Neurology

by

(ASD 2) x 2

It’s Monday morning now, and it’s a new month, and I’m writing a new blog post, one that will‒or should‒not be like the old post.  Though, of course, superficially it will look like most of the others, and for someone perusing a bunch of them who does not happen to read English, there will almost certainly be no distinguishing characteristics.  Certainly there will be no meaningful ones.

Be that as it may, as of Friday evening, I have now received my autism assessment report.  It is official; I have been diagnosed as having autism spectrum disorder, level 2.

The level 2 part of that surprised me a little bit.  In case you don’t know‒and for most of you, there’s no reason why you would‒the levels of autism, not in order, are:

Level 1:  What would be called “high-functioning” autism by the hoi polloi, though that term is frowned upon by the “neurodivergent” community by and large, because it judges the quality of a person with autism by how well they can pretend to be someone without autism.  In any case, those with level 1 are people who have autism but are not significantly disabled by it, and are able to do okay on their own with minimal or at least fairly easy accommodation.

Level 3:  These are people who are more severely impaired by their autism, and are more or less dependent upon support from others; they cannot really function on their own at all.

Level 2 is mid-range (duh!) and is characterized by needing “substantial” or “considerable” support.  Here’s a quote from a web-search:  “Autism Level 2 means a moderate level of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), where an individual requires substantial support to manage social communication and daily activities, exhibiting more noticeable challenges in social interaction and repetitive behaviors compared to Level 1, but not as severe as Level 3.”

I guess my bias was that, if diagnosed, I would be level 1, since I do live on my own and I don’t really have any support.  On the other hand, there’s little argument but that my life is a complete mess, and it’s not improving.  So I guess I really don’t do so well on my own.  But it’s not as though I have any health insurance or any other access to support services to help me improve things.  Still, at least it explains a little bit about my intractable insomnia and depression and anxiety and so on, as well as all my many failed interpersonal relationships.

I don’t yet know whether this knowledge will make any difference for me.  I don’t yet know what I’m going to do with the result.  I am still digesting it.

There is, however, an amusing coincidence, if you enjoy such things*.  I was born with an atrial septal defect (a hole between the upper chambers of the heart) “secundum type”, that was repaired when I was 18.  In other words, that was “ASD” secundum type.  So, one might say, ASD type 2.

And now I have Autism Spectrum Disorder, level 2, so:  ASD level 2.

These are both official acronyms used by the medical community.  It’s nothing but a coincidence, of course, but it is a peculiar and slightly amusing one.  I have been diagnosed with ASD 2 in two different ways.  There’s only one of the two for which there was a surgical intervention that was essentially curative.  The other is something for which one just has to adjust and deal as well as one can.  Fortunately, I’m really good at adjusting to and dealing with just about anything that comes at me.

Ha ha ha ha ha!  That was a lie, obviously.  I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly good at adjusting to things, except perforce, which has certainly happened a fair number of times.

Anyway, again, I don’t know at all what I’m going to do with this information.  I don’t know how I could possibly actually seek, let alone obtain, any manner of support and/or accommodation, other than the basic stuff that happens more or less on its own.  I’m going to tell a few people at work, I think‒certainly the owner, though I feel a bit shy about that, but also my two coworkers with whom I am closest, one of whom has a child with autism.

I don’t know how much will change otherwise.  But I figured I would share this information with those of you who read this blog regularly‒a rarefied few individuals, I must say.  I guess I’ll be writing a post tomorrow, too, barring the unforeseen (a caveat that always applies).  In the meantime, I hope you all have as good a day as you possibly can.

*Well, the councidence’s existence isn’t actually conditional upon you enjoying it, but I think you know what I mean.  Please let me know in the comments below if you do not know what I mean.  I don’t like not being clear.

by

Udaimonic so-and-so, U.

It’s the last day of February, everyone.  It’s also Friday, the last day of the “typical” work week, and it is also the last day of my work week, since I am not working tomorrow.  It’s not as though I have anything particular to which to look forward this weekend, but I do need the rest.  I’ve been feeling exceptionally exhausted lately.

Alas, as you know, exhaustion does not translate into sleepiness for me, just weariness.  Somewhere in the neurologic centers and relays that connect such things as fatigue and sleep, I have a short circuit, or at least one that doesn’t perform up to spec.

Of course, my pain continues, though as always, I have tried to adapt my activity, my posture, my exercise, my shoes…even my underclothes to try to decrease my pain.  I have put a tremendous amount of mental energy into this over the years.  If I had devoted that time/energy/effort to the study of any abstract problem‒say, the dynamics of an accelerating near-light-speed spacecraft approaching its local Schwarzschild “radius” as length contraction and “relativistic mass” take effect and bring GR into play‒then I would have made significant, possibly really important, advances.

Alas, when one’s problem is chronic pain (coupled, causally or otherwise, with insomnia), it is very difficult to focus enough mental acuity upon other things.  The very nature of pain as a neurological process in animal systems does not allow it to be easily ignored, or indeed to be ignored at all for any length of time.

Those creatures which can readily ignore pain for long, or who don’t experience pain*, don’t tend to leave as many offspring as those for whom pain is both present and urgent.

It’s a similar problem for those rare people who don’t experience fear, though clinically this seems more likely to happen as a result of damage to the brain rather than being congenital, possibly because children without fear really don’t tend to reach adulthood.

It’s interesting to note that, anecdotally at least, people who don’t feel fear tend to be quite frightening to would-be bullies and predators.  They don’t behave like others do in response to potential threats, and predators tend to rely on fear in others.  A person who looks at them with no more fear than they would at a tree or a rock can be quite disconcerting for someone who has become dependent upon the fear of others.

This is one of the reasons it can be good to have dogs present if you’re guarding something.  They don’t fear guns (generally) so one can’t exactly threaten them with firearms.  And if they attack, they don’t hold back.

