Philosophy

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For thy part, I do wish thou wert a blog, that I might love thee something.

Hello.  Good morning.

I’m not actually sure what’s supposed to be good about it, though.  There’s certainly almost nothing of noteworthy “goodness” in my day-to-day life.  Perhaps there are some of you out there who have “good” things happening in your lives.

I have to guess, or to suspect, that there are at least some such people among those who read my blog.  The distribution of such “goodness” is probably statistical, so even if that distribution is heavily skewed toward the “not good” end of the axis, there are likely to be at least some people who fall toward the better end as opposed to the bitter end.

I’ve been having a lot of severe pain recently, more than usual, though I’ve tried to adjust various things and habits and exercises and practices and so on to see if I can make it less severe.  Nothing has made much of a difference so far.

My boss gave me the information for a doctor he went to see when he was having trouble with his own back, and apparently this doctor did him some significant good.  I am considering going, but of course, I don’t actually have medical insurance.  Still, most offices have an uninsured rate of payment, and it’s usually not as crazy an amount as people might think, especially for routine visits and such.

It’s only when things like hospitalizations happen that healthcare becomes ruinously expensive.  That’s really what I suspect should be the only stuff covered by insurance, since that would probably drive down the price of routine care.

The fact that health insurance—for those who have it—aspires to cover every little thing (or at least began that way) encourages increases in the prices of every little thing, not least because the administration of insurance introduces new steps into the whole payment process, and that inevitably carries inefficiencies and other costs.

Anyway, I could go on and on into speculation and discussion of the economics of healthcare, but it’s a subject about which one hears so little of intelligence that even bringing it up engenders frustration.

I don’t think it will probably do me any good to go to my boss’s doctor, though I’m sure he’s good, based on what my boss says.  The problem is, I went through that whole cycle ad nauseam, for more than ten years—trying to treat my pain through interventions, through various different medications, through exercise, and of course, through surgery.

I even had a trial of one of those implanted cortical stimulators, where they thread a wire along your spinal cord that produces an electrical wave that’s supposed to interfere with pain signals.  I felt like I had been turned into some form of Black & Decker™ drill or jackhammer, since it seemed as though half my body was vibrating violently.  But in order to suppress the pain, the power level had to be turned up so high that I could barely walk.

Ultimately, nothing made a huge difference in my pain, including the laminectomy and fusion of my badly damaged (torn all the way to the middle, not just bulging) L5-S1 intervertebral disc.  The surgery did reduce my pain to some degree, and made it somewhat more stable, but it certainly did not come close to making it go away.

I’m not aware of any new breakthroughs in pain management, let along pain cure, and I do keep at least a weather eye out for such things, and I have the expertise and knowledge to recognize them.  There aren’t even really any new pain medications, whether NSAIDs or otherwise.

On the other hand, it seems one can always find the would-be curtailment of people’s access to pain treatment by those who think they have some form of moral obligation to tell other people how to live their lives, despite their own existences being about as enviable as that of a hippo’s rectal leech.  Now there’s a group (the people, not the leeches) I would happily subject to steadily and inescapably increasing daily levels of pain until they finally beg for death.

Actually, they probably aren’t worth all that effort.  They should just be disintegrated so that everyone else can get on with their lives.

Back to the earlier point:  I know enough about the treatment of chronic pain, and about interventions such as epidurals and the like, to know that they are very far from panaceas.  I’ve tried them, more than once, and they have had little to no benefit.  I’ve tried a lot of things.  And yet, my pain not only continues, it spreads.  Most days, most regions of my body are in pain most of the time.  It’s exhausting, and there is almost nothing positive in my life to counterbalance it.

Ironically though, Extra Body is apparently quite a cheerful story.  I’m now well into my second edit-through of the piece, and my sister, who has read the first draft, says she thinks it has the most positive or upbeat (I don’t recall the specific words she used) ending of anything I’ve written since The Chasm and the Collision.

I don’t know where such upbeat writing comes from, other than that it’s simply the nature of this particular story, and it has been since I first thought of the idea.  It’s just not the sort of tale that has a dark or grim ending; I can’t really claim credit for that.  It’s like wondering why a romantic comedy ends with a couple getting together and not with the Great Old Ones rising from the depths to destroy the world*.  That’s just what happens (and what doesn’t happen) in those kinds of stories.

Still, at least maybe it means that someday people will actually read my story, and if they do, they will finish it with a positive feeling, and so perhaps be inclined to read more of my stuff.  (The fools!  Bwa-ha-haaah!)

Oh, well, it’s not important, and this is getting boring, just like everything else.  Almost everything is either boring or is actively unpleasant and painful.

There’s a line from the Pink Floyd song One of My Turns that goes “…and nothing is very much fun anymore”, but I would add that almost nothing is fun at all anymore.  Or, to twist the words of Kurt Vonnegut, “nothing was beautiful and everything hurt”.  Physics is getting boring, as are mathematics, computer science, biology, philosophy, psychology, fantasy and science fiction and horror, books and movies and TV shows and streaming stuff and YouTube videos…all of it is more or less unpleasant.  Human civilization overall is almost entirely moronic.

And there’s certainly nobody who particularly wants to spend time with me.  You’ve read my blog posts; at least you’ve read this one.  Can you blame people for not wanting me around?

I didn’t think so.

Anyway, that’s more than enough of my bullshit for now.  I hope you have as good a day as possible with your own bullshit, whatever form it might take.

TTFN

*Though it might be funny to write a romcom with that sort of ending, e.g., When Harry Met Sally in the Cabin in the Woods.

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There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another weekly blog post.  Last Thursday I was out sick, so I only posted a very brief, almost telegraphic announcement of the fact that I wasn’t going to write a “true” post that day, and I said that I might write a true post on Friday if I was feeling better.  Of course, I was not feeling better by Friday, so there was no such post.

I’ve nearly recovered from my acute illness—probably some respiratory virus, but nothing too terribly severe—and now I am more or less back on my normal schedule.

