Psychology

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That was a weird tangent dot com?

Well, it’s Friday, the 30th of January.  We’re almost done with the first month of the year (2026).  Has it been an auspicious month?  Has it been inauspicious?  I suppose the answer to such questions will vary from person to person depending upon how their personal month has gone.  And I suppose that points toward the notion that actual auspices are certainly not any kind of reliable indicator of how the future might go, at least not without great care to separate true patterns from false ones.

On the other hand, it’s not entirely mad to try to draw some potential conclusions about the near future from what’s happening in the present and what has happened in the recent past.  That’s one of the useful skills that’s available to minds that have the capacity to note patterns‒one can try to anticipate the future based on patterns one has noticed over time, and potentially, one can try thereby to avoid outcomes that are undesirable.

Of course, humans do tend to notice patterns that aren’t actually there a lot more than ones that really are there*.  This is usually‒probably‒related to the notion of the differential detriments of different types of errors:  It’s usually more useful to see potential threats that aren’t there than it is not to see potential threats that are there.

I think anyone who stops to think about such things will recognize that the first type of organism will be somewhat more likely to live long enough to reproduce than the second type, though they may be much less comfortable and content in the meantime.  Jumping at shadows can certainly be maladaptive, and too much of it can have a net negative effect on general outcomes, but not jumping at hyenas and lions (for instance) tends to be a very short-lived habit.

This goes back to my frequent talking point that fear, the ability (and it is an ability) to become alarmed and unhappy but energized and driven to fight or flee is going to be present in nearly every lifeform capable of movement over time.  Variations who feel less fear, or none, will not tend to reproduce as much because they are more likely to be killed in any given finite stretch of time, so whatever genetic makeup they have that leads them to lack a fear response, or to be prone to lack it, will not tend to propagate down the generations.

“Genetic makeup”, the term I used in that last sentence (go look, it’s there), made me think of a possible future technology in which people use some CRISPR-style techniques to achieve the effects that hitherto require the use of cosmetics.  They could insert genes into the cells of their cheeks, for instance, to lead them to have more pinkish pigment, or perhaps to make local blood vessels dilate for a nice blushing look, instead of having to use rouge (which is what I think the stuff is called that one applies to make one’s cheeks look pinker).  Or one could generate actual pigments in the cells of one’s upper eyelids, or increase the thickness of one’s eyelashes, all that sort of stuff.

Of course, doing this might entail risks.  Presumably, altering the genes of a given population of cells, even at the local level, could increase the risk of developing cancers, because one cannot perfectly control where genes will insert (at least not so far), and there will always be a chance of mucking up genes that regulate cell division rates.

Once one cell becomes more rapidly reproducing than its companion cells, it will tend to overpower them, in numbers anyway, over time***.  And with rapid and persistently higher rates of reproduction, there come more chances for new mutations to happen.  Those mutations that kill their cells obviously just go away more or less immediately.  Even the ones that revert their cells’ division rates back to “normal” will be quickly locally overwhelmed by the faster growing ones.  But a mutation that encourages even faster division/reproduction will quickly take hold as the dominant cell type, ceteris paribus.

And then, of course, this even more rapidly dividing population of cells will have that many more chances to develop mutations.  And so, down the line, given the billions of cells present in just one’s face, we find the chance for skin cancers to develop, once a cell line becomes so prone to reproduce itself that it cannot be constrained by any local hormonal or immune processes.

That was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  Although, frankly, I could change the title of my blog from “robertelessar.com” to “thatwasaweirdtangent.com” and it would not be inappropriate.

I’ll finish up today with just some basic housekeeping style stuff:

I will probably not work tomorrow, so I will probably not be writing a blog post.  But if I do write one, it will show up here.  I will certainly not be sleeping in the office tonight, but I did sleep here last night.  I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise, and after work I went to the train station but the train was badly crowded and there were no relatively comfortable seats available, so I gave up and trudged back to the office.

I just felt worn out, and I feared that if I did go back to the house, I might not come to the office today.  And today is payday, of course, and Sunday is the first of a new month, so rent is due (Wouldn’t it be nice if rent was dew?  Maybe not if you lived in the Atacama Desert.  Though a little dew might be very strong currency there, come to think of it, relative to most of the rest of the world). 

Hopefully today will be a better day than yesterday with respect to pain.  So far, at least, it doesn’t feel any worse.  The hard office floor can help a bit sometimes with my back pain.  That makes a certain amount of sense, or at least it may do so.  After all, our ancestral environment did not include mattresses.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to, that’s my life.  I mean that seriously.  That’s pretty much all there is to my life:  Getting up and getting to work (while writing a blog post), doing office stuff while dealing with noise and people and tinnitus, not getting long enough breaks because people seem incapable of watching the time, being the last to leave the office, commuting back to the house, trying to get at least a bit of sleep, and then repeating.  There appears to be nothing more than that coming my way until I’m dead.  Which, I think you might be able to understand, becomes more attractive and less frightening as the tedious, exhausted, and painful days go by.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  As for me, I hope at least to be able to sedate myself enough to have a longer-than-usual sleep tonight.  It’s not ideal (pharmacologically induced sleep being generally and significantly less beneficial than natural sleep), but it’s what I have to use.

*Think of the constellations**.

**Won’t someone please think of the constellations!?!?

***It’s like the difference between exponential functions. ab will grow much more rapidly**** when b is 3, for instance, than when b is 2 or 1.5 or 1.1, and so on.

****Stop looking at the negative side of the number line, dammit.  Just stipulate that a is always a positive number.  Or make the function the absolute value of ab, in other words, |ab|.

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Each new morn new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows blog heaven on the face

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (of course) and it’s also the 29th of January in 2026 (common era).  At least today’s date (the 29th) is a prime number, but other than that, nothing interesting about today’s date jumps out at me.

Not much interesting is jumping out at me about anything, come to think of it.  Not that there aren’t plenty of “interesting”* things happening in the US and the world at large; there are.  But they are largely just stress-inducing, and all too redolent of Yeats’s The Second Coming, i.e., “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  What rough beast indeed slouches its way toward Bethlehem to be born?

Meh.  It’s always been like that, though.  Peace and kindness in any populations are too easily infiltrated and spoiled by any freeloaders and parasites that come along‒on societal scales, these are often politicians as well as too many of the most wealthy individuals, though it would be foolhardy to say that they are all parasites or that they are the only ones.

