Philosophy

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“Now…what shall we talk about?”

It’s Friday, the end of the work week, and thankfully, I feel somewhat better than I did at the beginning of the week.  That’s rather unusual for me, and it has little (but not nothing) to do with the fact that the weekend begins tomorrow; it’s more about how badly I felt earlier.

Of course, many people look forward to the weekend; Loverboy even had a song about it.  And why not?  People look forward to spending time with friends and family, to being able to sleep late and relax.  It’s even possible to look forward to things like grocery shopping and yard work if it’s with and/or for one’s loved ones.

A lot of that doesn’t apply to me, since I’m almost always just by myself on the weekends (last weekend being a blessed exception).  And though it is quite nice to be able to rest, and even to sleep longer with the aid of OTC pharmaceuticals and natural supplements, I have a very difficult time loving or even liking myself, so I’m not spending the weekend with anyone whom I love.

I’m trying, though.  Those of you who regularly read this blog may understandably think that I have given up on myself, on ever being happy or having significant wellbeing or whatever you want to call it‒some state that could be described as one of “noncontradictory joy”.  But I do try.

One might say that I am always trying, really, though one may quibble with the definitions and whether they apply even when I am sleeping or engaged in other tasks.  But I arrange the place, the time, the surroundings, and even the posture of my sleep to try to improve my chronic pain (and of course my insomnia).

I also try to arrange the way I sit at work, the types of socks and shoes and other clothes that I wear to improve my state of being.  I take carefully chosen vitamins at particular times of day, and I alternate OTC pain meds to try to decrease, at least somewhat, the chance of negative side-effects and interactions.  So, I haven’t given up, though I often wonder why I have not.

I think one of the hardest things, for me, is to follow the (quite good) advice that one should treat oneself with the care and support one would any other person for whom one is responsible and whom they love.  I have a hard time loving myself.  I certainly quite often don’t even like myself, but that’s a lesser problem; it’s entirely possible to love someone but not like them in most senses.

Okay, well, this is getting dull, and I have just been distracted by one of those silly “provocative” questions one often finds on social media, specifically, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”  These questions are apparently meant to start discussions (or even arguments) online or in person, and they are much of a type with questions such as “Does pineapple belong on pizza?”

To me, such questions are basically category errors, or something closely adjacent.  My first reaction to such questions is to want to give them a sneer worthy of Billy Idol.  A hot dog is a hot dog; who cares if it’s a “sandwich”?  And nothing “belongs” on pizza.  Pizza is an invented concoction, people can put on it what they want.  In any case, to make such questions in any way useful and amenable to reasonable discussion, the questioners need to define their terms.

What do they mean by “hot dog”?  If they just mean the meat-cylinder, then no, that’s not a sandwich by most definitions, but that would need to be defined too.  If one defines each of the terms precisely and specifically, then one could sensibly address questions such as “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” or “Does pineapple belong on pizza?”

But of course, deciding the question based on those rigorous terms and applications doesn’t answer it when other definitions and terms are applied.  The vast majority of words don’t really have definitions, they have usages.  The vast majority of words just happened, they were not invented by one person who could thereby define the meaning of the word as they invented it.

I could give you the definition of the word “orcerterlolet”* from my book The Chasm and the Collision, and this would be one of those rare situations in life where I actually have authority over the meaning of the word, because I am the author.  I invented the word and its meaning.

Except in such rare cases, though, there are no final and definitive definitions of words, at least not prior to mutual agreement for specific purposes.  Also, there are no authorities about anything that wasn’t specifically and entirely invented by the person claiming authority.  There are experts, but there are no authorities.

For instance, the police are not “the authorities”, and elected officials are not our “leaders”.  They are all public servants, employees hired (in various senses) by the people of a given nation, and they should be treated as such.  But that’s a whole ‘nother subject, and I’m not going to get started on that now.

I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.

*I’m not going to give you the definition, though.  If you want to find out what it is, you should read the book.

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Doff thy name; and for thy name, which is no part of thee, take all my blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and I’m going to try to be more upbeat today in my writing.  So, given my track record, I’ll simply now say…

TTFN

Ha ha, just kidding.  I would never let you off that easily.  I don’t, though, really know what I’m going to write today.  Of course, I never really know ahead of time, as you know (ahead of time) if you’ve read this blog for long.  But now we’re doubly ignorant*, because I have to choose from a much narrower realm of things about which to speak:  the Positive (or at least the Non-negative).

I suppose we could talk about electric charge‒that can be positive, if you’ll pardon the pun (and even if you won’t).  But of course, charge, and specifically positive charge, has interesting historical contingencies.  Because, of course, positive and negative are merely chosen terms; there’s nothing inherently “negative” about the charge of an electron, nor is there anything inherently “positive” about a proton.

As I understand it, Benjamin Franklin was the one who named the two charges and who began the convention that current moves from positive to negative along, for instance, a wire supplied by a voltaic pile (or “battery”, another term Franklin coined, according to what I have read and heard).

Of course, it was quite a long time before people discovered that‒oops!‒the moving particle carrying the charge in a flowing current is the electron, the “negatively” charged particle.  So, based on the already widespread convention, current, as described by physicists and engineers (and electricians I presume), flows in the opposite direction from the actual charge carrier that’s moving.

It’s a bit like relating stars’ intensity by describing how dark they aren’t.  And it turns out, given that the magnitude scale for stars indicates brighter stars by smaller/more negative logarithmic numbers, that’s actually‒in a sense‒how it’s done.  This is also due to historical contingencies.

These sorts of things happen a fair amount.  Remember when VHS beat out Betamax because it was basically first to the market, even though pretty much all reputable experts agreed that Beta was the better, more reliable, clearer, lighter-weight format?  Once people get used to something, they often don’t want something new, even if it’s better.  I get it, of course‒unnecessary change stresses me out severely‒but it’s definitely unfortunate.