Speaking of being “back”, though, my back has been acting up severely this week, and in an atypical fashion.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  Possibly it’s just due to being sick, with the coughing and the lying around more than usual and so on.  Possibly it’s something else.  Anyway, I’ve had to go to a combination of near-overdoses on my various OTC pain medications, and that’s not wonderful.  It got so severe yesterday that I was actually saying out loud that, if it didn’t improve, I was going to have to find some relatively high parking garage nearby and jump off it.  I was not exaggerating, as I think was obvious to those around me.

It’s easy enough to wonder why I don’t do that anyway, given that there is very little in my life that’s positive, and what positivity exists is episodic, and it can’t make up for the constant negatives of pain and illness and sleeplessness and depression and so on.  The closest I come to any comradely activity is streaming YouTube videos of people reacting to songs or movies that I like.  It’s almost, but not quite, exactly unlike watching a movie with a friend who has never seen it before.

Speaking of paraphrasing or otherwise referring to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m most of the way through the first run of editing Extra Body.  There’s a long way to go, since I usually do as many as seven such iterations before considering my editing done.  I figure by that time I’ll usually have lost any proprietary affection for a story and it will begin to bore me, so it’ll be easier to cut out extraneous material.

That’s the principle, at least.  I don’t know how well it’s worked hitherto; I’m too deep inside the process to trust my evaluation.  I did at least transcribe the material I had written so far, in passing, on HELIOS, so that if/when I’m ready, I’ll be able to pick up writing that by hand in its first draft.

Extra Body is my first non-horror story in a while (unless you count the beginning I made on writing The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which is certainly not horror, but is also certainly nowhere near done, if it ever will be).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s a good choice to have reverted to a sort of lighthearted science fiction story set in the modern world, but at least I was able to squeeze the first draft out.

Of course, I’m paring down the word count as I go.  As I’m sure is obvious to all of you, I get rather wordy when I write, especially when I’m using the computer keyboard, since I type quickly and usually can do so more readily even than I can speak out loud.

I’ve been reading some more books about quantum field theory (and related subjects) lately.  It’s still very intro level stuff, of course, but either because recurrent exposure to increasingly technical material is gradually sinking into my head, or because I’m just getting a tiny bit “smarter” overall over time, I’m actually finding some of it more familiar and understandable than before.

I must say that I was a little bit proud of myself not too long ago when I was thinking about how complex numbers are represented using a two-dimensional plane, with internally consistent mathematics and whatnot, and I wondered if one could have three-part complex numbers.  I soon realized that only even-numbered ones would work, and then I learned that these were indeed a thing (i.e., quaternions) and that indeed only even-numbered versions of such things can work.  Of course, it’s very difficult to visualize something that has four dimensions, so you just have to do the math, and I haven’t started to work on or learn that seriously, but I played with some “higher order” complex-number multiplications a few times, which was how I saw that only even-numbered ones, with separate “imaginary” roots would work.

On a vaguely related note:  I was listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast yesterday evening.  He was speaking to Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist who specializes in facial recognition and processing centers of the brain, and she mentioned that the attributes of a face can be thought of as many-dimensional, in the sense that there are numerous “variables” that can be represented about any given face, and that they effectively comprise a higher-dimensional space.

Then she turned the matter around and noted that there are apparently those who consider using such things as faces as ways of intuiting mathematical or related systems with higher dimensions, thus representing them in ways that the human mind is capable of visualizing.  I though that was a fascinating notion*.

It reminds me little bit of the concept of the “memory palace”, a mnemonic/rhetorical tool that originated in ancient Greece (so I understand) in which one associates the aspects of, say, a speech one is going to give with imagined artifacts or decorations in some imagined hall or room, so that the aspects of that speech can more readily be remembered and brought to mind when needed.

There are several fictional characters, most notably Hannibal Lecter and the BBC’s Sherlock, who use rather exaggerated versions of these memory palaces.  The one described in Hannibal is more coherent than the one in Sherlock, but they both take great liberties with how the concept was originally used.  Nevertheless, for the longest time, thanks to the amusing tableau** Thomas Harris described for how Hannibal Lecter had “stored” Clarice Starling’s (fictional) home address, I could readily reconstruct her address at will.  I think I may still be able to do it.  It should be something like “#33 Tindall Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22308”.  If anyone wants to check my recollection, that would be welcome.  I’m not certain I got it right.

I’ve usually found such mnemonics more trouble than they’re worth.  It’s easier for me to connect concepts in the real world, building mental models of the way things work rather than trying to memorize.  This means I probably don’t learn as quickly as some do, but I learn deeply when I do, and it’s easier to connect one model to another and to spot analogies and similarities and possible connections between systems that might at first seem unrelated.  That was quite useful in medical practice, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Oh, I almost forgot:  Welcome to the first day of August in 2024!

That’s all I have to say about that.

Apparently the summer Olympics are currently taking place, but I’ve been unable to muster any interest in them, though I used to love them, and I find that the manufactured controversies about some apparent misconstrual of the opening ceremony or some such (and the juvenile ripostes by political antagonists of the original misconstruers responding to the supposed offense) all serves simply to reinforce my feeling that not just the human race, but indeed all life of any kind, is a bad idea.  Thank goodness for the apparent inescapability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Anyway, I feel I’ve been meandering about here, randomly bouncing from topic to topic, without any consistency or coherency, so I’ll bring this to a close soon.  I fear that this once-weekly blog posting suffers from the fact that there are topics I probably would have brought up as solitary daily blog posts when I was doing them, but that I now want to try to squeeze in here.

I just can’t write (or edit) new fiction and write daily blog posts too, not while I’m forced to keep my day job.  If anyone out there wants to pay for my living expenses and support me so I can both write new fiction and write daily blog posts while still studying physics and programming and the like in the meantime, please, let yourself be known!  I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Otherwise, I’m pretty sure none of this is going to last very much longer.  My pain and dysthymia and alienation and insomnia are increasingly unpleasant, and there are fewer and fewer things in my life that compensate.

