the body; it very much is. I am no dualist in any sense of the word. The brain is an organ, and like all other organs, it has its attributes and vulnerabilities and dysfunctions. Trust me on that last score.
Or don’t trust me, that’s entirely up to you. I wouldn’t be inclined to try to cajole someone into trusting me. I’m not a huge fan of presumptive trust anymore than of giving someone presumptive “respect”. To me, respect, like trust, has to be earned, through the outcomes of interactions, and it can never really, reasonably, be complete.
Everything is always a calculated risk, including trust, even if the calculations are…not very rigorous or conscious, and even if people claim to have it absolutely. Those who make such claims are wrong or lying or both. One cannot even trust oneself absolutely. Trust me on that. Ha ha.
Anyway…
That’s just some typical nonsense or bullshit or whatever you want to call it from me. I don’t have any intention here‒not one of which I am aware‒other than just “to write another blog post”. How’s that for a positive, beneficial purpose or undertaking? How’s that for something to try to give oneself a sense of purpose or meaning or belonging? It’s pretty unimpressive, really.
As for belonging, in particular, it’s a fairly laughable notion for me. I don’t belong anywhere. Maybe no one does. Maybe the very notion of “belonging” in the social sense is and has always been a cognitive and emotional illusion.
Like individual atoms that exist within water molecules in the ocean, a person can technically be part of something bigger without any actual real involvement in that bigger thing, and without losing any nature of separateness.
Any electron in the outer portion of any atom, or anywhere else, is just an electron and‒barring highly energetic interactions‒is going to remain an electron** forever, as far as we can tell. And it is literally identical in characteristics to every other electron that exists, and they are all entirely fungible, just like the individual cents in your electronically recorded and maintained bank account.
Of course, people, despite being composed of countless numbers of such tiny, fungible particles, are not fungible. They are too complicated, there are too many ways to put electrons and quarks together to make a person for any two to have even a nanoscopically tiny chance to be identical in all pertinent senses.
Okay, I don’t know what point, if any, I’m trying to make here. Probably there is none. Or if there is, it is probably some desperate, quietly terrified attempt to connect somehow with some kindred spirit(s) somewhere. However, I am getting weirder and weirder all the time, or so it seems to me, so it seems ever more unlikely that kindred spirits exist for me, if they ever did.
Like Melkor, I’m looking to find something or someone in the Void, but alas, it is just…void. And my thoughts continue to be unlike those of my brethren, and, like Melkor, I become ever more dispirited and spiteful, though at least I’m not trying to conquer or destroy Arda. I went through that phase back when I was a preteen and teenager.
I’m not saying I was necessarily wrong when I recognized that people are absolutely shit at trying to create and run civilization well. I just don’t think it’s probably worth the effort to correct things, because it would be a neverending effort.
Oh, well. That’s enough of my spewing words for the moment. There seem to be brush fires down in south Florida‒we can all smell the smoke‒but it seems unlikely that they will contribute much to the destruction of current human society.
Is that good? Is it bad?
I don’t know.
I hope you have a good day.
*Would such a hat become invisible? Would it, if it were strong enough, gain the power to sense and dominate the wearers of all the other rings? Would it inevitably become evil?
**The same cannot be said for muons, let alone taus, the two higher mass “species” in the electron family. They are unstable and rapidly decay to smaller particles, but they have the same charge and spin as an electron. Electrons, on the other hand, appear to be at some manner of ground state; they are too “light” to decay into anything smaller spontaneously, and any changes they do undergo cannot violate the conservation of charge, so they are limited.
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He reads the post with just his fist and still believes he gets the gist
Well, I said yesterday that there would be roughly a 50/50 chance whether today I would write on the lapcom or on the smartphone, and guess what: today I am writing this either on the lapcom or on the smartphone! How’s that for an accurate prediction?
But wait. Which one am I using? Can you tell just by reading this post? Are you sure?
Of course, I know which one I’m using. It would be most ‘passing strange if I did not know whether I am writing this on my lapcom or on my smartphone.
Is there a way for you, the reader, to tell? Probably. Almost certainly.
But do you know what that way is and how to apply it? I doubt it very much.
That’s not an insult, by the way; I don’t know what it is or how to apply it, either. I’m just pretty sure there is such a way.