That was quite a series of little tangents, wasn’t it?  I think they were interesting, but then again, I was the one who brought them up, so that shouldn’t be surprising.  Whether or not anyone else is interested is difficult to guess.  It’s rather akin to the way things are with humor‒it can be very hard to know consistently what other people will find funny, or for them to know what you find funny, so you might as well amuse yourself.  Then, at least, you can watch to see who enjoys your humor, and those people are the ones with whom you can enjoy such things in the future, at least in principle.

I am horribly tired, and I’m in a great deal of pain as I write this, though for the moment at least I don’t notice any fear that might be present.  Time’s been my way when I’ve been so tired and depressed and in pain that I had no reaction to and felt no fear toward things that would normally have made me quite afraid, from minor things like wasps and bees all the way up to oncoming cars and trucks.  I don’t tend to be afraid of people much, never have been‒at least, I’m not afraid of them physically.  Socially, they can make me quite tense.  In that case, though, the tension is not the same as fear, though I guess it qualifies as anxiety.

Speaking of fear, I fear this is it for this week.  I truly hope that you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful weekend and that you are healthy and safe and eudaimonic**.

*There are people who have a genetic disorder called CIPA:  congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (i.e., they don’t sweat), and they basically don’t experience pain.  They also don’t live very long, and before they die their bodies tend to be quite damaged, often by such simple things as standing in one position for too long, since it doesn’t feel uncomfortable to do so for them.  They also don’t notice infections, and they don’t tend to get fevers.  It occurs to me, however, that though their lives are short, people with CIPA might well have significantly longer pain-free lifespans than, say, I have had.  I had pain issues starting at a pretty young age, after all.  Still, if I could be cured of all pain at this stage of my life, when I am hardly worried about my longevity anyway, I think it would be worth it.

**It’s interesting to consider the prefixes “eu” and “u” in words of Greek origin.  “Utopia”, for instance, literally means “no place”, making it clear that an imagined perfect society does not exist and may be impossible.  Whereas, if one were to write “Eutopia”, one would mean “true place” or “good place”.  Thus, my middle name “Eugene” means “true born” and is etymologically related to the term “eugenics”.  Mind you, only a fool would believe that I was actually the product of some eugenics program, that I am some true-life Khan Noonien Singh***.  “Eugene” was just my paternal grandfather’s name.  On the other hand, while eudaimonia means “good spirit” and refers to a state of general emotional and mental well-being, “udaimonia” would mean “no spirit”.  That sounds more pertinent to me, don’t you think? 

***Though I suppose one could speculate that I was a failure of such a program.

by

I could a blog unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course‒Valentine’s Eve, if you will.  I don’t mean to imply that every Thursday is Valentine’s Eve (which would imply that every Friday is Valentine’s Day).  No, no.  For the sake of any future archaeologists who might be trying to piece together tattered bits of our civilization, among which is this blog post*, I’ll point out that Valentine’s Day falls on February 14th (every year, without even any breaks!), and today is February 13th.  I’ll also point out that I am probably the only one who would think of it as Valentine’s Eve.

As you may be able to tell, I have nothing about which to write, today.  Don’t worry (as if you would), that won’t stop me from writing.  But I am distracted by mental exhaustion and rather severe pain that’s been bothering me and exacerbating my depression all week.  I know that my depression is not dependant on or caused by my chronic pain‒I know this because it predates it by a good twenty years‒but Batman knows it doesn’t help.

I mean, think about it:  you have dysthymia (aka chronic depression, with dips into full-on major depression), probable undiagnosed ASD with all its associated difficulties, you had a congenital heart defect (also called an ASD!) requiring open-heart surgery at 18, and now you have chronic back pain from a disk rupture/tear and “failed back surgery syndrome” for about 20 years (so every day for 20 years has been dominated by pain), and your career is wrecked, you’ve been to prison, you have no social life, no friends (outside of work), no romantic attachments for more than a dozen years (after having been divorced after your marriage of 15 years and then having only one, short and ultimately rather catastrophic, relationship after that) and you strive for self-improvement‒which you stubbornly keep trying to do, because you’re stupid that way‒but each time run into the barriers and obstacles and quicksand of your mood disorder, chronic pain, and probable “neurodivergence”, sending you what feels like three steps backward for every one you took forward.  Why would you not want to give up?

What, other than foolhardy stubbornness (and literally mindless biological forces), could drive someone to keep going and keep trying when there is no point, no goal, no reward, no aspirations, and no significant amount of even transient joy (though there is some)?

Whatever it is, it’s associated with such a high degree of tension that I cannot even sleep at night without waking frequently and early as if I were a soldier in the jungles of wartime Vietnam or something.  It’s really stupid.  I’m very irritated by and with myself.

But I have not yet been able to find effective solutions.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t any‒the potential solution space might just be very large, and the subspace of workable solutions much smaller‒but it also doesn’t give any reason to be convinced that there are effective solutions.  There may be no answers, there may be no “right” way to go.

Oh, well.  What was I writing about…or, rather, what was it about which I was writing?  I don’t know.  Valentine’s Day, future archeologists (perhaps virtual beings?) trying to find clues to the attributes of our civilization, the pointlessness of continuing to live without connection or companionship or activities, no full escape from pain (ever), no good nights’ sleeps, all these weird things were matters about which I wrote above.

Enough.  I’m annoyed by myself; I can’t even imagine how annoyed you readers must be.  Really, I can’t.  My apologies.  I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish.  Nothing, really, and possibly nothingness***.  But I have nothing else to write right now.  I hope you all have a good day.