Here’s to Macbeth’s proverbial last syllable of recorded time.  L’mavet!***

TTFN

*It does come up against difficulties when considering the notion of orthogonal axes of vector spaces being able to be rotated into one-another.  It’s hard to see how one could intuitively consider rotating the variables of, say, eye size and cheek color into one another, or what an inner (or “dot”) product or cross product of two such variables could mean…though with the latter, it makes the use of the “right hand rule” an amusing invocation of a slap in the face…or at least poking someone’s cheek.

**Involving Jesus (age 33) marching along with a .308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms, followed by J. Edgar Hoover in a tutu, followed by Clarice driving a “Tin Lizzy” model T Ford, going past Arlington National Cemetery.  Something like that, anyway.

***This is an expression I invented this morning, the counter-toast to the famous L’chaim, which in Hebrew means “to life”.  Then, being me, I jotted down some words for the first verse of a parody song of “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof:


“To death!  To death!  L’mavet!

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death!

Here’s to the father I tried to be

Here’s to that travesty

Drink L’mavet, to death,

To death, L’mavet.

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death.

Death has a way of releasing us

Luring and teasing us

Drink L’mavet, to deeeeeaaaath…”

That’s as far as I got, but I did only work on it for about five minutes, so, it’s not too bad.

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That but this blog might be the be-all and the end-all here

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time once again for what has become once again my weekly blog post.

I miss doing daily posts, but it’s hard to fit them in along with writing new fiction and the like.  I could probably do it, but that would pack the time before work every day, and probably would overflow into the beginning of my usual work time, and I’m already always so tired from pain and insomnia and anxiety and depression.

I’ve even been doing a very modest amount of guitar playing, though the arthralgia/arthropathy in the base of my thumbs, and in my other fingers as well, has made that frustrating.  There are songs I could play quite well before that I’m having trouble playing now, though I’ve been insistently practicing them out of frustration and stubbornness.  I suppose it doesn’t matter; it’s not as though anyone else is ever likely to hear me play guitar again.

I also don’t really see the point to the daily blogs.  I’ve occasionally used them as rants to express some of my thoughts on things that were irritating me, but though I put those thoughts out into the world, I doubt that they have ever had any impact at all on any issue.  But to a greater degree, I had hoped that the blog would serve as a kind of therapy and a cry for help at the same time.

Perhaps the therapy part worked occasionally.  I am still alive for the moment, though I don’t necessarily call that a success, since I seem to feel steadily more anhedonic with every passing moment.  Every day is dominated by discomfort, physically and mentally, and there are very few compensatory positives in my life.  No change I can envision making on my own seems likely to improve anything…at least no change I have the wherewithal to make.

Obviously, the other, related purpose I mentioned for my daily blog (the “cry for help” part) hasn’t played out.

I guess it’s a bit like those whistles they attach to flotation devices on airlines, for you to use if you have a “water landing” and actually survive.  You can blow them and…I guess, what, alert the coast guard or whomever is searching for you?  But that assumes someone is searching for you and knows where to look for you, and can even hear that pathetic little whistle in the middle of the ocean.  It’s laughable.  I guess it’s more “cry for help theater” than it is a cry that might succeed in summoning help.

That’s the way it is, I suppose.  Everyone is helpless and adrift, some of them are just more deluded than others.  It’s those who are most able to be objective, by choice or by nature, who tend to be more depressed, not just because the universe is vast and civilization so puny, but more because almost all humans imagine that they are important to the universe.  It’s not necessarily bad if they think that they have the potential to become important—that’s not necessarily delusional (as discussed in David Deutsch’s book, The Beginning of Infinity).  No, they imagine that they are currently important.  They imagine that their moment in human history, let alone cosmic history, is the crux of causality, and many of them believe that the very universe itself was created so that they (or those like them) could exist.

Pathetic.

In their self-importance, they cause so many problems.  This in itself is not inexcusable; no one can foresee all possible outcomes of any actions.  But then, instead of seeking the means to fix problems that arise, many of them seek to blame the problems, to find scapegoats, whether among other people or among imagined supernatural devils and demons, because of course, since the universe was made for them, they could not have caused the problems.

Ugh.  Let’s get off that train of thought.  It’s too frustrating.

It’s July 11th today, which in the American date ordering fashion is 7-11, so there are no doubt specials and sales going on in the international convenience store chain 7-Eleven®.  Enjoy them if there are branches near you and if you like that kind of thing.  You can probably get a deal on a Slurpee® or something similar.

Now let’s briefly discuss my fiction writing, going back to the original intended subject of this blog*.  I have written a decent amount this week:  4,824 words since last tally, bringing the total to 75,070 words.  That’s 114 pages long in the current format.

I am within striking distance of the end of the story, though it may seem that I’ve said that before.  But in this case, I am literally on the cusp of the final major event of the tale.  It’s not impossible that I could finish the first draft within this coming week, barring (as always) the unforeseen, and assuming I write some on every workday.  I am not scheduled to work this Saturday, so there will be fewer days for writing than last week, but when stories get near to their climaxes, I tend to write a bit more, daily.  It’s even possible that I’ll write more this week, though there are fewer writing days, than during this last week.

Then will begin the editing process.  I may also start writing HELIOS, which I intend to do with pen and paper, since I think most of my best books have been written in first draft, solely or substantially, by that means.

As for everything else—well, there is nothing else.  I have no friends (other than work acquaintances), no nearby family (at least no nearby family with whom I speak or who want to see me), and no real hobbies other than this writing and my minimal guitar piddling around.

There’s basically nothing I do for fun.  There are a few things I do for distraction, but they end up annoying me because they draw me away from doing things I would feel better about, like learning more physics and mathematics and languages and computer science and so on.