In any kind of ecosystem that’s complex and productive enough, with enough thermodynamic “free energy”, there will be many means by which “life”** finds a way to garner resources and increase.  Some of these are generally useful and productive, the equivalent of green plants and earth worms and so on, creating or improving the resources that make the whole thing livable.

But when there are resources, and when there is a complex ecosystem (of any type) then predators (like the cows and horses and sheep that feed on the plants and then the other animals that feed on them) will evolve that prey ultimately on the primary producers, as well as parasites that just drain life from many levels of the system for their own benefit without providing anything that is useful for any other creatures.  There are also symbiotes of various kinds, instantiating various forms of mutual exchange to mutual benefit.

Of course, every living cell‒each of the tens of trillions in every human body and the bodies of all other eukaryotes on Earth‒is a symbiote, really.  The mitochondria (and chloroplasts when applicable) and probably other organelles were separate life forms that long ago took up and adapted to residence within other cells and have never left, to the benefit (in the “short term” at least) of all multicellular life forms.  And, of course, those life forms themselves are each massively symbiotic systems of countless cells.

But, unfortunately, even a life form that originated from a single ancestral cell‒and this applies not merely to each individual organism but to life on Earth as a whole‒can produce parasites that drain and ruin things for the rest.  Think of cancer, here, when applying the concept to “individual” organisms.

And even otherwise sensible and useful parts of an organism can experience a kind of mission creep that ends up making them detrimental to the whole.  Think of autoimmune diseases, or analogously, some of the judgmental and self-righteous excesses of the left that have caused their electability to deteriorate, allowing the already mutated cells on the right (which has seen its own healthy functions overwhelmed by its own cancers over time) to overgrow to general detriment.

Of course, cancers and severe autoimmune diseases and the like will end up destroying themselves, but they are prone to take the organism down in the process, and then all that will be left finally is a decaying corpse.  Am I speaking literally or metaphorically?  Yes, I am.

I know humans tend to think of themselves‒when they think of such things at all, or indeed, when they think at all‒as somehow different, separate, special, other than the various levels and stages and types of life and interactions.  They are not.  It’s just very difficult for them even to think to look at themselves dispassionately, as if from above and outside.

Of course, they are different from all the other things in reality‒as is everything else.  Everyone is “special”, which is just another way of saying no one is***.

If and when humans actually develop a civilization that goes beyond Earth and out into the greater cosmos to become significant at a galactic scale or higher, and in a durable way, I will recognize them as something special****.

Until then, nothing humans have done has really been much different qualitatively than ants making hills and termites making mounds and bees making hives.  Even the various space probes and messengers and, yes, astronauts are not much different than the scouts that bees “send out” to look for new sources of pollen and nectar.

Humans really could stand to develop a greater sense of humility.  I strongly suspect that they would do much better that way in the long run.

I don’t have high hopes for them, unfortunately.  But then, I don’t tend to have high hopes about much of anything.  That may be due to some degree of insight on my part, or it may be just the way my mind tends to work, or there may be other possibilities or combinations thereof.  In any case, I often find humans in general‒with noteworthy exceptions‒utterly exhausting and disgusting and pathetic.

But humans are not the only creatures that merit such reactions.  They are merely, for the moment, the most consequential ones to me.  Saddle me with an infestation of cockroaches or a swarm of mosquitoes or a massive overgrowth of mold and/or mildew, and I will be at least temporarily distracted from my (sad and disappointed) contempt for humans, and to some degree for everything else.  It will not, however, make that feeling go away.

The universe as a whole and in its parts is so noxious as to be barely, if at all, tolerable.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  But I suspect it always will be that way, at least unless and until the whole shmear evolves into a state of uniform, maximal entropy with no free energy and so no dynamic processes beyond those required fundamentally by quantum mechanics.

Oh, well.  I guess I can check out any time I like, and‒unlike the case with the Hotel California‒I can thereby leave.

I hope you all have a good day.

TTFN

*In the sense as used in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times.”  Or, as I have said many times in the past, one should try never to be interesting to one’s doctor.

**This can be literal, or it can be metaphorical‒businesses, nations, ideologies, etc., can be what we are considering when we say “life”, but many of the same patterns hold at every scale.

***Props to Dash from The Incredibles for this pithy insight.

****Or, well, if I am still alive then‒which seems unlikely‒I will so recognize them.

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Should I write on Substack? Should I not write at all?

Well, first, today’s date is a bit boring; it’s just riddled with even numbers.  Even numbers, of course, are almost never prime‒out of all the infinite prime numbers that exist, only one is an even number, and that’s the even number:  2.  Likewise, out of all the infinite even numbers, only 2 is prime.

Now, you might point out that there is a 2 in today’s date; in fact there is more than one (har):  1-28-2026.  However, each of those twos reads, almost inescapably, as part of a larger, non-prime* number‒28, 20 (or 2000), 26.  So, they lose their charm.

And that’s my weird, number-related nonsense out of the way for now.

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day, but I’ve done my best to get a head start on that this week, to the degree possible.  We’ll see whether or not that does me any good.  Well, I will see.  I doubt any of you will see, and you probably won’t know in any sense.  I guess I might share it here on this blog, if it sticks in my mind enough for me to mention it, but I doubt that will happen.  It seems unlikely that anyone would care, anyway.

The cliché thing to add at the end there wanted to be “but never say never”.  However, that expression annoys me, partly because it includes the word “never” twice while admonishing others not to use it.  Of course, I recognize that to be deliberate verbal irony, but I don’t find it very clever.

My preference is to say something like “never is a long time” when admonishing someone against making sweeping, “never”-related statements.  Or, if someone says something like, “they were supposed to get back to me, but they never did,” I will often say, “Never hasn’t happened yet.  They just haven’t gotten back to you so far.”

No, actually, I don’t have any (local) friends.  Why do you ask?

I still haven’t received any feedback regarding the Substack question.  In fact, the only feedback I’ve received of any kind has been from the two people who are basically the only people who comment on my blog.  It’s nice to get feedback from them, of course, but I would welcome others as well.  And I would really appreciate someone’s thoughts about the Substack and/or monetization idea.