TTFN

*This, of course, raises the question of how future archaeologists would even be able to see my blog without having already understood much of our civilization.  After all, unlike paper artifacts such as books and magazines, every written thing on the internet and web requires functioning computer systems, including processors, storage, internet protocols, languages from html to Java, C+, Python, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, I don’t know what, as well as all the necessary hardware.  This is something people who say stupid things like “online is forever” don’t seem to grasp:  if we lose electrical power or some other process interferes with electronics, all the data on the internet is useless.  Hard copy books can decay of course, but that is much slower; they are much more self-contained stores of information, much less contingent.  That’s something about which to think, as the world approaches the brink**.

**Yes, I did that on purpose.

***That was a deliberate sentence fragment, used to convey a sense of drama and intensity.  I don’t know if it worked.

by

And I looked, and behold a pale cat

Well, I have some relatively good news, which is why I decided to write a post today instead of just leaving it:  Dorian, the light gray cat, has returned.  Well…he was back last night, at least, though this morning he was nowhere to be seen once again, which is itself somewhat unusual.

He was a bit scraggly, with some traces of dried blood around his fur on the side of his head and neck, but it didn’t look like it was his blood.  He actually looked lean and healthy, moving very much like the hard-ass stray cat that he is.

I’m guessing that he got into a pretty big fight at some point‒he seems prone to them‒and then hid away somewhere while he recovered his strength.  Then, that pale grey shadow took a new shape* and grew again.

I think stray cats, like defective and damaged people, don’t like to show any weakness to those around them.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they are unable to show their weakness, even though they may crave acceptance and support.  There are good, sound biological motivations for this in stray cats and other mammals; showing weakness or injury can invite further aggression from other cats and even encourage predators.

Of course, human males (or anthropoid creatures living among humans, such as I) are no exceptions to that tendency.

It’s also been said that, in many ways, people on the autism spectrum are like cats, at least in some ways, and I can see the point, though it is an oversimplification.  Still, it leads me to speculate that, sometime in the relatively deep past, perhaps two separate subspecies of humans (maybe the legendary Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons) existed, one being more naturally ultrasocial, the other more constrained but with other capacities that aided their survival.  We know that Neanderthals, for instance, had bigger brains than so-called modern humans, but the structure appears to have been slightly different.

Perhaps it’s the genes from such a separate subspecies that led to some people having ASD or other versions of “neurodivergence”.  To be clear, I don’t know that there’s any good evidence that this is the case.  I did encounter at least one study that looked for markers known to be associated with the autism spectrum and the DNA residua of Neanderthals present in people of European descent.  There seemed to be some correlation, but I didn’t think it was particularly impressive.  So there’s not a lot of data to support the hypothesis.

It would be nice‒in some ways‒to think of oneself as just a different kind of human, not as something alien.  But I think that’s probably a silly dream for me.  I do not belong here in any serious sense; I am an alien, a mutant, a replicant, a stranger.  And to humans, of course, a stranger is presumptively an enemy unless and until proven otherwise.

Anyway, Dorian was back last night, but gone again this morning.  We’ll see if he returns.  There are other cats who come around.  But, of course, there is no real affection from most of them.  They come to me opportunistically, because I put food out for them.  I am useful to them.  Similarly, I am often useful to humans in the world.  I have many skills and abilities, so I have frequently found that people like to have me around to help them get things done.  But eventually, the negatives of my presence outweigh the positives, and people go away (or send me away).

I don’t blame them.  I want to go away from myself, though I have never had any desire to be anyone else.  I would prefer oblivion.  Or maybe I would just prefer rest.

Speaking thereof, I slept almost four hours last night, and of course, I awakened and couldn’t go back to sleep in the wee hours of the night, and I am now at the office finishing this post.  I don’t look forward to the weekend‒there’s nothing good about it‒but at least I can collapse and try to recuperate.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything next week, or just leave everything be.

I feel perched on the borderland between life and death, and the Undiscovered Country beckons.  It must be really great there, because no one who goes ever comes back.

*To be honest, it’s pretty much exactly the same as the old shape.

by

There is no title–just a lease. Ha ha.

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m on my way into the office again, since we are open today.  And therefore, as I warned you, I am writing a blog post.

I have no idea what I’m hoping to gain by doing this.  I have no clear notion even of what in principle could be gained from this.  However, I am a creature of habit, as well as of compulsion and desperation, so, well, I’m doing this.  I also try very hard to be a man of my word, though I probably fail as much as anyone does at that.

I don’t really have much news to discuss.  There’s little percentage in discussing the actual news, i.e., events from around the globe, since in the modern world saying something online that someone disagrees with is tantamount to being a revolutionary religious heretic in their eyes, endangering not only the world but the souls of the unborn.

Of course, one of the expressions that most irks me in this vein is when people say that someone is “destroying their existence” or something along those lines, by what they’ve said.  This is obviously nonsense.  I try very hard not to say unkind or hurtful things to people‒courtesy is the lubricant of civilization, after all‒but mate, if I wanted to destroy your existence (and acted on that want) you would not be complaining about it; you would not exist.

This is part of the stupid conflation of words with violence, an idea that can only really be held by those who have little experience with real violence*.   I’m sure I’ve discussed that here before, and it doesn’t really bear repeating.

Yesterday morning, I had a little bump up in my mood and energy level, which I didn’t understand, but I also didn’t really question at the time.  Maybe it was because the holidays are over or something, I don’t know.  Maybe it was because a reply I made on threads got hundreds of likes‒which surprised me‒or because a deliberately stupid joke I made in response to another thread got a decent number of likes and no fewer than two people posting gifs of famous scenes of people saying “Boo”.  That made me chuckle, because it was more or less exactly the response for which I was hoping.

I don’t like to think I’m that shallow, for such things to significantly give me a boost, but who knows?  This stupid human body and limbic system with which they saddled me has all sorts of bugs and hacks and workarounds that just piss me off.