I’m reading a tiny bit of fiction, but I can’t do very much of it, since it often exacerbates my depression.  When I read stories, I tend to be very much pulled into their mindset and worlds, but there are almost always multiple characters in any story, and there are usually friendships and social interactions, and after I stop reading them, I’m left feeling the relative coldness and emptiness of daily life more acutely than before.  That may be a big part of why I haven’t easily been able to read fiction in recent years.

Be that as it may.  I expect I shall probably write another blog post next week, though I make no promises.  I can’t promise ever actually to publish even Extra Body, let alone HELIOS or any other of the dozens of stories for which I have ideas waiting in idea-space.  But I seriously doubt that anyone would be much the worse for that lack, anyway.

I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  I may have a tendency to misanthropy and even pan-antipathy, but the people who read my stuff can’t help but hold a special place in my heart (meaning my mind).  So I do honestly wish you all well; indeed, I wish you the best possible lives and days available to you.

TTFN

[Side note:  I doubt anyone noticed, but last week’s post was exactly the same number of words long as the Declaration of Independence is purported to be, counting signatures and title.  You’re welcome.]

*It was meant as a form of promotion for my fiction.  As someone who is not good at self-promotion, partly due to an essential and apparently inherent self-hatred, it was the best I was able to do to try to get word of my books out into the wider world.  If you’re interested in looking at and considering reading some of my already-published fiction, you can either look at the My Books page of this blog or go to my Amazon author’s page.  Of course, I would welcome anyone who wants to read my fiction, and would also welcome feedback about it.

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I must have liberty withal, as large a charter as the wind, to blog on whom I please

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another of my weekly blog posts.

It’s also the 4th of July, which in the USA is Independence Day, the day on which we celebrate the official founding of the country, the date on which the Declaration of Independence was signed and “published”.

I’m often led to wonder how many—or should I say, how few—people in the US have actually read the Declaration of Independence even once.  It’s really not a very long document.  It’s not.  There are, so I’m told, 1320 words in the document proper, which goes up to 1458 words if you count the title and all the signatures*.  I’ve written many blog posts longer than that!  And yet, I wonder how many of the most vociferous “patriots” have actually read it.  There are even YouTube videos of someone else reading it to you, if that’s easier than reading it yourself.

Most of the loud and proud advocates of one or another political affiliation aren’t really people who have first evaluated and then adopted a particular set of ideals.  They are sports fans, rooting for their arbitrarily chosen team, angry when a coach or player they don’t like is seeing prominence, happy when their team is winning for the moment, imagining that they have some effect on the game—and perhaps they do have some effect—deluding themselves that they really understand or intuit their sport well.

Ironically, of course, many actual sports fans really do have deep knowledge of their sport.  They know a bit about its history, they study actual statistics, they recognize hidden complexities, all in fields where there is almost literally nothing important at stake—beyond the salaries and careers of athletes, coaches, and commentators, and the joy of fans.

But in areas where it can potentially, truly matter to them, most people accept random streams of noise from various websites and social media platforms and pundits and—Cat help them—Fox News as more than enough data for them to use to choose political candidates.  Except, they don’t really, actually even  use any of that information, at least not any pertinent information, to pick and choose candidates.  That would require effort.

Cat forbid any of them read the Constitution.  That’s a little longer than the Declaration of Independence**, but unlike the Declaration, it is an actual, legal document—the operating system of the United States of America, if you will.  To read the whole thing, once a year—or even once in a lifetime—doesn’t seem too high a bar even for the average person to clear.  Again, I believe there are YouTube videos that basically consist of someone reading the document aloud.

And Schoolhouse Rock did such a lovely and catchy song version of the preamble to the Constitution when I was young that I don’t think I’ll ever forget it while I am alive.  Indeed, it may be that, if I ever haunt some location after death, unlucky visitors to that place after midnight on moonless nights will hear a hollow, chilling voice singing, “We the people…in order to form a more perfect union…”

Given that people read all sorts of stupidities and absurdities on social media, one might think that familiarizing themselves with the documents that underlie the society in which they live might be not just useful but doable.  It might even be useful to study something of the political and moral philosophy behind these documents, and the jurisprudence that has grown up around them since the country began.

I’m tilting at windmills, I guess.  Still, if you live in the US and haven’t read the Declaration of Independence in a while, I encourage you to do so.  Even atheists often sing carols on Christmas; if they can do that, how hard can the other thing be?

Remaining in nation-level politics:  today is also the day of a General Election in the UK.  It’s apparently expected that the Labor Party will win the majority of seats in parliament and that the Tories will be ousted from power after quite a long time “in charge”***.  I suspect it will just be another instance of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, but we shall see.  While no one actually runs or controls anything, there are actions and laws that can have effects on patterns and outcomes in the short and long-term.

It’s not as straightforward to achieve any given end as politicians and pundits would like to believe, or would like you to believe, but it does happen.  This is one reason I think we should treat all new laws and regulations literally as experiments, with pre-chosen measures of outcomes upon which to evaluate the successes and/or failures, as well as side-effects, of any given act of legislature.

It’s simply not enough to have good intentions.  It never has been, and it never will be.  Good intentions are merely the beginning of actually doing good, and they are barely even that.  They are more akin to the very first, mild early pangs of hunger that eventually must be turned into actions such as hunting and gathering and starting fires and cooking food and then chewing and eating it, or the modern equivalents thereof.

In other news, I wrote only 3,752 net new words on Extra Body this week, since I had last Saturday off.  It’s now 107 pages long (in current format), and yes, it really, honestly, is nearly done—at least the first draft is nearly done.

I’m not sure why it’s taking me so long to finish.  Maybe it’s because it’s not in any sense a horror story, so I can’t bring my darker self to bear upon it; darkness is, after all, my dominant aspect.  I don’t think that’s really the cause, though.  I think it’s really just because I am nearly out of gas, with no thoughts or hopes for any future worth having for myself.