It occurs to me now that the “demotion” (really just the redesignation) of Pluto from planet to “dwarf planet” was a rare exception to this, when humans, recognizing that the terminology they had been using was not ideal, changed it.  Of course, this was the work of an international astronomical society, a group of scientists, so certainly it wasn’t a typical situation or decision.

It also was basically a matter of necessity**.  Several other Kuiper Belt objects similar to Pluto had been discovered, some more massive than Pluto, and all with very elongated, non-circularish orbits (like Pluto’s), so either there were going to be a slew of highly irregular planets with highly eccentric orbits, outnumbering the “older” and more orderly planets, or we were going to have to call these things something else.

It’s useful to remember that the names and categories that we put on things are just our names and categories.  They are not arbitrary, at least not if they are useful; but they are our designations, like the little bits of code that let operating systems know where to find programs and files on a computer’s disk memory.  They let us talk to each other about things and address them with consistency and rigor, so that we can better understand them.

But Pluto doesn’t care whether we call it the ninth planet or a dwarf planet or a cartoon dog.  It doesn’t care if we call it Pluto or Hades or Osiris or Hel or Mandos.  It doesn’t have any idea what we call it or how we “define” it.  It doesn’t have any ideas at all, as far as anyone can tell.  It’s not the sort of thing that has ideas or cares about things.  To quote Mister Spock (who was not speaking about Pluto) “It is, essentially, a great rock in space”***.

For nearly 4.5 billion years, Pluto‒like Jupiter’s moons, like Ceres, like the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud and so on‒was just there, and no one knew it was there, no one had seen it, no one was aware of it (as far as we know, anyway).  Intelligent awareness does not cause things in the universe to be; rather, things in the universe being and doing what they do sometimes, rarely, cause intelligent awareness, at least in one tiny place in the cosmos.

BTW, you are in that place and you are one of those intelligent awarenesses, in case you didn’t know that.  But I suspect you already did know that.

It’s quite the rarefied club to which to belong.  Even if there are countless intelligent species in the universe (however one might reasonably define intelligence) they must nevertheless be a tiny, petite, and wee part of all the stuff in the universe, at least for now.  In principle, that could change eventually, and intelligence could come to dominate the universe, but that’s probably a long way off, if it’s going to happen at all.

It can be hard to be optimistic about that possibility sometimes, given the state of humanity, which always seems abysmally stupid.  But remember, the smarter ones among humans have an advantage, the greatest advantage we have seen in our world:  they are smart.

And with that, for real this time:

TTFN

*I know, if there are fewer things from which to choose, one is in principle less ignorant, since there are fewer unknowns, the entropy is smaller, etc.  However, sampling from these spaces is not random; the negative concept-space is more well known and thus less random (and more likely to be chosen) than the positive space, about which I know but little.

**Not to be confused with the question of the necessity of matter.  That’s a whole sort of “metacosmological” notion.

***I know, I know, Pluto is largely made of water ice.  Trust me (or not), at the temperatures of Pluto, water is a rock.  And at the temperatures and pressures of Titan, methane is the stuff of lakes and streams (i.e., it is a liquid).  And at the temperature of the interior of the sun, tungsten is a plasma…or so I suspect.

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“For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning”

It’s Odin’s day now, so…well, have a good day, Odin, or Wotan, or however you prefer to refer to yourself.

I’m on my way to work, but I did not walk today.  Yesterday was a horrible day, pain-wise*, focused on my left knee, which is still sore, so I’m not going to try to do much walking.  I have knee braces and so on, but they only do so much.  I was wearing them on Monday during my walk, and they probably helped.  Maybe the alternate shoes that avoided bothering my blisters made the stresses and tensions produced by the way I walk different than usual, and that’s why everything was irritated.

Oy, I seem to have a hard time discussing anything interesting, don’t I?  It’s just all boring nonsense.  I suppose some of this is the sort of stuff I might talk about with a spouse or a partner or a close friend if I had one.  I guess that makes the blog behave as a kind of talk therapy.

I actually have intended for it to be thus in the past, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any serious positive results.  Of course, I can’t see what I would have been like if I had not been writing this blog.  Perhaps I would have been much worse  Or maybe I would have been healthier, but no one would ever know, and my thoughts would forever be lost to the world.

What a tragedy.  Ha ha.

It’s a weird thought, but what if putting my thoughts out into the world actually makes me worse, but it makes me someone who will, to however small an extent, be remembered in some way (since I don’t have a family with whom I live or spend time to remember my thoughts and my day-to-day foibles).  It’s a bit like Melkor putting his power into Arda, leaving it suffused with traces of him until its end, though he was weakened thereby, and he was defeated at least partly because he had weakened himself so much.  And, to a lesser extent, it’s like Sauron, putting his will and power and spirit into the One Ring.

None of that has any true bearing on reality, of course, there being no real Melkor or Sauron.  There is also no real spiritual “power” of that nature.  At least, there’s nothing that anyone can demonstrate convincingly in a way that makes it clear that it’s not just the wishful thinking of frightened naked house apes who want to believe that they have power and consequence in what is, after all, a very large universe.  At best it’s smoke and mirrors and placebo effects and the happy coincidence (with applicable confirmation bias) of some real processes that humans can influence, albeit not by mere will and vague thought and heart but by actions, by choices, by real thoughts guiding real deeds.

The current state of the world—or at least of the US—makes it clear how rare real thoughts are among the primates here.  One need only study chimpanzees and orangutans and, for that matter, capuchin monkeys and the like to get a basic grasp on most of human behaviors.  Humans just have other notions cluttering up things, and those can sometimes distract one from recognizing what’s really happening—monkey-work from top to bottom, all but unmitigated.

I guess there’s nothing particularly bad about monkeys.  It’s just that humans think they are somehow fundamentally different than monkeys and other primates and other animals.  They are different in more or less trivial ways, of course, as all species, and indeed all individuals, are different.  But they are not a different fundamental type of being.  They just have more memory and processing power in their brains, and their social hierarchies are able to take place at much higher removes.  Thus they need ideas, stories, that bind them together to get things done.