I don’t know.  Maybe to be able to monetize one’s (nonfiction) writing, one needs to have some consistent shtick or something‒a focus on politics or medicine or philosophy or what have you.  Whereas I don’t even know what I’m going to discuss until I’m already discussing it**.  Is that the sort of thing that could sustain a paying audience?  I don’t know.

I would like to get some broader feedback on this, but I don’t know how to elicit that feedback except by asking here.  It’s not as though I have anyone else to whom I can talk about this kind of thing.  I barely have anyone to whom I can talk about anything.

I guess I could just try to “fake it until I make it” with a more focused blog, obeying an idiotic admonition that people recall only because it rhymes.

Now, I’m fond of lyrics and good poetry so I appreciate rhymes, but rhyme does not equal reason; in other words, don’t fall for someone saying something like, “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

If anything, if someone tries to convince you using a rhyme, veer in the other direction from accepting what they say.  When people have good reasons for something, they don’t require clever verbosity to persuade a reasonable person.  I say “persuade”, but that’s really being a bit disrespectful to the notion of true persuasion.  Using the “rhyme as reason” fallacy is really a form of dishonest manipulation, as is the willful application of many fallacies when trying to influence another’s thoughts.

Anyway, I don’t want to fake it with respect to having a particular focus or agenda in a blog or other series of writing.  I’ve been faking being human all my life, and that’s more than exhausting enough.  Also, as time goes by, and I see more and more of the things humans do and the ways that humans do things, I’m thinking maybe trying to act like one of them isn’t such a well-advised undertaking.  Maybe humans are vastly overrated.

Then again, so are most other life forms on the planet.  Perhaps phytoplankton/cyanobacteria are the only innocent life forms on Earth (and I’m far from certain of their innocence).  Of course, since no being had any choice in being the being that it’s being, one could say that every life form is innocent, and that’s fair enough, but then the very concepts of innocence and guilt become nearly useless.  Maybe they should be.  Maybe they tend to mislead and muddle people’s thinking.

I don’t know what I’m on about with all this.  I suppose I’ll see how I got to this point when I edit the post.  I doubt it will be terribly enlightening, but it’s not impossible.

That’s enough for today, though.  If any readers do have any thoughts about the Substack idea or anything else, I would be interested to hear them.  And, yes, I would hear them even if they are just written on the page (or, rather, the screen), because when I read, I hear what I’m reading in my head; that’s how I read.  So there.

I hope you have a very good day.

*I think the official term is “composite number” but I don’t think they need (or deserve) a special name.  They are just non-primes.

**I’m using the word “discuss” fairly broadly here, since usually I’m the only one “talking”, and it’s not clear whether or not that counts as a discussion.

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Really, Doctor Elessar, you must learn to govern your passions

I woke up this morning thinking‒or, well, feeling‒as though it were Saturday instead of Tuesday; I’m not at all sure why.  But it is Tuesday…isn’t it?  I suppose if I’m wrong I’ll find out soon enough.  But my smartphone and the laptop and the internet-connected clock all seem to support what I think, and what I thought when I woke up (as opposed to what I felt), which was that this is Tuesday, the 27th of January, 2026 (AD or CE).

It’s odd how emotions can be so bizarrely specific and yet incorrect.  I know that this is not merely the case with me.  We see the effects of people following their emotional inclinations over their reason all the time, even though those emotions were adapted to an ancestral environment that is wildly different from the one in which most of us now live.  It’s frustrating.

Though, of course, frustration itself is an emotion, isn’t it?  Still, it is simply an observable fact that emotions are unreliable guides to action.  We definitely could use more commitment to a Vulcan style philosophy in our world.  And by “Vulcan”, I mean the species from Star Trek™, Mr. Spock’s people, not anything related to the Roman god.

Of course, the specifics of the Vulcan philosophy as described in the series have some wrinkles and kinks that don’t quite work.  For instance, curiosity and the desire to be rational are emotions of a sort, as are all motivations, and the Vulcans do not avoid these.  Then again, in the Star Trek universe, Vulcans do have emotions, they just train themselves to repress them.

Still, the Vulcan ethos is not so terribly different from some aspects of Buddhism (and some of Taoism and also Stoicism), and the logic focus and internal self control are quite similar to the notion and practice of vipassana and other meditation types.  Perhaps metta can be part of that, too**.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone on this planet committed themselves to mindfulness and rationality*?  Perhaps it will happen someday, if we do not die as a species first.  It’s not impossible.

By the way, AI is not our hope for that future, specifically.  Just because AIs are run on GPUs that use good old digital logic (AND, OR, NOT, etc., i.e., logic gates) doesn’t mean that what they do is going to be logical or rational or reasonable.  We are creatures whose functions can be represented or emulated by circuit logic, but the functions‒the programs, if you will‒are not necessarily logical or rational or reasonable.

Humans’ (and humanoids’) minds are made up of numerous modules, interacting, feeding back (or forward) on each other, each with a sort of “terminal goal” of its own, to use AI/decision theory terminology.  They play a figurative tug-of-war with each other, the strengths of their “pulls” varying depending on the specific current state of that part of the brain.

I’ve spoken before of my notion of the brain/mind being representable as a vector addition in high-dimensional phase space, with the vector sum at any given moment producing the action(s) of the brain (and its associated body), which then feeds back on and alters the various other vectors, thus then changing the sum from moment to moment, which changes the feedback, which changes the sum, and so on.

The AIs we have now are at best analogous to individual modules in brains of creatures of all levels of braininess, doing specific tasks, like our brains’ language processing centers and spatial manipulation centers and memory centers and facial recognition centers and danger sensing centers and so on.  We know that these modules are not necessarily logical or rational in any serious sense, though all their processes can, in principle, be instantiated by algorithms.

If we imagine a fully fledged mind developed from some congregation of such AI modules, there is no reason to think that such a mind would be rational or reasonable or even logical, despite its being produced on logic circuits.  To think that AI must be reasonable (or even “good”) in character is to fall into a kind of essentialist, magical thinking‒a fairly ironic fact, when you think about it.

Okay, well, this has been a rather meandering post, I know (a curious phrase, “meandering post”‒it seems oxymoronic).  I didn’t plan it out, of course.  There is much more I could say on this subject or set of subjects, and I think it’s both interesting and important.  But I will hold off for now.

Perhaps I’ll return to it later.  I would love to receive lots of feedback on this in the meantime.  Also, I would still like to get feedback about yesterday’s post’s questions, such as those about Substack.  I won’t hold my breath, though.