Of course, from my own point of view, the metaphorical wavefunction has already collapsed, and there is only one possible remaining outcome, whereas before there were (at least) two.
I say “metaphorical wavefunction”, invoking the quantum mechanical notion of the collapse of previously superposed quantum states into one final state, but there are good reasons for us to doubt that notion’s accuracy even within quantum mechanics. After all, it would be the only known physical process in the universe that is not time-reversible and which destroys information about prior states of reality. That oughtta be a pretty big red flag for scientists. It’s almost as bad as finding a process that seems to violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics*.
I find the Everettian approach to quantum foundations much more intuitive, personally. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more likely to be correct, but I think, I suspect, that it is.
Anyway, in the macroscopic world, the seemingly superposed possibilities that present themselves as we come to the point of a decision are not actual superpositions. They are merely models we render in our minds of possible outcomes to try to improve our decisions. In fact, in almost every case, it’s likely that the choice we make was “determined” ahead of time‒by the laws of physics, not by us.
I would guess that it was that way when Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics became so dominant despite its failings. The problem is, Bohr and/or Heisenberg (I don’t recall which one) was by reputation exceptionally charismatic, and he was well able to ensure that his/their notion(s) became predominant, not because the ideas were more convincing, but because the people were (or the person was).
That’s not a good reason.
This is part of why I dislike the practice of public “debates” about controversial topics at pretty much any level. When it becomes a contest in and of the moment, the “winner” of the debate is not necessarily the one with the best evidence and the most consistent and clear reasoning. It is, often, the one more skilled at mere rhetoric, the better sophist, the one with the better ability to manipulate human cognitive biases, the one with the better speaking voice, the better looking one, the one who makes the best jokes (especially at the other’s expense).
This is not a good or reliable or useful way to measure empirical reality‒except that part of reality that tells us who is more superficially persuasive to Naked House Apes.
That’s part of why the court system in general is so bad: the one who wins in court is not necessarily (or even probably) the one who is right, but rather the one who has the better lawyer with more resources. This usually translates to “the one who happens to have more money.” That’s not a good basis for any kind of system that refers to itself with the term “justice”.
Oh, well, what are you gonna do?
Well, it would be nice if you could do your part toward at least improving these things in whatever way you might be able, especially if you are in any kind of influential position. This here, this writing, is me doing at least some of my part, for whatever it’s worth.
In the meantime, I’d be interested to get your feedback: do you think this post was written on the lapcom or on the smartphone? Why do you think that? Are those your real reasons? Or are they the reasons you create‒some might say confabulate‒to justify a decision you made for reasons that are not clear to your conscious mind?
Please let me know in the comments. And talk amongst yourselves there, too, if you like.
Also, please have a good day.
*This is not to say that it is impossible for net entropy to go down in a closed system. It’s not only possible, but if you wait long enough, it’s going to happen somewhere, for the 2nd Law is statistical in character. But for anything but the simplest situations, you’re going to have a wait for such an outcome. Even if you’re just flipping 13 coins until you get all heads or all tails (or any other specific, ordered pattern you might want), then it’ll take a little while. Getting all heads in a row (say) on 13 coins is a one in 8192 chance, if my mental arithmetic is right. It would take some time, but you could pretty readily flip those 13 coins more than 8000 times, especially if you flip all 13 at once each time. But anything much more involved than that (and just 2 more coins would require four times as many flips) becomes rapidly and astonishingly more unlikely. If you’re waiting for any sensible region of, say, the Earth to experience spontaneously decreasing entropy, you’re going to be waiting such a long time that probably the current time (about 13.7 billion years) since our Big Bang would seem like an unnoticeably tiny fraction of the blink of an eye. And, of course, the Earth is not going to be around that long‒not more than about another 4 or 5 billion years at most. If that seems like a long time to you, you need to adjust your perspective.
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Cosmic. Way out. I can relate.
Well, here we are beginning another Monday, and I’m writing this post—again—on the mini lapcom.
I say “again” not because I am writing this very post for a second (or more) time, nor because the last post I did was written on the lapcom, because it was not. I mean “again” in the sense that last Monday I wrote my blog post on the lapcom. I also did so on Tuesday and on Wednesday last week, but I cannot yet say that I will do so tomorrow and the next day. I won’t even say “barring the unforeseen”, because I can rather easily imagine, and therefore foresee, situations in which I will not write those blog posts on the lapcom.