Anyway, such online responses are very temporary and shallow for me, enjoyment wise.  And yet, alternatively, when other people actually contact me directly via social media, in most cases, my immediate response is stress, tension, hyperalertness, anxiety, etc.  And in me, any form of fear quickly sublimates into hostility and battle-readiness, usually in a very literal sense.

I often have to take hours and hours before I can reply to a simple greeting through one of the various messengers (even ones that aren’t obviously bots trying to sell something or other, which I ignore) and sometimes it takes me days.  Even ordinary SMS messages can be stressful.  When I hear the text alert on my phone, my usual reaction is either “What do you want!?” or “Oh, shut up, will you?” before I even know who sent the text.

Even positive texts from friends and family, perhaps in response to my own holiday greeting texts sent to them, cause tension, even though I’m glad to receive them.

I suppose one could call it anxiety, but that’s not exactly the way it feels‒though maybe I’m splitting hairs.  Anyway, I just feel at a loss whenever anyone tries to communicate with me, especially if I’m mentally engaged in something else.  I feel as though I’ve forgotten entirely what one is supposed to do in such situations, but I know that I’m inclined to say or do stupid things.

So, I have to pause and think and give my brain time to digest the fact that someone has messaged me.  Somehow, it always feels as though it is a threat‒ironically, it can be more threatening to receive messages from someone I like than from someone I don’t, because those are people whose opinions about me matter to me, at least in principle.  And I know I always screw up relationships with people who matter to me.

It’s even stressful to see when I have comments here‒but please don’t let that dissuade you!  I want comments, I appreciate them, just don’t take it personally if I take a long time before responding to them.  I won’t say preparing to respond is as bad as trying to work up one’s nerve to walk across hot coals, but maybe it’s analogous to preparing to jump into a very cold lake.  Even if you know that, once you get used to it, you’re probably going to enjoy it, every time there is a kind of “stage fright”.

It’s analogous with physical contact for me.  I have no skill with how and when to initiate physical contact with someone, whether comradely or romantic or whatever.  This skill I have never been able even to begin to acquire, let alone to master, though back in the day I got pretty good at faking my way through seeming to feel natural with verbal interactions at least.

This probably has been a large contributing factor in my dolorous and limited romantic history.  Even when with someone with whom I wanted to be intimate, and who I knew wanted to be intimate with me, I have near-paralytic difficulty starting anything, even something minor like a touch on a shoulder.

Part of that is an automatic warning in my head that says, “Danger, danger, you are making a mistake.  There is no way that anyone, least of all this very special person, could want you to touch them in any way, let alone to do anything further.  You are disgusting!  Don’t inflict your slimy touch on someone else, especially not someone about whom you really care.”  Well, it’s words to that effect‒it’s rarely thought out explicitly, it’s just the uncrystallized, supersaturated feeling those words convey that tends to get in my way.

Oh, and I also tend to get pretty tense when someone touches me‒even if it’s a significant other, sometimes, and even though, in the right situation, even a minor touch can be soothing‒because I feel like I don’t know how to react and I’m sure I’ll screw it up, and anyway, they’ll be in danger of catching cooties** if they touch me.  And, of course, a lot of the time I don’t really want to be touched.

I don’t know how I got onto this topic, but anyway, my temporary boost yesterday lasted only a few hours.  I didn’t sink to as low as I had been on Thursday, but after all, if you’re treading water, it may seem for a moment, due to the chaotic action of the waves and maybe a random burst of extreme effort from you, that you have risen higher above the surface of the sea…but you will not stay elevated.  You will sink back down to the level of whatever passes for neutral buoyancy, after briefly dipping lower.  And, of course, unless you reach shore or a passing boat finds you, sooner or later, you will drown.

That is, unless you’re lucky enough to be eaten by sharks.

*Or perhaps those who have suffered brain damage due to real violence, but those people can be cut a lot of slack.

**Figuratively speaking.  I don’t have lice (which is what I am led to understand the term “cooties” originally meant) nor any other literal contagious infestation or infection.

by

My charity is outrage, life my shame, and in that shame still blog my sorrows’ rage.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and it’s thus time for my now once again weekly blog post.  I hope you’re all pleased.

Before I go any further, does anyone out there know any way to reset the default font in Microsoft Word back to Calibri?  As I have mentioned before, I cannot stand the new Aptos font.  If I could send a terminator* back in time to kill the mother of the person who designed that font, I would be strongly tempted to do so.

But, wait, you might say.  Surely if I have access to terminator and time travel technologies, there must be other, less homicidal ways to change the basic font of a word processing program.  That may well be so, but violent matricide is all such a person deserves, I’m afraid.  Anything less would not convey the degree of my antipathy.  I’m inclined to say the entire family tree should be eliminated, but eventually the line of any living person intersects with the line of all people alive on the planet, so to wipe out the oldest ancestor would be to wipe out a common ancestor to all living humans, thus wiping out the whole human race.

Hey, wait, maybe that’s not such a bad thought.

While we’re at it, maybe we can go back over three billion years ago, to that warm pool about which Darwin spoke, and spray some Lysol, thus aborting all life on this planet.  I suppose life might start randomly again somewhere else, even if one did such a thing.  After all, it happened pretty quickly once conditions became conducive, implying that it might not do just to wipe out the spot where the ancestors of all actual modern life began, but might instead be necessary literally to sterilize the whole planet.  But how do you do that if even the collision with Theia that is the presumed origin of the moon didn’t do it?

Still, while the origin of basic life seems to have been a strong or at least a rapid tendency, the formation of eukaryotes and then multicellular life seems to have been much harder, taking another two and a half to three billion years after the earliest life to evolve on the planet.  So maybe, if a different proto-life had formed, life would never have progressed beyond something like bacteria.