I’ve had very bad pain this week, and my insomnia continues, and my tinnitus and disequilibria continue, and the noise and not-infrequent idiocy is no more bearable than before.  And I have very little in my life to counterbalance the negatives, to make up for the minor tortures of daily life, not least among which is the willful human stupidity to which I alluded above.

I probably ought to expunge myself from the world before I decide to try to expunge the world itself.  It’s always a temptation.  I frequently brainstorm ideas for relatively modest interventions that could destabilize the world, both politically and physically, just to try to put it out of its misery and mine.

Speaking of misery:  does anyone actually like the new Aptos font that Microsoft has made its current default?  I find it repulsive, and it makes me lean toward preferring Google’s alternatives to the Microsoft word processing and spreadsheet programs.  To whomever designed this font, I say:  I’m sorry, I’m sure you put significant effort into it, and that you did your best given the circumstances and your innate abilities and all the various vectors impinging on your state at the time…but you fucked up.

Oh, well.  That’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  In the UK, I hope you have a good General Election, with outcomes that are overall beneficial or at least not detrimental.  Keir Starmer may be a bit lackluster, but it’s not as though Sunak and his eighty-three or so immediate predecessors over the last several years have been all that impressive.

In the US, I hope you all have a nice holiday, and I encourage you to take a moment to read at the least the beginning and ending of the Declaration of Independence—you can skip the list of grievances if you must.  If nothing else, you’ll encounter compound complex sentences that would be daunting even for me to write.

TTFN

happy independence day

*I haven’t counted them myself, so I make no guarantee, but those numbers certainly seem about right, so I don’t really doubt them.

**Excluding the Amendments, it is apparently 4,543 words long—or 334 words fewer than the net new words I wrote on Extra Body before last week’s blog.  That’s far from an insurmountable task to read.  With the Amendments included, it’s still only 7,591 words.  That’s only twice as long as my shortest short story, Solitaire, and it’s far less dark and horrifying.

***No one is ever really in charge of anything, not on any significant scale.  Also, queen ants don’t actually organize ant hills, and queen bees don’t run their hives, and queen termites don’t design and manage the construction of termite mounds.  Get over it.

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Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night and, for the day, confin’d to blog in fires

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so I am writing my traditional Thursday morning blog post.  This is my first post this week—which feels odd, I have to admit—and should also be my last post for the week, barring (as I always say) the unforeseen.

It’s the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere (the Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere), and so it is the “longest” (“shortest”) day of the year.  It’s also the official beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere (winter in the south), though nature doesn’t give a flying f*ck at a tiny little rat’s ass about how humans label the days.

Speaking of labeling the days, the Tri-rail system is making a repeated, official announcement that on July 4th it will be operating on a weekend/holiday schedule, which is not a surprise.  What is irritating—to me, though probably not to anyone else—is the fact that they have set it up to say that this schedule will occur on “the 4th of July, July 4th”, which they repeat in Spanish and Creole.

It’s irritating because, if they’re going to name the holiday and then give the date, why don’t they refer to it as “Independence Day”, which is after all the original name and point of the holiday?  I mean, it’s worth recalling the ideas included in the Declaration of Independence, aspirational though many have always been and not yet quite fully instantiated.  You know, the whole right to life, “liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the fact that all (people)* are created equal, and the fact that governments only legitimately exist in order to secure the rights of the people, “deriving their just power from the consent of the governed”, and that when government fails to perform its fundamental duty, it is the right of the people to change it, with the caveat that one should not change governments lightly or frivolously.

It’s absurd to say that the 4th of July is on July 4th, because it’s redundant, quite apart from failing to acknowledge the point of the holiday.  It’s a bit like making an announcement, “El tren funcionará según el horario de los domingos el Cinco de Mayo, el quinto día de mayo.”  The fact that the announcement is in the form it takes is further evidence that humans don’t think either about the significance of the day nor the logic and concision of the language they use to convey information.

It sometimes gets to the point where one doesn’t bother trying to determine why a particular person is a misanthrope but rather one wonders why anyone is not a misanthrope.  I’m not a bigot, though; I don’t just hate humans.  I don’t think the other animals are any better that humans are (and I’m no great admirer of fungi, plants, protozoa, and prokaryotes).  They’re just less competent (in the broad sense of the word), and so their blind self-interest and response to entirely “local”** influences tends to cause less damage and create fewer absurdities and stupidities.

That’s enough of me griping about train announcements.  In other news, I have been writing this week (though I did not work on Saturday after all, because the office was closed, so I didn’t write any on that day).  Since last post, I’ve written a total of 3,731 words on Extra Body.  It would have been more—it probably should have been more—but I’ve really been writing only a page a day, and I’ve had to force myself to do that.

I’m incredibly exhausted.  My sleep has been consistently poor, even for me, and if anything it seems to be deteriorating steadily.  I can’t even rest when I have down time; I’m extremely tired but I don’t feel sleepy.

To quote John at the bar in the song Piano Man, “I believe this is killing me”.  I’m not speaking metaphorically.  Every day I feel vague and separate, like a very faintly received and poorly rendered analog television signal, dominated by static.  My dysthymia/depression is very bad, my tinnitus is just awful, making my sensory sensitivity to sound (or “SSS” for short) all the worse.  I can’t even tell if I’m writing coherently, or if I’m speaking coherently at any given day or time.  Thankfully—I guess—I speak to nearly no one, other than a few people at work, and that’s pretty limited, because I feel like I have nothing to say that isn’t inane or repetitive.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Sunday was Father’s Day, which is at best a bittersweet holiday for me; I haven’t physically been in the presence of my children since about 2013, and though I’ve exchanged emails, texts, and a few phone calls with my daughter (and she sent me a cool gift for Father’s Day), I’ve had all of one e-mail exchange with my son since 2013 (unless I’m forgetting something).  Clearly, I’m unsatisfactory and/or unpleasant even to the people I love most in the world.  You can just imagine how irritating I am to people who hate me (of which group I am the chief member).