Heavy sigh.  Have a good day.

*Not “logic” as they called it in Star Trek, because logic is not necessarily related to the real world, but can be entirely abstract.  Imagine if the logic to which Vulcans dedicate themselves were Boolean logic.  Of course, at some level, based on the Turing’s ideas, including the Church-Turing Thesis, all thought processes can be reduced to or represented by intricate Boolean logic.  But I don’t think that’s what the Vulcans are on about.  I’ve often wondered if perhaps the Vulcan word that translates as “logic” in English has more sophisticated connotations in Vulcan.  Maybe they don’t use “rationality” because they connect it to rational numbers, and maybe “reason” is too closely related in Vulcan to “cause”, which as I’ve noted before is not the same thing (“there are always causes for things that happen, but there are not necessarily reasons”).

**One can imagine a perverse sort of dukkha based meditation, in which a person focuses deliberately on feeling the unsatisfactoriness of life.  I doubt it would be very beneficial, but I can almost imagine ways in which it might be.  The very act of deliberately focusing on suffering and dissatisfaction might lead one to recognize the ephemerality and pointlessness of such feelings.  I don’t intend to try it, though.

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“Stupid is as stupid does, Mrs. Blue.”

Well, here I am again after all, writing another stupid blog post on another stupid day in a stupid life on a stupid planet.

Now, with respect to that last entry on my brief list, one might say, “Hang on.  Of all the planets we know, Earth is the only one with clear life, let alone intelligence.  Doesn’t that make it an exceptionally smart planet?”

I would agree that, yes, it is an exceptionally smart planet (so to speak).  But that’s not saying very much.  All the other planets in our solar system appear to be lifeless, so they are really neither smart nor stupid.  They are merely lumps.

You can’t (or shouldn’t) call a rock stupid nor should you expect it to be smart.  The concept of “smart” doesn’t apply.  It’s a bit like my term “unsane”, which does not mean the same thing as “insane” as I use it.  “Unsane” means that the concept of sanity (or its lack) does not even apply (it’s a good term to use in a cosmic horror setting).

To be stupid‒in the sense in which I am using it here, anyway‒one must have the capacity to be smart.  It’s an important distinction, I thinktion.  I recall hearing a guest* on Sam Harris’s podcast discussing the notions of smart versus stupid.  Basically, smart could be thought of (in this guest’s view) as doing something in a way that was faster or more efficient than randomness would provide.

I think this person used as an example the process of getting from one’s house to the nearest airport.  The nonintelligent way to go would be, for instance, just to make randomly chosen turns at each intersection.  Using that strategy, one would get to the airport eventually, though the time it takes would scale (I think) proportionally to the square root of the distance…or maybe it was the square or the log, I don’t remember off the top of my head how such drunken walks scale with distance.  I think it must be more like the square than the root.  If I had the energy, I would look that up for clarity, but I’m not up to it right now.

Anyway, the point is, random turns on finite roads will get you to the airport eventually**.  Whether or not life would still exist on Earth by the time you arrived is uncertain, but you would get there.

Any route that took you less time than the “average” random route could be considered relatively intelligent.  The most intelligent route(s) would be the one(s) that got you to the airport in the least amount of time (or by the shortest distance, depending on your preference, though the two often coincide).

On the other hand, going around and around the block on which you live would never get you to the airport.  That would be stupid.  As you can see, it’s worse than just being nonintelligent.

Actually, of course, it would still be stupid if someone chose to do the random walk method to get to the airport when maps, etc., are available (unless one were doing it as an experiment, though in that case one’s goal would not be to get to the airport as efficiently as possible).

My point is probably well hammered into the ground by now:  to be stupid (at least as I am using the word) one must have the capacity to be smart.

For instance, I am supposedly quite smart.  In principle, there are probably few strictly intellectual disciplines which I could not “master” if I had the will (and resources) to do so.  There are some things that require particular bodily or other configurations or capacities that make me incapable of doing them more or less at all‒I could not be a professional basketball player or an Olympic gymnast, for instance.  But when it comes to “mindy” things, things for which a skill can be learned, my attitude has always been more or less that if someone can do it, then I could do it given enough time and effort.  I’ve not encountered anything so far that’s disabused me of that judgment.

And yet, despite that, look at the state in which my life wallows (I do not refer to the state of Florida, though that’s evidence supporting my point).

If I were able actually to constrain and focus my mind on one (or a few at most) subject(s) and just work on that (them), I think I could honestly make a real, significant contribution.  Perhaps it would not be anything revolutionary or monumental, but it would be a difference.

Unfortunately, I cannot seem to remain focused on specific things just on my own.  This is part of why I have done best in preprogrammed curricula.  Medical school, for instance, was fairly easy (in terms of mental difficulty, not in terms of the amount of work).  But depression and insomnia and anxiety and what I now recognize as the effects of ASD, and possible other forms of “neurodivergence”, make it difficult for me to learn things straightforwardly‒to drive as quickly to the airport as possible, figuratively speaking.

So, what point was I trying to make, again?  Oh, yeah.  To be stupid, one has to have the capacity to be intelligent, at least in the sense in which I am using the word “stupid”.  Maybe it would be better to use variations of the word “idiot” such as idiocy, being idiotic, that sort of thing.  Even the Doctor openly admits to being an idiot, despite being arguably the smartest person in the Doctor Who universe.

I guess that could make me feel better about myself, in principle, since if even the Doctor is an idiot, it’s not too shameful if I am.  But Doctor Who is not reality, nor is any other work of fiction (unless one is invoking the broadest, most unfiltered concept of the multiverse***).  In the real world, my stupidity makes me in many ways far stupider than any annelid worm, for instance, because I ought to be smarter than I am, I ought to be more secure than I am, I ought to be more at ease than I am.

I certainly ought to be more successful than I am now and have been for a long time.  My living quarters and conditions and whole lifestyle now are significantly less posh and luxurious than conditions were in college (and that’s not even counting the fact that I was getting an education then).  Even prison seemed‒in some ways, at least‒healthier and more conducive to well-being than how I live now.  And I don’t see any sign, nor recognize any clear way, that I’m going to do anything but continue to go downhill from here.

And, alas, I fear that the hill I’m descending has no lowest level.  It just keeps on going down, down, without even a “rock lobster” to break up the wretched descent.