Okay, well, I think I’ve made it clear that I don’t like Aptos.  And now that I’ve finished the first draft of Extra Body, I think I may in future switch over to using Google Docs for my word processing.  I hate unnecessary change in the first place—such as all the tweaks and upgrades and nonsense that all the apps and systems are constantly enacting, and the changes in WordPress that nearly always make the platform less convenient—but when they are changes for the worse, I really cannot abide them.

What misguided notions led Microsoft to think that their weird little new font with its curlicues and malformations of letters would be an improvement?  Can entire software companies develop global degenerative neurological conditions?  Or is it just a matter of the second law of thermodynamics, ensuring that any local cleverness is an ephemeral exception?

Just look what’s happened to the United States.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I have completed the first draft of Extra Body as of yesterday morning.  I did not write on Friday, because I really felt like crap, mentally.  I honestly suspected that my brain was crashing, experiencing a burgeoning system failure (speaking of degenerative neurological conditions).  But then, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, I wrote a total of 5,599 words, bringing the final first-draft tally to 80,676 words, at 123 pages.

I don’t know if the tale is any good, but it’s certainly impressively long for something that was imagined as a short story.  I’m going to take a very brief break before I begin my intended draconian editing process, during which time I mean to transcribe what I’ve typed so far of HELIOS** into a spiral bound notebook so that when I get to the appropriate stage, I can just continue writing that first draft by hand.

Of course, this is all extremely speculative.  I don’t expect that it will come to fruition, because I know that I simply cannot survive as my life is and—more importantly—as I am.  In case you can’t tell, I’m constantly almost completely defined by tension and hostility (though I do my best never to allow them actually to be released unjustly; I may almost always wish to wipe out all life in the universe, but I almost never do it).  The world, the planet, the biosphere, what have you:  none of it seems natural to me, none of it seems good or beautiful or welcoming.

I feel like I’m already in some Lovecraftian otherverse, not just a stranger in a strange land but an alien entity in an alien universe, where there are not even an integer number of spatial or time dimensions.  I truly sympathize with Agent Smith in the original The Matrix, when he says, “I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer.  It’s the smell—if there is such a thing—I feel saturated by it…”

Of course, I don’t think he was literally saying that it was solely the smell that bothered him.  This was merely the metaphor, the shorthand, the figurative focus of his antipathy.  The sense of smell is merely the most elemental, the oldest, the most direct sense, and it tends to elicit the most visceral responses.  Even bacteria can be said to “smell” the world.

Lest anyone be fooled, I want to make clear that it’s not politics and social dysfunction and the like that make me so antipathic toward the world, though politics is pathetic and contemptible.  But politics—including dishonesty, hypocrisy, willful stupidity, delusion, political violence, and all such manifestations of primate dominance hierarchical jockeying—has always been pathetic and juvenile and worthy of sneers and nausea (as well as occasional mordant, contemptuous laughter).

Anyway, that’s about a thousand words in this post already.  I could go on and on spewing vitriol, but I don’t think it would make much difference.  I don’t know how I can possibly survive as I am, as things are.  More to the point, I don’t know why I would possibly survive as I am, as things are.

The world is disgusting, my life is almost entirely uncomfortable and frankly painful, and above all, I find myself disgusting.  I try to distract myself with writing, and with some music, and with studying physics and mathematics and languages, using various books and apps and so on.  I even pretend I have friends by watching YouTube videos of people reacting to songs movies I like.  But nothing is fun.  And none of my chronic pain and sensory issues have improved.  And don’t even get me started on insomnia!

Oddly enough, I think I would feel less alone if I were truly the only person on the planet, or if I were a castaway on an island.  Perhaps I’m wrong, of course; that is purely speculation.  But it feels like it would be the case, and that’s not a good feeling.

Well, I hope (and suspect) that most of you are doing and feeling better than I am.  That almost has to be a good thing.  Please take care of each other and yourselves.  Despite all the people and things I feel that I might wish didn’t exist, or that could be obliterated, you are among the rare few to whom that doesn’t apply.

TTFN

*As in the movies created by James Cameron, not the line that separates night and day on an astronomical body illuminated by a star.

**A little less than 3,000 words.

by

Numbers of words and words of thoughts and thoughts of consciousnesses

Since I came up with the idea and mentioned it in my blog on Saturday, I could not fail to put the idea into practice of keeping count of both the number of words in the new “block” of fiction writing I did today and to keep track of the change in the total word count, to compare them.  This was especially true since, on rereading what I had written on Saturday, I realized that I had started a conversation between two characters rather abruptly, and so I added in a more natural beginning to that interaction while I was editing.

This didn’t have as big an impact as it might have, since I also pruned things slightly while rereading.  In any case, I kept track of the net total word change and the word count in the new block of writing, and those numbers are:  1,228 words in the new block written today, but a net increase in word count of 1,264.

I don’t know how representative this is of the typical disparity, but it’s less than a 3% difference whether you use the larger or the smaller number as your denominator, so it’s not huge.  Still, I’ll probably keep this up, at least for a while.

After I had finished writing and gotten up to get ready to get off the train, I had a weird train (ha ha) of thought that led from me thinking about the fact that one can no longer readily stream series A through I of the British show QI in the US, to how I had needed to order the DVDs for those seasons through Amazon UK, which I did quite some time ago.  This led me to think about the shipping process, and how seamless and rapid it had been–it was not as fast as ordering something that’s sourced locally, but nevertheless it was impressively rapid.

And I thought of the various people involved, and how not one of them had been aware of the whole process from beginning to end, and indeed, possibly not one of them had thought about what was being sent and to where.  Each part of the process was more or less automated, or at least occurred “locally”, in a phase-space sense*.  And yet, the whole has become a process that takes place with remarkable efficiency, despite no member of the chain of the process really knowing too much beyond their own part of the job.