And, of course, two Saturdays from now, June 29th would have been my 33rd wedding anniversary.  Thirty-three is, of course, the age at which hobbits “come of age”, and was Frodo’s age at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, though it was seventeen years later that he left the Shire to begin his great journey.

Okay, well, I’m rambling now.  I’ve probably been rambling all along, but it’s becoming impossible not to see it at this point, even for me.  I’ll try to get a little more done on Extra Body this week if I can.  It really is almost finished, but that’s a rather nebulous status.  I could conceivably finish the first draft by next Thursday, but I would not recommend placing any bets on it.  I also wouldn’t recommend placing any bets on me living to see it published, let alone to writing and finishing HELIOS, or anything else, for that matter.

I’m just too damn tired and discouraged, and whatever my species actually is, they seem to have forgotten about me, if they ever realized that they left me here***.  I’ve been investigating high, open parking garages in the area—they’re not as common as I would wish in this part of Florida—and experimenting with replacing the psyllium with other substances in these generic Metamucil capsules I have, just to try to figure out promising techniques or ideas.  I don’t know what’s going to happen, of course.  But I’m damn near sure that there will be no epiphany or miraculous rescue.  As far as I can tell, that’s just not how my life works.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good week, and a good beginning of summer, though of course the heat in the American east and northeast is supposedly pretty bad.  It’s rough down here, too, but that’s not anything new.

TTFN

destroyer

*Even Star Trek only fixed their androcentric version of things with the start of The Next Generation in the eighties, so we shouldn’t be too hard on Jefferson et al for unthinking sexism (they had other moral errors that were at least as egregious).  Even in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, women only got the right to vote in 1952, so the US had them beat by over 30 years.  And, of course, there are plenty of countries throughout the world where women still do not have equal rights…or often any rights.

**I’m using “local” in a relatively technical sense, here.  Obviously in these days of global communication networks of various kinds, one can be influenced by ideas and forces not merely from across the planet but also—given the information from history—from the past.  However, all these influences only come to bear upon individuals when they actually receive the information that influences them, when any incoming influence actually impinges on their nervous systems.  And, of course, no organism can help but respond to the forces that operate directly upon and within it, anymore than one can choose to waive one’s compliance with the laws of physics.  So, local, national, and international news are in this sense nevertheless all local forces.  Even gravity is really a local force in this sense—each portion of the gravitational field responds not literally to distant objects, but rather to the state of the field right next to it.  This is especially obvious in the phenomenon of gravitational waves, but is true of all gravitational effects.  And, of course, like all influences in this, our universe, the transmission of those influences cannot go faster than the fundamental speed of causality, which is the speed of light.  There is some possibility that, at least in some sense, quantum mechanics is a non-local process (or set of processes) but I have my doubts about even that.

***This is metaphorical—well, usually—and I am not literally delusional.  It merely captures how I feel about myself in relation to all the other people in the world.

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Morose and morbid, but alas, not morphean

This is getting truly intolerable.

I woke up and got up even earlier today than I have most days recently, though I went to sleep no earlier last night.  I finished my fiction writing already by 6:30 am, after having come to the office, though I only wrote a single page:  Block words 784, net words 778, percent difference about 7.7%, total words now 55,105 and total pages 84.  I didn’t have the mental energy to do more.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about this.  I am tired and stressed and borderline angry nearly all the time, and almost everything is unpleasant.  I’m trying to do healthy things, with diet and exercise and even footwear and screen time and all that, but the things I do seem only to make things either stay the same or get worse.  I’m trying very hard to pretend to be as upbeat and positive as I can be–I don’t know, have I been pulling it off here on my blog?–but I spend a substantial part of every day wishing I would die and thinking about optimal ways to make it happen without inconveniencing anyone much, or getting me locked up for trying.

I want to make something clear:  I don’t want to want to die, if you take my meaning.  It’s not a philosophical position, like promortalism or antinatalism*.  At an intellectual level, at a personality level, I would much prefer simply to be reasonably healthy and to like myself and to have a sense of a future and to have joy in the things that have reliably given me joy in the past.  I try.  I really do.  After all, I’m still here.  But to keep trying simply for the sake of “keeping trying”, simply for the sake of “not giving up”, just feels more and more pointless.  To whom am I proving anything?  For whose benefit am I lathering, rinsing, and repeating**?

Oh, well.  What does it matter?  Over 150,000 people in the world die every day.  That’s already more–every single day–than the number of people the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe will be resurrected to reign with Jesus (and yet they keep trying to recruit more people).  At that rate of death, it would take 146 years for all the people presently on Earth to die.  This seems unworkable given that humans rarely live longer than 100 years.  Only a handful reach 120, and as far as we know, no one lives significantly longer than that, as simple fact of biological “design”.  The world is a conveyer belt, transferring countless creatures from birth to the grave, but the people on it think the conveyer belt is eternal–and, in a sense, of course, conveyer belts are.  At least, they are finite but unbounded along the length of their motion, “a circle that ever returneth in to the selfsame spot“.

Oy.  Never mind me.  I don’t think I’m making sense.  I hope you’re all doing well, and that you’ve been getting much more sleep than I’ve been getting.  For goodness’s sake, don’t take it for granted!  Enjoy it.  Luxuriate in it.  Be like Shakespeare, not like Poe, with regard to your attitude toward sleep!

And pay no attention to this man behind the keyboard.  He’s not a bad wizard, he’s just a very bad man.

*Oddly enough, the Wikipedia entries I found for these subjects when looking for a link (so the curious could pursue the subjects further) I found only Swedish language entries that had to be translated.  I’m not going to bother with the links.  The meanings of the terms should be pretty obvious.

*Figuratively speaking.  I only shampoo once on any given day.

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My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they blog their watches on unto mine eyes

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again—indeed, it is the last Thursday in May of 2024, common era, and this day will never come again.  That is, it will not come again unless time turns out to be cyclical, in which case, I guess this day will come again over and over, an infinite number of times, though it would never feel that way from inside.