Enough.  I hope you have a good day.

*I checked; it was David Krakauer, in the Making Sense podcast number 40, unless I’m quite mistaken.

**Assuming unlimited fuel and an airport (and set of roads and a vehicle) that last long enough.

***See Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality, and possibly Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe.

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Minding primes and priming minds

It’s Monday the 19th of January (in 2026 CA or AD).  19 is a nice prime number, but it’s one people don’t think about very often.  Stephen King turned it into an “evil” number in his extended universe, which is much less obvious and predictable than using the unjustly maligned number 13.  I’ve always* liked that he did that.  It was clearly chosen at least partly because it was (and remains, and always will be) a prime number.  But it’s not an obvious one.  So, nice job King-sensei (not that he needs my moral support, though I would welcome such support from him).

I occasionally think about mailing Stephen King a copy of one of my books just on the off chance that he might read it some day when he’s bored.  If I were to develop the chutzpah to do such a thing, what do those of you who have read my stories think would be the best one to send him?

Take your time, and don’t be shy.  I’d love to hear from all…what, one of you?  Two?

I don’t think there could be three, but I could be wrong.

Returning to the topic of prime numbers, I had a cool thing happen on Friday:  I bought some stuff at the local convenience store, and my total was $19.07.  I looked at it for a moment and thought that it was a cool-seeming number.  I know 19 and 7 are both prime, and the digits don’t add up to a multiple of 3, nor is the total number a multiple of 4 or 5, obviously.  I wondered if it might be prime.

Back in the day, I would have had to check that more or less manually, but nowadays, I was able just to type into the search bar “Is 1907 prime?”

It is!  Or so claims Google.  If necessary, I could check it myself, by hand, though that would be laborious.  I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to write a quick computer program to check all the possible factors (among numbers less than 954**).  I doubt that I will do either thing, though.  I’m pretty confident in Google on this point.

And now, having said that, I’m starting to feel uncertain.  Could Google be wrong about this?  Am I really going to have to check for myself?

I remember when I realized I had never seen the Pythagorean Theorem proven mathematically (I grew up in a declining school system, sorry).  So, I had to prove it to myself to my own satisfaction, which I did.  Thankfully, it’s easier to prove something like that when the answer (so to speak) is well known.

Okay, enough numeracy, or whatever the best term for the preceding matters might be.

I did not work on Saturday, which is why I didn’t write a blog post on Saturday.  The office was open, but my coworker was able to come in, and the boss specifically told me to take the day off.  Apparently, my exhaustion really was beginning to show, even to other people, which seems not to be the usual case.

Of course, having one day of actual rest doesn’t cure my situation, but it is a minor respite.  I have more fundamental issues than mere rest or lack thereof, but I am not sure there is any way to fix them, at least not in practice.

In principle, of course, it must be possible at least to improve the settings in my brain‒tweak this set of synapses and adjust sensitivity to this or that neurotransmitter, increase (or decrease) the blood flow to this and that region of the brain, etc.  That sort of thing, done precisely and judiciously, could in principle correct or adjust any parameter of brain function one might want, in whatever ways lie within the realm of the brain’s potential.

We’re a long way from being able to carry out such manipulations, and it’s by no means certain that we will exist long enough for neuroscience to achieve such things.  But there’s no principle of nature that precludes it.

Of course, people might be quite leery of even researching such things, even when we finally know enough to do so.  After all, if we can adjust the brain specifically and precisely to make it less depressed or less anxious or less forgetful, we can adjust it in other ways, too.  One could adjust someone’s brain to make them fall in love with a particular other person, like the mythical old magic love potion.  I think most people would rather not fall in love that way (though there’s no reason to think such love would be any less delightful to experience than ordinary, clumsy, stochastic love such as what we have now).

Indeed, one could adjust human minds to make them happy, no matter what the circumstances.  Of course, this could well be used to dominate whole populations of people; one could keep them under constant control because they would be happy, and you could keep them motivated and loyal and satisfied with whatever their lot might be.  I think most people would find that notion repugnant, but it is at least somewhat morally ambiguous, because such people would be as legitimately happy as anyone who becomes happy “on their own”.  Indeed, they might well be happier than any person had ever been before, and more “well-adjusted”, and more creative, and more psychologically healthy.

I get near some of these concerns in my book(s) Unanimity:  Book 1 and Unanimity:  Book 2.  I wouldn’t say those specific ideas figure centrally, though matters of mind and free will and the nature of a person’s character and how it can be changed by physical events are a big part of it.  Also, all sorts of horrible things happen, since it is a horror novel.  And there’s a lot of room for all of it, since it’s as long (total) as the unabridged The Stand and It, to bring us back to Stephen King.

With that, I guess I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, I won’t already be exhausted by tomorrow.  I hope you have a good day.  And if any of you know Stephen King, please ask him which of my books he might think he would want to read.  I’d really appreciate it.

*Well, not always.  I didn’t like it before it happened or before I knew about it.

**Incidentally, 953, which is the rounded-down answer to 1907 divided by 2, is also a prime number.  That’s kind of nice.

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What do we call a day on which we bread and cook things in hot oil?

It’s Friday.  It’s also pretty cold here in south Florida; it’s about 44 Fahrenheit right now.  We are now just over halfway through the month of January in 2026.  Yesterday we were just under halfway through.

Actually, no, that’s not really correct.  Since January has 31 days, the 16th (today) should be considered the median day.  There were fifteen days before this, and there are 15 days after, and there is this one day in the middle that stands alone.  So, maybe I can reasonably say that we are now rather precisely halfway through January, or at least we will be at noon.

Enough of all the date and number nonsense.  I’m probably the only one here who enjoys or even notices such things.

With respect to anything else, “enjoyment” is an even bigger question.  I did spend a bit of time yesterday watching some of the rather nutty inventors/amateur engineers on YouTube making and testing various odd devices, including some particularly nifty ones, such as various kinds of homemade flame throwers.  I’ve made homemade flame throwers myself, with varying degrees of success, so it’s nice to learn from the successes and failures of these other people.

It’s briefly amusing, but that’s about it.

I didn’t do any more problems on Brilliant dot org yesterday.  I’ll try to do some today.  But so many things distract me and get in the way, and work is not the only issue.