Ants and termites use pheromones and/or other chemical signals, which they produce and use instinctively.  Humans use stories and songs.  But it’s all just spontaneously self-organizing behavior, with little to no deep thought above or behind the scenes, however people like to delude themselves about their puissance and their importance.

Oh, well.  Let them delude themselves and grope through their shallow pseudo-mysteries.  The universe will deliver whatever it delivers to them, and their most fervent beliefs will not change anything in and of themselves.  And most people will probably never even realize that they were shown to be misguided and even deluded.  They will go to their graves proclaiming desperately that they are not in fact even dying.

As I’m fond of saying, whataya gonna do?  I hope though that, for today at least, you’re gonna have a good day.  As for me, well, I’m sure you can believe that no day that someone spends with me is likely to be a very good day, not anymore anyway, and unfortunately, I have to spend every day with me.  So, at least spare me a little sympathy.

*In that I had a horrible day because I was in pain, not that pain had a horrible day.  I don’t know whether some personification of pain would have had a good day or a bad one.  I might imagine that the personification of pain would dislike chronic pain because it’s not useful.  It’s not helping to protect against any injuries; the injuries are already done.  It has become, instead of a protective process, an erosive one, something that worsens the status of its bearer.

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Is it possible to choose not to care, if you do?

It’s Friday again.  I won’t say “Thank God it’s Friday” or “Thank Batman it’s Friday” or anything of that sort.  Of course, I’m glad that we’re ending what has been a terribly long work week, which has provided only a few moments of accomplishment, apart from the trivial and the usual (i.e., working).  But that’s not saying much.  In general, for me, the weekend is just another two empty, lonely days coming up before the start of another work week.

I’ll be glad to get some rest, of course, since on the weekend I can knock myself out because I don’t have to worry about being able to do anything that requires mental effort the next day.  I find that terribly useful.  Also, I intend to try to get used to riding my new bicycle more over the weekend, especially since my right heel and the ball of my right foot now have new blisters from walking yesterday, and these will make further walking painful and somewhat counterproductive for the immediate future.

Other than that, though, there’s really nothing else going on.  I had thought—earlier in the week, when lack of foreknowledge allowed me to be stupidly optimistic—that maybe this weekend I would ride my new bike to the movie theater and see the new Fantastic Four movie, since I’ve always been a fan of the FF, and of course, I hear that the new Doctor Doom makes a post-credit appearance.  I’m an even bigger fan of Doctor Doom than of the FF.

I have mixed feelings about how they’re doing Doom.  He is (usually) my favorite villain across all fictional universes, and I’ve been very disappointed—mostly—by the way the movies have failed to portray him.

To be clear, I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was a very good cast as Doom.  But the script of that first FF movie all but completely ruined his character, though it and he were still enjoyable.  I’ve long said, if someone wants to see a movie with a nearly perfect portrayal of how Doom should be, they should watch Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan.  Ricardo Montalban’s performance as Khan, and the way Khan is written, is almost perfect for Doom.

Anyway, all this is really neither here nor there.  I’m almost certain that the MCU is going to fuck up in trying to bring Doom to the screen—not least because they’re using RDJ to play him.  The means they’re going to somehow link Tony Stark and Victor von Doom.

While I admire Downey’s portrayal of Iron Man, which made him much more interesting in the movies than he ever was in the comic books, Tony Stark does not so much as deserve to polish Doom’s boots, let alone be somehow incarnated as Doom.  RDJ could have played Doom de novo, probably—he’s a very good actor—but to link those characters annoys me.

I don’t know why it matters to me.  It really shouldn’t.  I don’t know why much of anything matters to me.  I don’t know why I bother writing this stupid blog or doing anything else.

I want to rest.  I feel like I can never just clear the tension from my system.  Maybe if I actually stopped caring at all, I could do it.  But it’s very difficult to make yourself stop caring, because you already do care, and to be able to reprogram that particular function of your being, you would have to be able not to care about the fact that you would no longer care.

This is a conundrum that has long haunted or at least worried AI researchers.  If you program an AI with a particular terminal goal—the one that motivates it above all, to which all other goals are instrumental, subordinate goals—it becomes nigh impossible to make it voluntarily submit to changing that terminal goal.

If this seems obscure and abstract, consider a man (for instance) who deeply loves and cares about his family, more than he cares about anything else, or even everything else, in the world.  And then imagine asking him to submit voluntarily to some procedure by which he will be made to stop caring at all for his family.  Can you imagine such a person agreeing to that?  Would you agree to that?

If you don’t love or care about your family, try to think of something else you dearly love and feel justified in loving, like, I don’t know, Nascar or some particular political movement or some such.  Then imagine submitting yourself to some procedure or medicine or whatever that changes that, not because you have come to think that it’s a bad thing to love, but just because not caring about it would be simpler.

I’m not sure what point there is to this post.  Probably there is none.  I just need to shut it down for now, and hopefully over the weekend I’ll at least get some rest.  I don’t know what to say about anything else.  But please, do have a good weekend.

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What title would be appropriate?

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, because I have a new backpack (the old one was really starting to fail, and has been for quite some time—I can relate, and I wish I could replace myself so easily) and it does a better job with the weight, however minor, of the little computer than the old one did.  Also, I just didn’t feel like dealing with the stupid little engine of distraction that is the “smartphone” today.

Ugh, it’s so stupidly muggy already here in south Florida at a quarter to five in the morning that the sweat around my eyes is fogging up my reading glasses while I just sit here and try to type.  Why do people live here?

Okay, well, I know why I live here, and it was because I was trying to accommodate others in the past—people I love, not just anyone—and so I was willing to go with their flow and go away from anywhere where I had long-term connections and such like.  So, I came here to America’s syphilitic dong, which harbors, or has harbored, such parasitic animalcules as Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, Dickless Scott, Michael McAuliffe, Ron DeSantis, and who knows how many others.  What a shit hole.