Certainly, in at least some sense, this day is permanent.  For instance, this is so if, based on Special and General Relativity, one can consider the universe to be a “block universe”, i.e., one in which each event and moment or whatever you want to call it in all of space and time is simply what it is and is “always” there, like a cosmic Blu-ray® that plays itself.  Except it doesn’t play itself.  Again, it simply is, and the sense of time passing is simply something experienced by tiny beings that comprise little four-dimensional braids of energy because of the way they are put together or rather the way they exist in local spacetime.

I’ve written about this before, considering the question, if we (and everything else) are permanent and unchanging local patterns in spacetime from the beginnings of our lives to the ends, might it be that, when we die, from an experiential point of view, we merely start over at the beginning, with everything in our lives happening over and over.  Or perhaps it’s more accurate to think that, in such a case, there is still a “me” that is living yesterday, experiencing it, and the day before and the year before and the decade before, and so on, in a possibly infinite continuum of moments.

If that were to be the case, then the best general advice would probably be to try to make your life such that, if you are going to live it over and over again for eternity, that will not be the equivalent to being condemned to Hell.  I think Nietzsche talked about something like this, but I may be misremembering.

Of course, each time one lives one’s life again is restarted from a local blank slate.  It’s not as though you would ever have any memory of having gone through all this before, any more than a character in a movie learns from the fact that you’ve played the movie before and behaves differently next time.  Anakin Skywalker will never avoid becoming Darth Vader, no matter how much we see that he suffered horribly and did horrific things that he regretted, all while failing to achieve what he had meant to achieve by going to the dark side in the first place.

So, however you were going to live your life is how you were going to live your life—from the outside perspective—and you should just try to do the best you can in any case, because…well, why would you do anything else?

Of course, whatever you end up doing is literally doing the best you can, since you cannot change what you do once it’s done.  See above regarding the permanence of time and so on.  Even if quantum mechanics in some way derails the “simple” spacetime block notion*, that doesn’t make the past any more amenable to adjustment.

Whatever the nature of reality ultimately is, it is, and we are not going to change that.  We can learn more and more about it and use that knowledge to our benefit, but we cannot ever escape whatever the meta-level rules of reality are, any more than a pawn can make any legal move that allows it then to change the rules of the game of chess.

Anyway, that was all good fun and we all had a jolly good laugh, but I feel that perhaps I’ve trodden such areas too often, and I’m probably boring my readers.  Apologies.

Junes is coming in two days, and it’s a relatively eventful month.  A close family member of mine has an important birthday; the Solstice will be here (Summer in the north, Winter in the south); and of course, Father’s Day comes in June.  That’s a bitter holiday for me, unfortunately, but there’s nothing I can do to change that preexisting fact; again, see above.

As for other things, well, I think I got a slightly better sleep last night than I’ve been getting lately.  I still began waking up at about 1:30 in the morning, but I was able to go back to sleep again until a little after 2 and then about 2:30 or so, and 3, and then started just giving up and fully waking up at about 3:20.  Even so, at least I was able to get to sleep somewhat earlier than I usually do, and that’s saying a lot.  It may be quite tragic that three and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep feels so much better than usual, but it does.

It’s not simply happening randomly, just to be clear.  I am making interventions and trials and seeing what helps and what doesn’t.  I’m not going to get into them for the moment, lest I cloud my own mind with the discussion.  But it’s not just that, hey, wow, I’m sleeping slightly better these last two nights, gosh I wish I knew why.  It’s the product of my always ongoing attempts to improve things when I can.

I’ve also been reading a bit for that past few days on and off—mainly Sean Carroll’s new book—but, while this is a good thing, it’s not an unadulterated good.  I won’t get into the reasons for that caveat, and in any case, from my perspective, it’s overall a positive.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to writing my one page (or possibly more) on Extra Body, and I will give a brief report on that (probably), though my brief reports are somewhat prone to digression into not-so-brief discussions of tangentially related subjects.  I am also going to be working Saturday, barring any changes, so I’ll probably rinse and repeat then.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a great rest of the week as May draws to an end and June arrives.

TTFN

*It need not do so.  The spacetime block might merely be more complex than our first, naïve notion of it, and actually be a spacetime block made of the universal wavefunction, with “branches” at every quantum decoherence and a level of splitting that may be as fine as the divisions of the real numbers, uncountably infinite.  Taken as a whole, though, these could all still be fixed and “permanent”; there would just be more of a fractal sort of character to it at the level of quantum interactions and the like.

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Brief Wednesday writing report and digressions

Today’s writing on Extra Body:

“Block” words:  738

Net words: 698

Evidently, I cut a fair few words (40 overall) in my rereading/editing of previous writing, making the difference about 5.7% today, an unusually large disparity, at least since I’ve started keeping track.  The total number of words in the story as of today is 48,422, and it is 71 pages long (single-spaced on Word in Calibri 11-point).

As I wrote today, I came to worry that I had given my character a work-week that was now almost eight days long, because I had the character mention that the weekend was coming, but it seemed a long time since the previous weekend.  So, I scrolled back up through the story, noting the day of the week in any given scene, and realized that in the moment of the story that I wrote today, it was Thursday evening.  The weekend was indeed just about to arrive.

Apparently, somewhere in my mind, I had kept track of the days in the story better than I thought I had.

This sort of thing happens to me a lot.  I seem underdeveloped in the usual tendency toward mental self-confidence, and so I frequently check and recheck things to make sure they are as I thought they were.  I check my pockets to make sure my keys are there probably several dozen times a day or more, for instance.  I’m pretty good at mental arithmetic–I do it as part of my job, for one thing, and I can total up the sales numbers as they happen faster than other people can when they use calculators, but then I always recheck the totals three different ways using Excel, and when they are all the same and agree with my numbers, I consider it tolerably likely that I’m correct.  But I never feel certain.  Even though mathematics is the realm of theorems, and once proven, such theorem-laden information should be epistemologically final, I don’t ever feel final about it.  Perhaps this is part of why I am incapable of being religious; faith doesn’t even make any sense to me.