Of course, I also cannot predict whether, like last week, I will write Thursday’s and Friday’s posts on the smartphone. It’s not that unlikely, but I don’t know ahead of time whether I will write them on the smartphone or the lapcom. I could make predictions, but I think anything deviating terribly far from 50/50 would probably be very much a rectally sourced prediction.
I will say, though, that if I do write blog posts the rest of the days this week—which will include Saturday, alas—I will almost certainly write them either on the lapcom or the smartphone. How’s that for a bold prediction? It’s not a certainty, of course, but then again, pretty much nothing is. It’s getting into the high 90 percentiles though, I’d guess. I’m not skilled enough at probability/decision theory to get much finer in my estimation than that.
Anyway, that was about 250 words of utterly pointless drivel, wasn’t it? It’s quite odd how much and how quickly I can write about more or less nothing of significance. Mind you, from a certain point of view, nothing is really of significance. Also nothing is of significance. I mean two different things by those two different uses of the same words.
The first means that there is almost nothing in the universe that, in itself, is significant (cosmically speaking, of course—on different scales, significance has different requirements). No individual, localized thing or fact can matter much on the largest scales. On the other hand, nothing—the vacuum, absence, whatever you want to call it—is significant. This partly refers to the fact that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerated rate, and this seems to be due to the vacuum energy, the energy of “empty” space. A uniform energy density in space creates a negative pressure, which creates “negative gravity” in a sense, and that drives an expansion of spacetime.
The nature of this vacuum energy, or cosmological constant, is definitely significant in that it will determine, almost solely as far as we can tell, the future fate of the universe.
Of course, the term “vacuum” may be somewhat misleading given its ordinary usage (quite apart from when one refers to the household appliance). The vacuum is never really “empty” despite what the usual meaning of the word is. It’s full of all sorts of quantum fields as well as the gravitational field that is spacetime itself. The vacuum is just when these fields are in their lowest possible states/energy levels*.
There’s also the famous Higgs Field, which actually is one of the quantum fields, but it is interesting in that it is a scalar field, meaning that it has magnitude at every point but not direction (like a map demonstrating local temperatures on Earth’s surface, as opposed to one detailing the wind, which will have magnitude and direction).
If this seems a peculiar distinction to you, think of the electromagnetic field, which has both magnitude and direction at every point. It’s actually a little more complex even than just that, because of course, electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the electromagnetic field, but each one of them is a vector field (with magnitude and direction) which interacts with the other, so the combination of them is something more involved.
Also, when energies are high enough (changing the way the Higgs field interacts with other fields), the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force turn out to be part of the same thing, called the electroweak force. And, of course, there is the question of whether all the fields are really just aspects of some “higher” field or structure.
This would be some form of “unified field theory” (not to be confused with GUTs, or “grand unified theories”, which are less grand and less unified than unified field theories). Of course, we don’t know that there is a unified field. There may not be. There may just be a minimum number of fields that cannot be further reduced.
If M-theory (AKA string theory) is correct, then yes, there is a unified form from which all fields derive their character thanks to the shapes and resonances of their vibrations in high-dimensional spaces. On the other hand, other versions of quantum gravity such as “loop quantum gravity” leave gravity (AKA spacetime itself) as a separate kind of field, composed of tiny, tiny parts (the “loops”) knitted together.
At least some versions of this theory have been disconfirmed, however, because it predicts a very, very slight difference in the speed of travel of electromagnetic waves depending on wavelength, and light from extremely distant quasars has been tested and found to be uniform in arrival time (based on variability in the quasars and specific catastrophic events, if memory serves) from wavelength the wavelength, even to tiny parts in billions of light years traveled.
Okay, well, that’s surely enough trivia for anyone early on a Monday morning. I wish I didn’t have to work today, but then again, I wish I didn’t feel like I have to do anything. But I do feel that way. I guess it’s probably better than being inert. Without a goal or goals—terminal, instrumental, or otherwise—there is no action.
You can call it a “drive” instead of a “goal” if you prefer. That may be a more accurate term, since nature doesn’t act in a teleological way (outside of thinking minds) but instead generates drives/urges/impulses, some of which lead to increased genetic reproduction and some of which lead in the other direction. Over time, the former are the ones that tend to accumulate, for what are probably obvious reasons.