Mind you, the neighborhood in which I currently live is quite pleasant in many ways, though I cannot consider it home.  It’s extremely multi-ethnic and very community spirited, at least as far as I can see.  People keep out of each other’s business, they take care of their stuff, they take out their garbage, they mow their lawns, all that.  And the houses, though they and the yards tend to be quite small, were clearly built in a time when it was considered normal to construct dwellings that more or less laugh at hurricanes.  Full cinder-block walls on smallish scales make for structures that do not readily move in response to anything but a direct-hit nuclear attack.

I’m really exhausted, and it’s only just the beginning of the day.  I’ve been exhausted for so long now that I can’t readily remember a time when I did not feel exhausted.  I can remember that I have experienced times in the past when I was not exhausted, but I don’t remember what it feels like.  So often, it seems that I surely cannot endure much longer, that I surely must collapse at any moment, that I must just crumble to the ground, unconscious.

But biology is my enemy here.  Living organisms are selected to be prone to continue, since there’s very little natural selection based benefit in being able to choose to shut down at will.  Any being with such a capacity would be less likely to leave behind offspring than those whose bodies simply continued until there was no way for them to do so, or until something else killed them.

I hate it here.  And I don’t mean just where I am right now, though it does apply.  I hate it in south Florida, I hate it in America (a shocking and new realization to me), I hate it on Earth, I hate being in this stupid universe.  I cannot say that I hate everything about it, of course.  I love my children, I love my sister and brother, and I even have a few distant friends who matter to me.  But for the most part—the overwhelmingly “most” part—things here are nauseatingly pathetic.

I don’t just mean humans, by the way.  I’m not one of those idiots who romanticizes animals as innocent and pure and lovely, imagining that they would live in harmony with each other if not for humans.  That’s puerile nonsense.  Anyone who thinks that is mistaken and/or delusional.  This, to me, is the most annoying flaw in The Matrix:  the fact that Agent Smith says and seems to believe that other animals achieve some form of self-imposed equilibrium with their environments.  I think a sentient AI would not be prone to make such an idiotic mistake, but maybe I’m wrong.  It’s not as though I’m not an idiot, too.

But animals don’t choose to be in equilibrium with their ecosystems.  The equilibria are forced upon them (when they happen at all) by death, by disease, by starvation and predation, by famine, by pestilence.  They no more choose to be in equilibrium than the various atoms and molecules in a complex chemical chain reaction choose to be in their equilibria.

Humans are merely more competent than all other creatures (on Earth) have ever been, and so are capable of pushing their environments farther than any others.  That is, unless you count the earliest photosynthesizing organisms, which probably produced the greatest environmental catastrophe the world has ever known—the release of free oxygen in vast quantities, changing the atmosphere and the very crust of the very planet, killing off the majority of life forms until those that remained adapted and became addicted to this new atmospheric drug.

Okay, that last bit of that last sentence was highly melodramatic and judgmental.  I was trying to make a point about how non-innocent natural things are*, but I fell into rhetoric, and that actually cheapens one’s arguments if one is dealing with dispassionate interlocutors.  Then again, when does one ever actually deal with such creatures?

Anyway, life is dominated by suffering and by aggression of one kind or another, because nature overall does not tend to reward indiscriminate kindness.  Humans are, ironically, the only species that seems even capable of the “outside” view, of a compassion and thought for the future and for the suffering of others that goes beyond their local, personal, and even species-specific circumstances.  And they are also the only species that can be seen to vilify itself.

Weirdly enough, it is the “good guys”, or those who try to be good guys, those who consider that worthy of aspiration, who are most often subject to criticism, including self-criticism; certainly they are the only ones responsive to it.  If you criticize narcissistic assholes, they really don’t care.  They’re not trying to be “good” in anyone else’s eyes.  They are already great in their own minds.  They already love themselves.  Just imagine trying to get your average cat to do something by appealing to its guilt, and you will get an inkling of what I mean.

Self-esteem is overrated.  I’m not saying it’s valueless, but it is selling at a much higher price than it is worth, like a vastly overinflated stock for a corporation so leveraged that it could move the Earth if it could find a fulcrum and a place to stand.  A little self-criticism is good for everyone, at least if they want to be anything other than a force for destruction, decay, and patheticness**.

I don’t know.  Maybe destruction is the better way.  Creation, and creativity in general, certainly hasn’t served me very well.

Now, in closing:  I didn’t walk or bike to the station today.  I needed a physical rest.  Hopefully, if I can muster the energy, I will do one of the two things tomorrow.  But even thinking about it right now makes me feel out of breath.  I don’t feel short of breath; I’m not anxious, I’m not tremulous.  I’m just without vigor and cannot readily imagine having any.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  Have a good day.

*Either everything and everyone is innocent, or nothing and no one is.  I mean this on a general scale, not regarding specific uses of the term relating to legal and criminal concepts.  I’m using the term from a fundamental, ethical/moral underpinning kind of way.  No one made themselves or their circumstances or their nature or their environments, and “free will” is a childish chimera.  As Eric Draven said, “Victims…aren’t we all?”

**Apparently that’s not a word, but “pathos” doesn’t carry the connotations I desired here.  Maybe “contemptibility” would be better?

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Oblivion is cold comfort, but it’s all the comfort I have to offer

Well, it’s Monday.  Meet the new week‒same as the old week.  There is nothing new or interesting happening, as far as I can see.  Nothing is new in my personal interactions with the world, and nothing is new in the world at large.  There may seem to be new things, and there are probably some details that are unique.  But then again, every snowflake is supposedly unique, but they’re all just flakes of snow, airborne ice crystals, and the overall behavior is nothing different despite all the trivially new specific flakes.  The phenomenon of snowfall is still just overall the same.