Mainly, I think the issue is that I am mentally exhausted.  Work contributes to that, of course, but not as much as my chronic insomnia, which is no better than ever.  And, of course, there is the dysthymia, which I think is officially designated now as “chronic depression”.  I guess that’s a more straightforward term, and I cannot deny that it is fairly clear, but I like (the word) dysthymia better.  The “dys” part carries the very sharp, ancient-world imprimatur of things going wrong, of shit not working properly, as in dysfunction, dystopia, and so on.

Believe me, there is shit that is not working properly here in this head.

Speaking of working and not working, the office will be open tomorrow, I hear, but I don’t yet know if I’m going to work or not.  That will probably depend on what my coworker(s) are doing.  I guess if I am working I will write a post in the morning.  I don’t think it will be a happy one.

I tell you, that high-rise, fancy balcony room (with king sized bed) in the fancy hotel in downtown [name redacted] near me is looking more and more enticing.  The daily rate is not very expensive, even on the weekend‒especially if you’re not going to have any expenses at all afterwards.  I guess I’ll keep that option in mind and keep checking the rates online for the nonce.

I don’t know why the nonce wants me to keep doing that, but so it seems to desire.  I do a lot of somewhat irrational things for that annoying nonce.

Okay, that’s enough of driving that particular joke into the ground.

I am still having trouble calming my mind without making myself more depressed.  Still, I have to admit, depression (in general) is somewhat preferable to extreme tension and (mainly social) anxiety, especially because, in me, anxiety presents as hostility, sometimes global and even cosmic levels of hostility.  Chronic pain doesn’t help that particular set point, of course.

I’m reminded of two different movie quotes, the first regarding fear and its consequences, from The Phantom Menace, spoken by (the criminally overrated) Yoda:  “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”  I always want to reply to that with, “Yeah…it leads to the suffering of the people who pissed me off.”  But that’s not very constructive.

The other quote comes from the (criminally underrated) movie Dragonslayer, when the old wizard, Ulrich, describes Vermithrax (the dragon) with the words, “When a dragon gets this old it knows nothing but pain, constant pain.  It grows decrepit.  Crippled.  Pitiful.  Spiteful.”

I feel you there, Vermithrax.

Incidentally, I’m not sure I understand the reason for the periodic eating of individual young virgin girls; that doesn’t seem to be nearly enough calories to sustain a giant, flying reptile that breathes fire.  I guess magic must be involved somehow.  And if the energy required for survival comes from some magical field, maybe food is only needed to provide raw materials but not to fuel metabolic activity.

I’m probably overthinking this.

I could use some magic now and then, I can’t deny it.  I don’t mean “magic” such as stage magic, though when I was little I got kind of into that stuff for a while, and I had several different books on how to perform magic tricks.  I mean “real” magic, like Harry Potter or Doctor Strange or what have you.  Of course, if such things existed in reality, they wouldn’t be “magic” except perhaps for nostalgic reasons.  They would be science.

I have long been irritated by the fact that there is no real “science of magic” in the Harry Potter universe.  They have all these classes about doing magic and so on, but as far as I can tell, even someone like Dumbledore (or Hermione) doesn’t get into the fundamentals of magic, the physics of magic, if you will.

But there has to be such a thing, of course.  Clearly the magic there has laws, it’s not just a “make a wish” kind of magic.  There must be a dynamics and kinematics and so on of magic.  But even the things they supposedly investigate in the Department of Mysteries don’t seem to have anything to do with fundamental magical laws.

Again, I’m probably overthinking things.

It’s a problem a lot of the time, and it often gets in my way.  I refer you to my point above that depression is probably better than the anxiety, tension, and hostility that seem to be my other option(s).  Maybe I should just lean into my depression, stop trying to be upbeat in any way, stop cracking jokes or even watching or reading comedy, stop trying to talk myself out of certain feelings, CBT-style, but rather just embrace and embody all my nihilism and pessimism and self (and other) loathing.

I don’t know if I can do it.  Still, it might be worth a try.  It’s hard to see it making things much worse.

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What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should blog for her?

Hello and good morning.  By no one’s demand, it’s time for another Thursday blog post.  On the other hand, it’s also not as though anyone has demanded that I not write a blog post.  This combination of facts suggests more or less complete, tacit indifference to my posting.

That’s okay, I guess.  And it’s not as though I could just arbitrarily change things on a whim even if it were not okay.  I suppose it might be doable for me to become unpopular, and to have people at least suggesting that I should stop.  I’d just have to start writing truly deplorable things.  Of course, it would be a challenge to be so deplorable as to engender bipartisan hatred.

It sounds somewhat intriguing, I must be honest, but it also sounds like a lot of work.  And I am just increasingly exhausted all the time, mentally.  I’ve used the following analogy before, and I don’t want to run it into the ground, but I feel very much as Gandalf described the Nazgul or any mortal who keeps a great ring of power:  they do not die, but neither do they grow or obtain new life; they merely continue, until at last every breath is a weariness.  Or, as Bilbo described what he was experiencing:  he felt thin and stretched out, like butter that’s been scraped over too much bread.  And as Bilbo concluded about himself, I need a change.

Alas, I have no friends among the high elves, so I can expect no welcome in Rivendell, nor am I friends with dwarves, so Erebor is not available to me.  I don’t seem to be good at maintaining connections with any people who are not nearby (whether they are real or not).  I didn’t quite realize this while I was growing up, because I was the youngest of three kids, and I lived in the same house and so stayed in the same school system until I was 18 (or very nearly).  The people around me were relatively constant for a long time.

As it is, though, I have a difficult time imagining what other people are doing‒even people I know very well‒when they’re not with me, or even that they’re doing anything at all, let alone what they might be thinking.  I think fiction at least helped train me to imagine other people’s thoughts in many ways, and I think that’s invaluable; I think reading* fiction should be encouraged in all autistic children if possible.

But it requires effort to imagine what someone might be thinking or even that they’re thinking or doing anything at all when they’re not with me.  This doesn’t mean I don’t care about them, or about other people; that’s orthogonal to the question.  The people who are important to me are very important.  But I can’t feel them from a distance, so to speak.

This, unfortunately, is why it’s not much use if someone says that there are people out there who care about you, to whom you matter, or words to that effect.  It’s certainly well-intentioned, and it is no doubt sincere.  But however true it is, the emotional valence is low.  I cannot feel that those people, whoever they may be, care about me unless I’m interacting with them, though I may know it to a high degree of intellectual credence.