And I thought, the whole economy is like this, locally, nationally, and globally.  Indeed, all of civilization is like this; everyone simply acts in response to local forces and events and incentives and disincentives, and the process turns into a self-sustained, much larger entity that has not been created by anyone, and is certainly not run by anyone (any more than a bee hive or an ant hill is “run” by the queen insect).  Nor should it be, since no human mind is capable even of grasping very precisely and in detail anything beyond a tiny part of the thing itself–this is probably part of why “planned economies” always fail, and until there is a super-intelligent AI (and perhaps even then) they always will.  It’s like trying to put one single nerve cell in charge of the entire human brain and body.  It simply doesn’t have the capacity to do such a thing.  When one nerve cell’s activity spreads with relatively little impediment through the brain, you get what we call a seizure.

Anyway, all that led me to thinking about whether it would ever be possible for a civilization, in the aggregate, to become truly sentient and self-aware.  I don’t mean that the members are self-aware; obviously they are already (at least some of them, and to varying degrees).  I mean, could the civilization as a whole develop self-awareness, develop what the philosophers of mind call “qualia“.

Our civilization is probably far too small to instantiate such a thing, currently.  There are after all “only” about 8 billion humans on Earth, compared to, for instance, the roughly hundred billion neurons in each individual human brain (mileage may vary) and tens of trillions of cells in an entire human body.  But perhaps, someday, if a civilization becomes large enough and remains interconnected enough, the lights may come on, so to speak–actually it would probably be a gradual process, rather like those European, “energy-saving” lights; it’s unlikely to be an instantaneous change.  But it could, in principle, happen.

Of course, those who espouse the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness™, might say that it could never happen, that qualia, that true consciousness requires some other ingredient or process.  I’ve never encountered an argument from any of them that impresses me, though.  Even Roger Penrose’s ideas about quantum mechanical processes being necessary for human consciousness–in denial of the Church-Turing Thesis and related ideas of universal computation–seems to me to be pure motivated reasoning, albeit by one of the great minds of the modern world, so it’s still worth exploring his ideas.  Even when he’s wrong, Penrose’s thought is more fruitful than that of the vast majority of people when they right, yours truly included.

I’ve arrived at no conclusions, of course.  It was just an interesting mental diversion that I thought I would share with you readers, since I have no one else with whom to share such things.  If any of you have any thoughts or ideas about them, please feel free to leave a comment below, here on my blog proper, not on other social media–I would prefer a forum in which other people who read comments on my blog could comment, too, and that’s not likely to happen on Facebook or on “the site formerly known as Twitter”.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I’m not going to edit this much before posting, so apologies if there is any persistently awkward wording or if there are any unnoticed typos.  Have a good “Not Memorial Day” day**.

*Of course, everything in the universe behaves locally–even quantum entanglement is “local” in a very specific sense.  Even gravity is local–the local gravitational “field” responds to the state of the nearby gravitational field, not literally to distant objects, which is part of why gravity can “escape” from black holes.  The larger-scale laws of nature emerge “spontaneously” from all these tiny, local interactions, or so it seems based on the best information I have.

**I mistakenly thought today was going to be Memorial Day because people at work kept talking as if it were.  However, that holiday is next Monday.  Sorry if I confused anyone, and thank you to my cousin for pointing it out to me.

by

Both my ears are ringing down the curtain

I’m planning on writing at least a page on Extra Body once I get to the office, but I haven’t left yet, and so I’m starting on a bit of a blog post, which I plan to finish with an update on what I write.  I don’t want to get out the laptop computer and use it at the house before I leave.

I have some unfortunate news‒unfortunate for me, at any rate, though it may not matter much to anyone else.  Yesterday, May 9, 2024 AD, at roughly 3:25 pm Eastern time, I suddenly began to have tinnitus in my left ear, matching what I have had in my right ear since…about 2007, I think.  I have very poor hearing in my right ear as part of that process, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on with my left, so far.  I can only say that it’s quite distressing.  I felt like I wanted to scream in the office yesterday afternoon, when it happened.  I still want to scream.  It’s been going on for just over 13 hours now, and there is no sign of it abating.

I fear this may be the proverbial final straw for me.  I don’t know if I can go on like this.  There are already so few motivations for me to continue living, and so many things that make life unpleasant.  I really don’t know what to do.

It’s slightly interesting that the pitch in my left ear is almost identical to the pitch in my right ear, just perhaps an eighth of a step lower.  I’m not sure what might be behind that fact.  Perhaps that’s the pitch range at which my cochleae are most vulnerable.  I am not really sure how I would find out.

It’s worth noting, though, that there is no internal evidence of any form of “beat” phenomenon such as would happen with real, external sounds that are close in pitch but not exactly the same, as their waveforms go back and forth between constructively and destructively interfering with each other.  This makes sense, of course; they are not real sounds but are neurological phenomena, and are occurring in opposite ears, and are thus initially processed in different sides of my brain.  The “beat” phenomenon in slightly dissonant pitches is a literal, physical, external phenomenon, not a neurological illusion.  This, at least, my current experience is making clear and convincing to me, at least provisionally.  I guess I knew it already, implicitly.  Has anyone else out there had this experience?

Anyway, as I said, if this bilateral tinnitus continues, I don’t know if I can.  It’s one thing after another, or rather, one thing on top of another.  Chronic pain, dysthymia/depression, insomnia, possible ASD, solitude, and now double-tinnitus.  My cup of hemlock runneth over, and maybe it’s time I just quaffed that motherfucker.

I guess I can give this a few days to see if it resolves.  I’m not optimistic.  Since the right ear tinnitus began, in the latter parts of the first decade of this millennium, it has waxed and waned in intensity, but it has not stopped for a moment.  But one instance of a phenomenon does not a pattern make, though my knowledge of the subject from a medical point of view gives me more data, and it’s not comforting.