“So in the world,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar said.  “‘Tis furnished well with men.  And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.”  He goes on the claim that he is unique in the next sentence, but immediately thereafter, Brutus, Cassius, et al, demonstrate that he too is merely flesh and blood like all the rest.

All the heroes, all the villains, all the ordinary people‒they are all functionally identical, despite all their trivial differences.  What percentage of the people who have ever lived are remembered at all?  A smattering, a handful, if that‒not even a rounding error compared to the total of all people who have lived.  And many of those we do remember are probably highly fictionalized and may not have actually existed at all.

What are the odds that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were real people?  How about Achilles and Hector?  For crying out loud, we know that even Richard III, presented as Shakespeare’s most thoroughgoing villain (perhaps matched by Iago) and deformed as well, was pretty much nothing of either sort in real life (or that’s what the historical evidence suggests).  He was simply defeated and then vilified by those who had defeated him, presumably to help justify their own actions.

And, by the way, who remembers them?

This sort of fact is part of why I sometimes refer to people (and other lifeforms) as virtual particles.  They pop into existence, persist for an infinitesimal period of time, and then literally vanish again, without a proverbial trace.

Well, actually, as with all virtual particles (which are not actually a thing but are merely mathematical and pedagogical tools) the collective effects of us virtual particles‒aka living things‒can have impacts on the world as a whole.  It’s even conceivable that, in just the right circumstances, as with the “real” virtual particles*, a virtual personicle can become actual.  I’m not sure what that would mean in the real world, though, and I’m not convinced that it has ever yet happened.

All this is part of why I have no patience for people who become fanatical about their particular ideologies and such.  They’re all just equivalent to some fanciful imaginary imaginings by a group of photons or neutrinos or what have you.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to approach their current affairs and ideas as “important” in their local** transient bailiwick, for some things to be important to them.  But it would be silly in a pronounced (but unfortunately not funny) sense for anyone to imagine that they had access to some final, consequential knowledge about the nature of the world and particularly about how people should behave.  If someone had such knowledge, I suspect it would be obvious to any intellectually honest person, including intelligent but disinterested aliens.

Humans and their dogmas are transient and transitory and ephemeral (and other synonyms as well) as are all other specific forms of life and ways of life.  Life overall is transient; as far as we can tell, it cannot even in principle go on forever.  That’s not just referring to individual lives, but to life as a phenomenon.  We could be wrong about this; there is much we don’t know, and in principle, our descendants could discover ways around the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  But that’s quite a big “if”, as it were.

Sorry to be such a downer; it’s just my nature, apparently.  Look not for comfort from me, as the ghost of Marley said.  It comes from other regions and is delivered by other ministers to other sorts of people.  Though, in this case, I’m not sure about what sorts of ministers and people would be involved, let alone what “regions” might produce such comfort.

In any case, I have no comfort, so I can offer none to anyone else; I cannot give what I do not have and what I do not even hope to have.  The best I can offer is to say that, well, oblivion seems to be the only viable alternative to discomfort offered by this universe.  It’s not much to offer, I admit, but it’s the best I have.  And, as pointed out above, as far as we can tell, it’s waiting for us all, eventually.

I won’t say that I look forward to it, because that really doesn’t make much sense.  But I am tired of trying to continue despite having almost no good reason to do so.

I hope you, the average reader, feel better than I do.  Batman help you if you feel worse.

*There’s an oxymoron.

**That “local” can, in principle, include the entire planet.  The point is merely that it is quite finite and limited.

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Only the truly continuous is infinitely divisible

Well, it’s Friday, the last day of another work week—the first full week of August (or Sexember, if you prefer) in 2025.  And here I am writing things that, so far, are not only trivial but banal.  Perhaps, as I go along, I will write something more interesting and surprising, but so far, I’m not impressed with myself.  I guess these things happen.

I did not end up riding my new bike back to the house last night, because there were thunderstorms in the area, particularly down by where I live.  I’m not too intimidated by riding a bike in the rain, but it’s a new bike, and its configuration is different than the type to which I am used, and it is slightly wobblier than my normal, so I felt it wasn’t a great idea to ride it five miles in the rain.  It turned out the rain was almost over by the time I got to my train stop, but it was nevertheless still quite wet and puddly, and I probably was wise-ish to avoid riding in it.

Still, it’s slightly frustrating.  Hopefully, today it won’t be an issue, because it would be a shame to miss the whole weekend with it by the house.  There are supposed to be thunderstorms today again, but they are expected earlier in the day than yesterday, and the weather is predicted to clear by early evening.  That should be fine, at least.

Of course, weather prediction is never perfectly precise—Chaos Theory being applicable and all that—but forecasts done for only twelve hours or so in the future are likely to be much more accurate than those for a day or a few days or a week ahead of time.  After about five days, trying to get too specific a forecast is a bit of a waste of effort, and it may always be.  One cannot, with finite computing power, calculate things to infinite precision, and without infinite precision, in the long term, Chaos makes one’s predictions ever more inaccurate.

Of course, that raises (not “begs”!) the question of whether reality is actually defined in any meaningful sense down to the level where limitless precision would apply.  In other words, are Real Numbers actually a thing that exists in reality?  That may seem a strange question, given that they are called “Real Numbers”, but that’s just a name, given by humans as a file heading if you will, a way to index the subject.  It doesn’t actually signify the reality of the real numbers, any more than those who call themselves “Conservative” in the current US are in any legitimate sense conservative by most agreed upon uses of that word.

Of course, all non-complex numbers are Real numbers, and all Real numbers can be considered complex numbers (just with a zero i component if they are only Real).  The counting numbers are still Real numbers, as are all the integers and fractions, and of course, all our best known “irrational”* numbers, like π and e.  But the vast majority of Real numbers cannot be specified by any reductive formula or algorithm, but have do be described digit by digit, forever—maximum information-type entropy.