Enough. I already said it was enough, didn’t I? Anyway, I hope you all have a good day. And remember, if you tend to come to this blog via other social media, you can subscribe to it using your email, and then you’ll get emails sharing every new post with you directly.
Take care.
*There is also a thing called a false vacuum. Spacetime itself could be in such a state, if the vacuum energy is capable of tunneling to an even lower energy level than the one at which it currently resides. This would not be a good thing for the current inhabitants of the universe, but at least they would never know it if the drop-down happened, because everything that currently exists would be erased at the speed of light. The universe as a whole would even be affected, but it wouldn’t be endangered per se.
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I almost forgot to put a title here again
I’m writing this blog post on my smartphone, as I did yesterday’s post, and in contrast to the posts from Monday through Wednesday. I haven’t yet received any direct feedback on whether there’s a difference for the reader or what it might be, but the numbers seem to indicate that the phone-written posts are more popular than the lapcom-written ones.
This could, however, be mere statistical fluctuation, having no relation to whether readers find one or the other type of post better. Quite possibly, most readers wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other without being told, even if the lives of their dearest loved ones were on the line.
Such is the difficulty with finding truly dispositive evidence in ordinary life. But that’s not to say it can’t be done. One just has to try very hard to be clear-headed and objective. And I don’t mean “try to try” to be clear-headed, not just to be able to say “I tried to be clear-headed”, but actually to act with the true intent to be clear-headed.
Of course, the human senses and human brains gather a tremendous amount of information every waking moment, checking it against their hitherto-built model of reality, seeing if things meet expectations according to that model, and trying to improve that model, that map, of reality. Mind you, there’s way more info in most places than anyone can take in. That’s okay, for the most part. Most of that detailed information is irrelevant to the life and reproduction of a far-flung African ape*.
Speaking of updating one’s models of reality, I just yesterday came across a video/written course on tensors (for physicists and would-be physicists). The professor’s approach seems like it’s going to be a good one, so I’m planning on trying to go through the course.
I want to learn well about tensors (about which my understanding is not yet fully clear, though I get the gist of the basics) not just for my own curiosity‒which drives me, in principle, to want to try to understand everything in the universe‒but also because I will need skill in using them and manipulating them if I am to solve my longstanding point of curiosity in Special/General Relativity.
I have a specific question about what the theories predict would happen in specific circumstances, and I have not been able to find anyone who reliably answers it. Really, no one has answered it at all, which is not too surprising, since it is fairly esoteric.
We’ll see whether I can commit to the bit. I have a hard time maintaining focus on things for too long at once. I dearly love to learn about new things and to develop new skills, especially in the sciences‒well, also in the arts‒but it seems that after (far too short) a time I get distracted by another interesting thing. Either that or I just get mentally fatigued and need to distract myself, usually either with music or something funny.
I suppose that’s not really that unusual. But lordy, it’s frustrating. I wish I could actually want to do what I want to want to do. Maybe I will be able to do so someday. Maybe I will be able to devise or find more direct control of the regions of my brain which govern attention, focus, and drive.
Of course, we do have some somewhat direct ways to affect those brain regions. The most widely used of these ways is caffeine. The majority of people in the world use some form of caffeine on a regular basis. At least, that was so the last time I looked.
Of course, there are other such tools, some more powerful in some ways than caffeine, but they come with their own sets of difficulties: these include the amphetamines and related compounds and cocaine. They can be useful in certain circumstances, but are difficult to use well, without significantly detrimental overall outcomes.
It would be easier if we could directly stimulate (and suppress) specific areas and processes of our brains at will. Of course, the technology to do such things exists, more or less, in raw form. One can stimulate the brain with implanted electrodes, or one can manipulate it more indirectly via externally applied electric and magnetic fields.
This has been done, of course, if only fairly crudely. The technology I describe in Unanimity is (mostly) very real. Is that what makes it scaaaary?
Probably not.
Okay, that’s enough for today, and for this week as well, since I am not working tomorrow (barring the truly very much unforeseen). I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend. Have a good meal or two while you’re at it. Though, possibly, that’s implicit in most concepts of good days and good weekends, come to think of it.
Oh, well. Have good ones nevertheless.
*That refers to humans, in case it’s not clear.