I’ll take a break writing now, for the moment.  I’ll complete this post later.

***

Okay, well, I wrote 728 words on Extra Body, which was basically one single-spaced page.  I guess that’s good, considering the circumstances.  It’s nice when the office is quiet‒it’s quieter than the house is when no one is here, because at the house, except in deep winter, I have to have the AC and/or fan on or it becomes unreasonably hot.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do, though.  The ringing in both ears is constant, like that high-pitched noise they play that only young people are supposed to be able to hear.  I don’t even want to play guitar or anything, for fear of it interacting.

I guess I’ll see what happens.  I’m off this weekend; maybe the noise will abate.  Or maybe I’ll finally go fully mad, like the Master in response to the drumming sound in his head.  Which reminds me, the new Doctor Who “season” starts tomorrow.  I guess there is that to which to look forward.  I really like Ncuti Gatwa so far, so hopefully it’ll be nice.  I’m off work this weekend; my coworker will be back in the office today.

I hope you all have a good weekend.

by

Had I pow’r, I should Pour the sweet blog of concord into hell

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday yet again, and I’m writing my more traditional blog post, but for those of you who weren’t expecting them, and so did not look, you should know that I also wrote posts on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  I had no drive or desire to write any fiction; it has felt utterly pointless to do so all week.  Everything pretty much feels pointless.

I did spend a bit of time yesterday sharing all my blog post links to my published works‒not counting music‒to X and LinkedIn and Facebook.  I don’t know if many people saw them, though my sister did leave a comment on Facebook on the shared link for Hole for a Heart, stating that it is one of my scariest stories.  Thankfully, it was intended to be scary, so that’s quite a good compliment.  If I’d meant it to be a light-hearted children’s fairy tale and it was one of my scariest stories, that would have been troubling.

I’ve long since noticed, from early on in my writing, that I tend to put horror elements into a lot of my work.  For instance, in Ends of the Maelstrom, my lost work from my teenage years‒which was an overlap of science fiction and fantasy‒I ended up having quite a few sequences that followed a large and powerful (and quite mad) cy-goyle named Chrayd, who was basically a horror monster, and whose actions didn’t directly push the plot forward.  His portions of the book were clearly little horror stories.

Also, my son read the original 2nd chapter of The Chasm and the Collision (which became the second half of the first chapter, “A Fruitful Day and a Frightful Night”) back when he was, I guess, about 11 or 12, and he said specifically that it was scary.  Of course, obviously it was meant to be scary for the main character‒I did call it “A Frightful Night” after all‒but I guess I did a good job of conveying Alex’s fear and making it at least slightly contagious.

I feel that at least some of the portions of Outlaw’s Mind ought to be quite scary‒it’s certainly meant to be a horror story‒but that may just be because I know what’s happening, and that at least some of events of the story were inspired by one of my two experiences of sleep paralysis (which is a truly frightening thing).

Of course, the two stories that are currently on my burners are not horror stories at all.  One is sort of a whimsical, light science fiction tale (set in the “ordinary” world), and the other is a more “light-novel” science fiction adventure, possibly good for young adults, based on a comic book I had long-ago envisioned.  I’m sure I will throw some horror elements in the latter by accident‒it seems to be how my writing works‒but it’s not any primary part of it.

Here I am writing as if any of those stories will be published and read by people.  Isn’t it cute?

One good thing about writing horror is that there is no reason to have any “trigger warnings”.  If you’re the sort of person who needs trigger warnings, you probably shouldn’t be reading horror stories.  I admit, though, that a few of my works probably merit greater-than-average caution; I’m thinking most specifically of Solitaire and both parts of Unanimity.  These are stories in which some quite “realistic” horrors take place‒things that could, in principle, happen in the real world.

Not that Unanimity itself could happen in the real world.  It couldn’t.  But many of the things done in the book that are horrific are possible and even realistic in a sense.

As for Solitaire, well…yeah, there’s nothing supernatural there at all.  It’s an entirely realistic story, probably too much so.  It’s short though, so a potential reader wouldn’t be troubled for long.  Still, that story is probably for “grown-ups” only.  Yet, as I’ve noted before, I wrote the story, all in one night, while I was in a perfectly good mood, keeping my then-future-fiancée company while she worked overnight on a project.

It’s curious to think about where these ideas originate and how they arise.

Even if we ever have a full description of the workings of a human brain, I doubt it will ever be possible to model, predictively and precisely, the specific outputs of any given one.  There are hundreds of trillions to a quadrillion synapses in a typical (or even divergent) brain, and those synapses are not simple And, Or, Xor, Not, Nand or other basic binary logic gates.  Their connections are almost continuously variable, and the reactivity and set-points can vary over time as well, in response to intracellular and extracellular conditions.

A quadrillion-bit system would never be close to big enough to model a human brain, even if we knew how to write the program.  And the possible outcomes of different processes in such a system would rapidly grow to numbers so vast they make the number of cubic Planck lengths in the accessible universe vanishingly close to zero.

As for “neural networks”, well, don’t let the name fool you too much.  They aren’t really modeling neurons or even acting very much like them.  I mean, they are super-cool*, don’t get me wrong!  But I don’t suspect that any of them, at least not by itself, will ever be a true AGI, not without also incorporating some analog of basal ganglia, limbic systems, and brain stems‒drives and motivations (general and partly alterable utility functions) in other words.

It’s also a concern (mainly orthogonal to the above) that, as more of what is out there on the anti-social webernet has been produced by LLM-based chat programs, the programs will more and more be modeling their future responses on responses not created by humans but by previous uses of the GPT style bots, and so they will more and more model only themselves‒a kind of solipsistic spiral that could rapidly degenerate into a huge, steaming pile of crap.