So, to describe fully a “typical” specific Real number usually requires infinite information, with infinite precision.  But there’s a real (haha) question whether any portion of reality is defined so precisely, or whether that could even have any meaning.  As far as we currently know, the smallest distance that has physical meaning is the Planck Length (about 1.6×10−35 m), and the shortest time that makes physical sense is the Planck Time (about 5.4×10−44 s), and so on.  These are very tiny numbers, but they are finite, not infinitesimal, and are certainly not infinitely non-repeating decimals.

But does the Planck Length (and Time) apply to actual, bottom-level reality, or is that merely a limit within the constraints of our current understanding?  We don’t know, for instance, how such things apply to gravity when it becomes strong enough for such scales to apply.

It’s mind-boggling, or at least wildly stimulating of probably inexpressible thought, that reality may be only finitely defined at every given point in space (which “points” themselves would only be finitely packed, so to speak, such that below a certain scale, the distance between two points would have no meaning) or that it may in fact be infinitely defined, down to the fully expressed Real Number level, and that indeed it may be infinitely divisible in the same sense Real Numbers are—and thus there would be, between any two points in spacetime, as many points as there are in ALL of spacetime.

Either possibility is wildly cool and difficult to represent internally—indeed, impossible to represent perfectly internally, but difficult even to contemplate roughly at any very deep level.  Is it any wonder that people like Cantor and Gödel were mentally ill, given the kinds of things they contemplated and explored?  I’m not saying those things were the reason for their illness; that would be a cheesy sort of magical thinking, redolent of an H. P. Lovecraft story.  But the contemplation of infinities and complexity and chaos is both sobering and intoxicating at the same time.

What do you know, I drifted into less banal areas after all.  I guess that’s a decent way to end the work week of blog posts.  I hope you all have an interesting and good weekend, without too many utterly unpredictable events (unless they’re good ones for you).

*Just to remind you, this does not refer to numbers that are in some sense crazy, just that they cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers, no matter how large the integers.  That’s the original meaning of the word irrational, but the very fact that there existed such numbers seemed so horrifying to the old Pythagoreans—or so I’ve heard—that it almost immediately acquired it’s secondary, now more common, usage.

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You flocks, you shoals, you fine emergent things

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and I’m feeling a bit beat up and wrung out from yesterday, which was an extremely bad day, pain wise.  I really felt quite stiff and sore all day, and I couldn’t help walking with a limp.  It’s quite frustrating.  I do have potential assistance of a kind coming today, and hopefully that might make a difference.  We shall see.  I’ll tell you more when I have more information.

As for anything else, well, there’s really nothing else going on in my life.  I still haven’t done any work on new song lyrics, nor have I played the guitar or keyboard at all, nor sang.  I don’t even know what kind of shape my voice might be in at this point, but it’s probably pretty rough.

I think maybe I should drink more coffee during the day.  I used to drink it regularly when I was up north, but I’ve fallen off a lot since coming to Florida.  A big part of that is just that coffee is a hot drink, and hot drinks in Florida can be quite unpleasant.

But also, if I can reevaluate my own internal workings and decision-making memory‒which I can‒I tried to cut back on caffeine because I feared it was a major contributor to my tension and hostility and anxiety.  Well, you’ve read my blogs before (unless this is your first time), so it should be fairly clear that that particular intervention was not fit for purpose.  And one thing coffee has always done for me has been to be something to put in my mouth and stomach other than food.  That’s certainly worth a lot in my case.

Anyway, in the new office we have two refrigerators‒the boss brought in one from his garage that was not being used much‒and though neither has an ice maker, ice trays are easy.  So I can make iced coffee to take the sting off coffee’s hot nature.  I can’t directly take the sting off Florida’s hot and muggy nature, of course, but it’s bearable most of the time.

And in the long run, who knows how Florida’s specific climate will alter as the world’s overall surface temperature increases?  One might assume it will just get hotter and more humid*, but it’s best not to jump to conclusions.  Weather patterns are the archetypal chaotic system, and though climate and weather are not synonyms, there is a relation.

Many things interact to maintain specific local climates.  For instance, the Gulf Stream keeps the British Isles much warmer than they would be otherwise, being so far north, but it is not a fixed pattern in the Atlantic, but a product of confluences of various forces and feedback loops (as well as probably feed-sideways paths).  It has not existed forever.  It just feels like it has because human lives are so short, and human minds tend to be woefully parochial and provincial.  This is a source of so many human problems, not least the failure to learn obvious lessons from history.

But I guess there’s not much point in moaning about that lamentable fact right now.  I try to do my little part by writing about what I think are occasionally interesting and thought-provoking ideas, and by trying to learn about all sorts of things myself, from history and philosophy to biology and physics and mathematics‒and, of course, I’m technically an expert on medicine.  It’s as if I hope that by increasing my own knowledge about as many things as I can, I’ll be able to bring up the average and perhaps have some magical diffusion effect.

I don’t actually think that, of course, nor is that really my motivation for learning about various things and stuff.  I just like to understand and know things, to the degree possible, and I enjoy the process of learning them.  Physics is the most interesting subject to me in many ways because it is the study of the workings out of physical reality.  Everything else that happens is “simply” chaotic, emergent murmurations that happen on the surface of the underlying processes.

There is a question whether mathematics is even more fundamental than physics or is rather an invention of humans to describe and work with the patterns that are happening that are not guided by mathematics, perhaps, but simply produce it as an epiphenomenon.

I think Stephen Wolfram proposed something along those lines, based on “cellular automata”**, but though I have his book A New Kind of Science, I have not read it, because I have the Kindle edition.  It’s not really formatted for Kindle, so it’s basically just a PDF of the original book, and that can make it very difficult to read on one’s smartphone.

Such thoughts are quite entertaining and they can sometimes be productive.  I often wish more people were interested in them rather than, for instance, what some particular celebrity did to some other celebrity, or whether some particular advertisement can, with tortured logic, be “judged” to be inherently offensive and even evil, or just how horrifically to punish someone who agrees with only 99% of the things you believe, but disagrees on 1%.