I also find that confidence, as expressed by other people, especially strong confidence, is almost always distasteful, in a powerful, visceral way.  I have severe contempt for people who make declarative statements about things they cannot know for sure, especially about the states of mind of other people, and about other people’s intentions.  Observing discourse about politics is almost always nauseating and infuriating.

The more confident someone is, the less I trust them, because I’ve noted that most people are far more confident than they are justified in being about most things.  And yet, many humans respond to the confident people positively, granting them pseudo-authority, even when–perhaps especially when–their confidence is not based upon anything testable or peer-reviewed or reliable.  This is part of why I hate thinking of those who hold political office as “leaders”.  They are almost always not leaders in any meaningful sense of the term, or they should not be.  I think it would be much better to think of them as employees, and to treat them accordingly.

Oh, well.  Perhaps this sense of uncertainty and the lack of reliability of people who nevertheless have outsized impacts on the lives of others is part of why I have trouble sleeping (though I think it’s mainly inherent and neuro-humoral, and related to what I suspect is ASD).

I slept a little better last night than the night before or the night before that, though it’s not saying much.  I felt vague and punchy all day yesterday, and I pseudo-jokingly said to my coworker that I wondered if anyone knows how to get in touch with Michael Jackson’s former doctor, because I could really use some Propofol.  It’s a pseudo-joke because, while I said it as if it were a joke, if someone offered me the option of being put under with it, even given the risk of death, I might take that offer.  I would certainly consider it.  Though I would have to feel reasonably confident that I was getting what I thought I was getting.  I suppose that’s part of why I wouldn’t really ever want to use illicit drugs–I would never feel comfortable that I was actually getting what I thought I was getting, let alone in any kind of reliable dose.

I hope you all feel vastly better than I feel.  It would be at least some crumb of comfort to be reasonably convinced that the large majority of people in the world tend to be much happier and healthier than I am.  If not, then what’s the point of bothering with the world?

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If Tuesday morning is like this, and Tuesday afternoon is never-ending…

It is Tuesday morning, the 28th of May in 2024 AD or CE, depending on how you prefer to write it.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter much to me; I’m okay either way.  I only first encountered the designation “CE” by the time I was in college (or “university”‒again depending on your preference), but I get why people use it.

I guess it’s probably silly to think that anyone should care whether I indicate what calendar era it is in which I’m writing.  I don’t suppose anyone would think I was writing a blog post in 2024 BC (aka “BCE”).  How would one even know toward which year one was counting down, if one were writing such dates?  Still, who knows how dates may change in the future, and whether someone might stumble across my blog posts in some unguessed age, on some weird, digital archaeological expedition.

How will such searches of the past even happen in the future?  If we advance beyond our current kind of online and personal storage, what would even happen to the data presently on the Internet and web and cloud and whatnot?  Heck, if all power went out for a significant amount of time in the near future, I would suspect that much of the stored data on the net might be lost.

Of course, quantum information will be conserved, if we understand that part of nature as well as we seem to understand it.  But the fact that it exists is not the same as being able to recover it.

Online is not forever.  Even if the actual data related to something sticks around, there will be so much other data that it will be as invisible as a single leaf in the Amazon rainforest as seen from space.  Perhaps far more so.  Very little that happens online is salient to anyone even as it happens, let alone after much time has passed.

Anyway…I’m writing this post on my phone in the back of an Uber heading to the office, because I again slept horribly last night, despite taking melatonin early in the evening.  I don’t know what to do about this sleep problem.  As John at the bar said to Bill*, I believe this is killing me.  And I don’t think I’m being melodramatic or hyperbolic**.

I mean to write at least a little bit of fiction this morning, but my last experience using the laptop computer in the backseat of an Uber was unpleasant.  To be honest, though, just about everything is unpleasant now.  There’s little if anything that brings me even transient joy.  There is occasional, momentary escape in the form of humor, for instance, but even that is becoming more and more difficult.  Mainly, I just feel ridiculously tense and guarded and tired and in pain pretty much all the time, or at least the vast majority of it.

I don’t want to keep doing this.  It’s just not worth it.  Nothing I do and nothing about me is worthwhile.

<sigh>  I’ll add an addendum about my fiction writing before I post this.

***

Well, I wrote 798 “block” words and 799 net words, which means that when I reread stuff today I added a word relative to the previous state of the story.  Still, like yesterday, it seems the difference is only one word, so I’m well below the roughly 3% difference seen in the past.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad or merely a neutral fact.

I could feel how foggy and vague I was while writing, so I forced myself to keep it short.  Actually, I had to force myself to write as much as I did, which was one page.  I’m not sure what my average page number per day has been since I started.  Most days that I write, I write well over one page and usually over two pages, but there have been many non-writing days, so it may average about one a day.  It’s a bit over 45 pages long so far, if memory serves.

No, that’s dead wrong.  It’s actually 70 pages long (I just checked).  That can’t be just a page a day, can it?  Have I been working on this story for more than two months?  I can’t remember.  If anyone out there has been paying attention, please let me know.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that.  I’m done for the day, at least on this stuff.  I feel like I’m done for everything else, too, but of course, the workday hasn’t even really gotten started.  I’m so tired.  This has to end soon.  Everything hurts, and nothing is beautiful, to reverse Vonnegut’s famous quote, as I like to do (I think I’ve done this recently, haven’t I?).  I only even keep moving at all out of habit.  I need just to lie down, figuratively, and let the elements*** take me.

I guess we’ll see if I’m strong enough to do that.  Meanwhile, all of you please have a good day.

*In the song Piano Man by Billy Joel

**As far as I know, I’m Euclidean.

***Or the elephants.  I’m not picky.

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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.