Maybe this is part of why I find it difficult to believe in ghosts, or any kind of afterlife, or any of the many invisible cosmic imaginary friends that people call gods.  Not that I think that I’m missing out in this case; intellectually as well as emotionally, empathically, I have found no reason to believe in any such things (though I have enjoyed writing fiction about them).

Indeed, the more I look, the less likely they seem.  But I do not give them zero credence, though it may come vanishingly close to zero over time.  But to give something an actual credence of zero, in Bayesian terms at least, means to say that there is no evidence or reasoning that could make you consider the proposition even possibly true.  That sounds terribly irrational to me, I don’t know about you.  It sounds like dogmatism, like blind belief, and I have no desire for such things.  I have very little tolerance for them.

What was I writing about?  Oh, yeah, that feeling of separateness and loneliness, of being almost cosmically, solipsistically alone, even though there are people out there (mostly far away) who care.

I have probably used this analogy before, but it’s a bit like being adrift in a small open boat on the ocean, and you have a radio that can only send in Morse code, but you can receive audio messages that there are ships out there, and they care about you, they feel bad that you are floating out there alone in an open boat, they support you.  And you believe them.  And the moral support is nice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t rescue you from being adrift at sea, with only the resources in your little boat, and you don’t actually know how long those supplies are able to last.  But they are finite.

Oh, who knows?  And why should anyone care?  I don’t know.  I have a hard time making good arguments for caring about me.

TTFN

*Reading is, I think, far superior to taking in TV shows, videos, movies, etc., though those things can be great fun.  With written fiction, one can literally get inside the minds of the characters and be given insight into what and how they are thinking and feeling.  With TV and movies, those feelings can only be inferred at best, and only when the acting is tolerably clear and those emotions are definitive.  For people with difficulty judging other people’s faces at times, that can be less useful than reading.

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“The numbers don’t decide”

I don’t have any fun numerical trivia to notice about the numbers of the date today, which is Wednesday (1-14-2026), by the way.  It’s not that I’m saying there are no potential fun numerical comparisons or patterns or what have you in the numbers of the date today, just that there aren’t any that stuck out for me, which probably means that there aren’t any which I would think are fun.

Prime numbers and palindromic numbers are probably my favorites of these kinds of things.  But although the primes are considered the “atoms” of the number world by those who study such things specifically—I guess those would be number theorists—there are many situations in which there are no obvious prime numbers.  I suppose the same is true of actual atoms, come to think of it.  When was the last time you encountered a single, naked atom in the wild, so to speak?

Anyway, I’m not really interested in “talking” about that right now.  I’m not really all that interested in much of anything.  I know, I know, this is getting ridiculous, I keep writing one relatively upbeat or at least engaged* post, and then I turn somber and negative on the next one.  Well, rest assured, in case you weren’t already, I feel generally glum and somber during the day even on those days when I write posts in which I’m truly interested, like yesterday’s.  You just have the good fortune not to be around me.

Even among those who are around me, such as the people at work—actually, there’s no “such as”, these are the only people around me except on truly rare occasions—there’s probably not much of a clue as to my glumness.  Apparently, my moods and feelings don’t show on my face, even when I become aware of them consciously, which can tend to be rare (I appear to have a degree of alexithymia).

So, even when I feel that I’m not sure I can make it through the rest of a given day, let alone through any more significant time, no one seems to notice.  There are and have been people at the office who have dealt with drug and alcohol problems, legal issues, erratic life choices, sporadic attendance, stuff like that, and they get at least tacit moral support and even help; there are various resources in the community to assist them that are readily available, and our culture lionizes those who recover from drug problems, even as often as they might backslide.

I just have a dysfunctional brain, or so it seems, and the useful resources to help that (without insurance) are about as prevalent as icicles in Death Valley.  And unless you’ve truly gone down the tubes with those inherent mental health issues, no one gives seems to give you much moral support or encouragement, let alone congratulations, if you’re working on them.

By the way, speaking of drug problems, I was on constant opioids (including the dreaded fentanyl, the patch, in my case) for chronic pain for several years, .  I weaned myself off of them by myself, by my own choice, because I decided they were doing me more harm than good.  This is, of course, different from kicking an actual addiction—very different—but still, I have to try to find something about which I can brag.  Or wait, do I really have to do that?  Probably not.

I’m trying to do things to help myself mentally.  I’ve been reading a new (to me) book that deals with Adlerian psychology and philosophy, for instance.  So far it’s pretty good, but it’s not as insightful or useful (again, so far) as are things like Stoicism and Vipassana and the Tao Te Ching and so on.

I’m also trying to do more with brilliant dot org, which is a truly lovely app that can be used to study various STEM fields.  I did some problems on it in circuits yesterday—I had started that course months ago—but they are so far very basic.  There’s a lot of “drilling” on this app, but when it’s simple stuff it can get a bit tedious.  I guess that might be good.  Doing scales for piano practice is boring but very useful.

I want to get back into the math and science on the site.  I would love to complete every course they offer.  I would love to read every last bit of the textbooks and similar that I have in my mini-library at the office (I’ve added a few things since taking the latest picture).

I would love to learn everything that is learnable, to be honest, but to focus on the scientific before getting to things like literary and other criticism and such like.  As for political “science”, well…I think it’s probably still about at the stage of alchemy right now, and it may never get beyond that.

Unfortunately, my attention span is troublesome.  I get interested in one thing and/or idea and try to immerse myself in it, but then something distracts me soon enough, and some other interest draws me.  I do end up learning about a lot of esoteric subjects that way, though in bits and pieces**.  My ex-wife was always at least mildly annoyed by the number of books I had sitting on my bedside table, most either laid open or with numerous bookmarks.

Still, it would be good to do something until the “end” before moving on to the next thing.  At the very least, it would give me a sense of accomplishment.  I was doing that pretty well with my fiction, starting while I was a guest of the Florida DOC—I would finish a given book (or short story) completely, including editing and, once I was out, publishing before starting the next one.  This was a big deal, because my fiction writing used to suffer from the same issues of my scattered brain described above.

I have veered off that trajectory in recent years, alas.  I now have no fewer than three “begun” stories that I haven’t yet finished.  And no, I haven’t gotten any work done on any of them recently.  I’m too stressed out and worn out, and I am, at bottom, thoroughly alone here.  It’s really very difficult many days just to force myself to continue at all.  Also, disappointing and stupid events throughout the country and the world make that all the more difficult.