Okay, I need to avoid getting started on that train of thought.  So, I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, by tomorrow I will have some relatively better news than I’ve had recently.  If so, I will probably share it with you.  In the meantime, try your best to have a good day.

*Particularly if sea level rises enough for a lot of the state to become submarine‒now that would be high humidity.

**The most well-known case probably being John Conway’s Game of Life, which is a “game” on a 2-dimensional grid of squares, with particular, simple rules about what happens to any given square depending on whether its neighbors are empty or not.  Remarkable, self-sustaining, and even traveling patterns form from these basic notions, similar to the way the flocking*** behavior of birds can be described with a few basic rules followed by each bird individually, requiring no communications other than just seeing where one’s nearest neighborings are.

***That sound like an epithet, does it not?

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Try to remember the kind of Sexember…

Well, first of all:  TBIF (Thank Batman it’s Friday).  I’ve been feeling particularly poorly this week, with sleep that’s even worse than my usual, and that is not good to start with.  At least, on the weekend, I can knock myself out at night with Benadryl and not really care that I will be groggy the next day.

I’m basically going to call this week a loss.  I haven’t gotten much of anything done that I had intended to do, and that’s discouraging.  But it’s a new month now, so there may be some psychological* tendency to think of it as a potential new beginning of sorts.  Mind you, there’s really nothing special about this day relative to any other; the length of a month is related to the lunar cycle and the length of the year, but only roughly, and the specific divisions are fairly arbitrary.

Of course, we know that August is named for Augustus Caesar, née Octavian, who succeeded in taking control of Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar (after whom July was renamed).  But it’s interesting, at least to me, to consider what it would have been named otherwise.  September, after all, is named after the fact that it was “originally” the seventh month, as October was the eighth, November the ninth, and December the tenth.

So, would August originally have been named Sexember (the sixth month)?  I think that would be the correct form, though Latin scholars among my readers should please correct me if I’ve used the wrong prefix**.  If I’m correct, I would like to propose a global change of name for this month back to the potential previous name.

“Sexember” sounds like a much more fun month than “August”, with its dog day connotations and so on.  Although, the prefix “sex-” referring to six has, as far as I know, nothing at all to do with the word “sex” relating to the reproductive divisions among animals, nor to the process involved, which‒for good, sound, biological reasons‒is something dwelt upon and enjoyed and even obsessed over by so many.  But I’m not worried about etymological purity here.

Imagine the antics on the various social media as oodles of young people of all ages geared up to celebrate “Sexember” and talked about how they planned to celebrate it.  Of course, I suspect most people would exaggerate their planned exploits, as people tend to do.  Social media is a supremely fertile ground for hyperbole and posturing and pretense and performative outrage, whether about political matters or just how “hot” one is and how perfect one’s life is.  I wrote a song about this topic a few years ago:  Like and Share.  Here, I’ll embed it in this post.

That brings up an issue raised by a very old*** and good friend of mine.  He noted that, since the company which published my songs put things on YouTube with disabled comments, there’s no direct way for people to give me feedback on them, good or bad.  Of course, the songs are also on Spotify and iTunes and supposedly on TikTok and all those others, but many of those don’t allow comments, either.

My works are also among the various available background songs that one can choose for “reels” on Instagram and on Facebook.  I enabled that last bit, and even used one once.  You all should feel free to use them, too.  In principle, I get paid when you do****.

Anyway, the thought I had was that maybe I should embed the songs here, on my blog, as posts.  Or maybe I could create a new page, like the one I have for “my books”.  I could call it “my songs” and could put the officially released ones there, as well as ones in progress, and I could even share some of my covers.  If I shared them as blog posts, at least, comments would be always available, and are almost always welcome.

Of course, that covers and the incomplete stuff are already on my YouTube channel, such as it is, and I even have a created playlist with all of them in it.  Those are already available for comment and response on YouTube.  I’m a long way away from having a monetized YouTube channel, though, and this blog isn’t monetized, either (though I sometimes think maybe I ought to monetize it, at least partially, or make a Patreon account or something).

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

In the meantime, hopefully today will be better than yesterday, which was a day on which I quite literally wished to be dead, because I felt miserable and in pain and alone, to say nothing of failing to achieve what I’ve wanted to achieve this week (or in this life).  The thing that most prevented me from taking action on that wish was that the effort involved would have been too great.

I feel less bad today, which‒given the nature of number lines and greater than/less than meanings and equivalences*****‒means I feel better than I did.  I still haven’t crossed the origin into positive territory, though, and I don’t know if I ever will again.  That’s the consideration that leads to contemplation of death:  if one’s present and expected future wellbeing function is always in the negative, then a return to zero is a net gain.  It’s analogous to a jokey thing I used to say:  The one who dies with the most debt wins.

Enough of this nonsense.  I’ll call this post and this work week to an end now.  I wish you all an excellent weekend, and of course, enjoy the first of Sexember!

*I made an interesting typo when I wrote this word, one which I don’t think I’ve made before, though it would seem a very easy one to make, given the layout of the QWERTY keyboard:  I wrote it as “paychological”.  That seems almost like something that could be a new slang term, with related terms “paychopathology” and “paychopath”.

**Perhaps “Hexember” would be at least as proper or more so (though we don’t have “Heptember”).  I’m not sure.  That would surely please some of the many Goth people I tend to follow online, but it doesn’t have as broad an appeal as “Sex-” does.

***By which I mean he has been my friend from way back (starting freshman year of college), not that he is very old.  He’s roughly the same age I am, and‒though I often feel as if I’ve been kept alive by one of the great rings for centuries or even millennia beyond my natural time‒my real age, in proper time, is 55 years, soon to be 56.  Of course, there is no actual quantum leap in age at the anniversary of one’s birth.  Time is continuous‒or, well, it is quantized, but at the scale of 10-43 seconds.  So for all foreseeable, practical purposes within our lifetimes, it is continuous.