Of course, the programmers are clever, and they may well find ways to circumvent such issues.  I suppose we shall see what happens, unless civilization fails and falls before that comes to pass.

Wow, all that was a curious course of thought, wasn’t it?  I certainly neither planned for nor predicted it.  It just happened (like everything else).

As for what will happen for the rest of the week, well, I’m far from sure and can’t even give a very good guess.  I may write blog posts tomorrow and Saturday, or I may write fiction, or I may do neither.  I may take a long walk off a short pier, literally or metaphorically.  If Hugh Everett was right, there will probably be some versions of me “somewhere” who take each of all possible actions.

In the meantime, I sincerely hope that the only possible Everettian branches in your futures are ones in which you are happy.

TTFN

*Though at least most of them don’t need literally to be supercooled, unlike most modern quantum computing systems.

by

I’m too tired to think of a good title for this post

I’m writing today’s blog post on my phone in the back of an Uber.  I could not sleep and figured I’d just head into the office, since it feels slightly more like home to me, at least when no one else is there, than does the house in which I sleep, .  I have my laptop (computer) with me, so I could write this post on it, but I think I would feel more awkward doing that.  It can be trying enough writing on it when riding the train, and the shifts and bumps and other minor accelerations in a regular car tend to be more irregular and pronounced than those in a railroad car.  There’s no track, for one thing, and also a car is much less massive, so it is more prone to lurch noticeably than a train is.

It’s a stupid waste of money to take an Uber, of course, but it’s not as though I’m saving up for the future.  I don’t expect any significant future, and to be honest, I don’t really want one, at least the way I feel most of the time lately.  Even the present is barely worth it, moment to moment.

I’ve recently learned that, in the UK at least, the average lifespan (the arithmetic mean, remember?) is only 55 years for people with autism spectrum disorder.  This average is no doubt weighted down by those who die quite young, but still, this is the UK, where there is a National Health Service.  Here in the US, where the average lifespan, at least for men, has actually recently begun to fall for the first time in any of our lifetimes, the average autistic lifespan is very likely to be lower than in the UK.  I’m 54 now.

I realize that there’s nothing magical about a statistical average when applied to an individual instance of a circumstance, but numbers mean a lot to me at least, and frankly, right now, the idea that there is a maximum predicted cutoff for my lifespan‒and that it is arriving soon‒is more of a relief and even a comfort than it is a horror.

Of course, I don’t carry an “official” diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, but as one who has, as part of his now-dead career, given who-knows-how-many thousands of “official diagnoses”, I know there’s nothing magical about them.  They are educated, best-available descriptions of what’s happening in particular instances in a medical situation.  They are useful for steering thought and decision making, but because they cannot address all details of an individual case, they can also shackle one’s thought processes and lead one astray.

One thing is clear:  I have some manner of atypical neurology.  I certainly have trouble with dysthymia and depression; I have little doubt about those diagnoses.  I have rotten chronic insomnia, which may be a symptom/sign of that probable neurodevelopmental disorder.  I also had a secundum atrial septal defect, and I have a slight cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, and these things both occur more frequently in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD (as opposed to the cardiac Atrial Septal Defect, see above).  They are far from diagnostic thereof, but their presence does shift my Bayesian estimates.  They can also be associated with other diagnoses as well, of course, but I don’t have nearly as many hallmarks of those disorders…at least as far as I’m aware.

Of course, each thing can also happen and stand on its own, being indicative of nothing but itself.  But I think we can all agree that there’s something atypical and dysfunctional happening in my brain, even if it doesn’t actually connect causally in any way to those other findings.

I did write a bit more than a page yesterday on Extra Body, which I guess is a worthwhile accomplishment.  I know it hasn’t been all that long, but I feel as if this only-one-page-a-day pattern is not giving me the benefit that I used to get from writing fiction.  Maybe it’s that I just get my juices going and then shut them down.  Maybe it’s that the story is taking so long to get on with itself.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just hoping for too much.  Hope is dangerous stuff.

I don’t know how to adjust my behavior, though.  I already tried to cut back on doing this daily blog, but found that not doing it made me very tense and stressed, since I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it.  It’s almost an OCD-like pattern.

I wouldn’t call it exactly anxiety that I feel if I think about not writing the blog (or doing any of a number of other things that I do by habit). It’s more of a kind of tension, a stress, and it can rapidly escalate into hostility.  Of course, all of these are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, the whole fight-or-flight mode, so maybe one could call my experiences anxiety.  Certainly, the physiological responses are related and quite similar.  But my mental state doesn’t feel fearful as much as angry, and even hateful.

Maybe that’s all just part of Yoda’s cliché little response to young Anakin admitting he was afraid in The Phantom Menace:  “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.”  I always wished Anakin would reply, “Yeah…the suffering of the people who made me afraid and angry.”  Oh, well, much of the Jedi philosophy in the prequels is kind of stupid, and it contributed to their downfall, but they’re fictional anyway.

Speaking of fiction, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my fiction writing.  I intend to keep writing at least a page a day, but writing it after I write my blog is stressful.  But not writing my blog is stressful.  And writing only one page a day of fiction is stressful.  And dealing with people being late to work and the noise and nonsense and the internally created rules that are not enforced when it’s inconvenient is stressful.  And commuting is stressful, and neither of the places between which I commute are places of comfort to me.

A large contributor to these problems is that, no matter where I go, there I am, and I am not comforting to me.

The Buddhists are supposed to have said that life is suffering‒or was that the Dread Pirate Roberts?  I suppose they might have agreed on that statement.  Still, you’d think that would be enough to counter Yoda’s little admonition, with the reply, “Everything leads to suffering.  What’s your pointy-eared point?”