****Though the pay rate is nearly as miniscule as the Planck time mentioned in the previous footnote.

*****A pet peeve of mine is when some people denigrate the notion of choosing “the lesser of two evils”, particularly during elections, expressing such sentiments as “the lesser of two evils is still evil”.  This may be true in a simple-minded sense, but it misses the point entirely and expresses woefully clunky thinking.  Such a person might be expected to feel that owing a debt of $10 was not any better than owing a debt of $100,000, since both are debts.  But when you think about with which debt you’d prefer to be saddled, the difference is clear.  Money has a way of sharpening people’s intuitions regarding numbers.  Indeed, there’s some evidence that “negative numbers” were first invented to deal with debts.

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“I don’t think I’ll ever get over the hill; those wounds run…pretty deep.”

It’s the penultimate day of July in 2025, and I can’t honestly say I’ll be sad to see the month go‒nor the year, nor the life, for that matter.

The word “penultimate” does make me wonder if any stationery company ever marketed a writing implement as the “Pen Ultimate”.  If so, I’ve not heard of it.  I guess it’s not a terrific marketing idea, just a mildly amusing play on words.

Anyway, it’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day‒because presumably once one passes the midpoint of the week, one finds it easier to coast through the rest of the week, as if one had reached the top of some hill (or hump) and was now loping, or perhaps sledding or skiing or snowboarding, down the other side.

Of course, that metaphor presumes there’s something akin to gravity applicable here, which is the force that makes it hard to go up a hill and easier to go down it.  But there is no such force applicable to time (though time is affected by gravity).

As far as I can see, no matter what you do, the days of the week proceed at the same monotonous rate, whether one puts any effort into it or not.  Time passes at the same rate (ignoring tiiiiiiiny adjustments for relative speeds and altitudes) for the most active athlete or business tycoon or person in the grip of mania as it does for someone idle or even someone in a coma.  And even if one can slow down one’s time relative to others‒for instance by going some substantial portion of the speed of light relative to them or by going into an area of strong gravity‒one’s own “proper time”, the time one experiences, will still be the same*.

One might effectively travel into the future of the people one left behind on one’s high-speed voyage, but one will also skip and miss all those years that one is “away”, and there’s no way to get that time back.  The nature of causality appears to preclude it.

So, yeah, the concept of hump day is purely psychological, and like so much of human psychology, it is stupid.  I wish I could say that my impression of such things has become less negative as my own proper time has passed, but alas, the young provide no more basis for hope with their presumed energy and creativity than the older ones do with their presumed greater experience and knowledge.

Almost all humans are really quite pathetic and come despair-inducingly far from achieving anything like their potential in wisdom or intelligence or creativity.  They mostly just bounce around like air molecules in a closed chamber, achieving maximal local entropy.

And don’t delude yourself that any other creatures on the planet are any “better” than humans.  Even the relatively smart ones like chimpanzees and porpoises and cephalopods and corvids tend to be often vicious, selfish, and violent.  That’s not all they are, of course, but it’s plenty.  They’re certainly not pure or innocent or fundamentally beneficent creatures.

Neither are dogs or cats or other mammals, or reptiles of any kind, nor fishes, nor birds, nor arthropods, nor annelids, nor protozoa, and so on.  Nothing in the world is inherently beneficent.  Even plants fight and harm and kill each other; trees waste their resources by growing taller to outcompete each other for sunlight, when if they all stayed shorter, at some uniform height, they would all be better off.

And fungi eat everyone, using other life forms for their resources and sometimes for locomotion, and they wage constant war with bacteria and so on.

There’s no good reason to expect any form of alien intelligence to be any better, nor AI either.  No matter how much smarter one being is than another, the most powerful defining factor of each is its limits.  Every finite thing is equally far from infinity.

Unfortunately, beneficence overall is not really an evolutionarily stable strategy.  Even if all beings in a given ecosystem were mutually benevolent, all it would take would be for one mutant to instantiate a degree of selfishness and ruthlessness and it would have a tremendous advantage over its kindly brethren, and its genes would spread and become more and more prevalent.

Of course, universal malevolence and selfishness are not stable, either.  That’s a recipe for overall destruction, as much as anything else is.  Prey are necessary for a predator to survive.  As Porter said in Payback about nice guys:  You’ve gotta have somebody to take advantage of.  The food web has to have a base somewhere.

It seems to me that there will never be any system that doesn’t have some such mixture of predators and prey‒even metaphorically within species and societies.  Of course, it makes sense to prevent and mitigate the depredations of the assholes and, if possible, to discourage them from existing at all.  That’s better for everyone.  But as with the trees**, it doesn’t happen on its own, and it is not self-sustaining.  The price of such freedom really is constant vigilance, and unerring vigilance of that kind is probably impossible in principle.

I’m not really trying to come to some point here.  Mostly I’m just expressing my frustration and despair and cynicism/nihilism.  There is not only horror in the world, but horror is always there and almost certainly always will be, at least until the ultimate (but at least peaceful) horror of universal heat death (or whatever) brings about the elimination of all experience of any kind in the universe.

The only enduring peace and freedom may be simple nonexistence.  But then there’s that damn Poincaré Recurrence!

Ah, well.  Have a day.  You can call it a hump day if it amuses you.  I don’t know why I care.

*And, of course, if one is traveling at a substantial portion of the speed of light, if one doesn’t have adequate shielding, one’s lifespan is liable to be shortened significantly due to exposure to induced cosmic rays:  When you travel at a very high speed through the elementary particles of open space, the elementary particles of open space travel at a very high speed through you.

**Think about it:  those beautiful California redwood trees are possibly the greatest, most glacially persistent testament to the “dog eat dog” nature of the non-human world; a centuries-long spectacle of cutthroat one-upsmanship, each tree fighting maniacally to outcompete the others for sunlight.  They are beautiful, of course, but so is a raging fire.