I hope you all are having a better time than I am.  I wish for you to be well, however useless such wishes may be.

P.S. Okay, well, if you look at (01-14-2026), you can make each of the digits of the year by adding digits of the month and date, without reusing any given month-date digit for any given year digit.  1 + 1 gives you the 2s, 0 gives you the 0, 4 + 1 + 1 gets you the 6.  That’s pretty lame though, even to me.

*I don’t know whether or not they are engaging posts (a phrase that sounds like an alternative expression for “hitching post”).

**Perhaps the fact that I seem to have to do things this way at least contributes to durability in my understanding, because I keep having to pick up where I left off months and even years ago.  Over time, I have gotten pretty good at being able to do that, and to be able very quickly, usually within the space of a paragraph or at most a page, to remember what was “going on” when I last was reading the book.  Yay, me.

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Or art thou but a virus of the mind, a false creation?

It’s Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 (CE or AD) as I write this.  I’m aware of no superstition in which Tuesday the 13th is either particularly unlucky or particularly lucky.  It’s just a day, even though it’s the 13th.  There are 13ths in every month, after all, though 31sts are another matter (it’s another prime number and is also a palindrome, if you will, of the 13th).

I do somewhat enjoy the fact that the numbers in the (American) expression of the date are: 01-13 and 2026.  Taking non-zero digits only of the month and century only would give us a situation in which the digits of the second half‒2, 2, and 6‒are twice the digits of the first half‒1, 1, and 3.

That’s quite tortured, I know, as far as finding patterns in numbers goes.  At least I’m just doing this for fun, because I enjoy such patterns.  I don’t see any real meaning in them other than “numbers are cool”.  But there are people who believe there is a deeper meaning in such number patterns, like some secret cypher left there by the gods.  It’s rather silly.  But it is of such mistaken attribution to purpose of mere random patterns that religions (and constellations) are made.  More’s the pity.

I have a bit of sympathy for our distant ancestors who first were left to make “meanings” of the various patterns and events they discerned among the various forces in the world with their big, advanced brains but couldn’t yet explain well.  So, they made up stories, and those stories involved the forces of nature being enacted and designed by “people” or sometimes just one “person”.  People were what they knew best.

It’s understandable.  It’s also just wrong (certainly as far as I can tell), as are most initial hypotheses.  Unfortunately, other people respond to those who speak with confidence, whether that confidence is warranted or not*.  And so, they believe.  And like viruses (which are just a kind of self-replicating data, after all) the superstitious ideas are able to use the machinery of human minds to reproduce themselves‒not because they want to reproduce themselves, but because the ones that tend to reproduce themselves tend to multiply, and even to mutate to greater reproduction and persistence and so on.

In case it’s not clear, I am not speaking metaphorically here.  This appears to be the way that religions and other ideologies occur and propagate.  There are, of course, many details at the level of individuals and why they are prone to absorb and then to pass these memeplexes on, either “horizontally” or “vertically” or both.

But there are similar such details in how specific viruses spread.  Does COVID latch onto this or that cell surface protein or glycopeptide?  Does it reproduce in this particular cell type better or another one?  Does it lead to sneezing or coughing in its host, thus making it airborne, or does it induce vomiting and/or diarrhea, making it more food or water borne, or does it reproduce in the organs of reproduction, leading it to be mainly sexually transmitted?  The details matter in dealing with specific viruses, but the pattern of origin and spread and mutation is general.

From these patterns, we can understand (for instance) why rapidly and aggressively lethal viruses tend to be replaced by more sublethal ones:  if your host dies too quickly, you don’t get as many chances to spread.  This requires no intentionality on the part of the virus.  It requires only the logic of replication, in which successful replicators tend to spread more than less successful ones and so come to dominate.

The competition requires no consciousness.  Similarly, religion does not require the existence of any actual deity to be able to cause people to believe in one.  And a religion’s prevalence doesn’t imply that it is correct, only that it is contagious and/or persistent but not instantly lethal.

We see cases of new and/or mutated mind viruses (religions in this case) that are indeed too virulent and so fail to become endemic,  Think of Jonestown, or the Branch Davidians, or Heaven’s Gate (and possibly Trumpism, but we shall see).

It’s possible for a virus that has existed in a body unnoticed or with minimal symptoms and signs for years or decades to respond to changes in the circumstances of its body by becoming more virulent again‒think of shingles (Zoster) the recrudescence of Chicken Pox (Varicella), or the horrible flare-ups (flares-up?) of some chronic hepatitides.

Similarly, just because the human race has endured so far with reasonable success despite being infected with various competing and mutually contradictory memeplexes does not mean it will continue to do so.  Certain of these mind virus variants have the clear potential to lead to globally life-threatening symptoms, and more than one shows signs of doing so.

But why would a virus, whether of the mind or of the body, do things that would lead to the destruction of the host it inhabits, and thereby itself?  That question misses the point***.  Viral evolution (like all such evolution) has no capacity to plan for the future.  It may seem that viruses mean to spread themselves, but that’s only because the ones that don’t tend, by their nature, to spread themselves don’t become prevalent; they don’t spread.

On the other hand, those that have, by chance, comparative advantage in terms of replication tend to replicate more and thus become more prevalent.  And if they mutate (which they will, see my point yesterday about how copying is never perfect) then those mutant forms that are more prone to replicate will replicate more, and of course, those mutants that have decreased the tendency to replicate or that destroy the host do not persist.  There’s no need for purpose; causality is enough.

This post is getting a little long for today, so I’ll draw it to a close.  I could say more on this subject and how the concept of the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators explains far more than just the literal evolution of life, but can provide insight into so much more, so many things.  Darwin was a mightier mind than he could ever know, or at least he came upon an idea that is more powerful than nearly any other that science has found.

Think on that, and be amazed.

*We’re living through some consequences of humans’ stupid tendency to trust people who convey confidence and certainty, even while telling patent lies.  Maybe we should hope for global thermonuclear war.  If humans survive it, maybe they would finally learn from that dreadful lesson**.

**But I doubt it.

***So why did I raise it?  For rhetorical purposes, though I have real discomfort with and distrust of rhetoric, it being one of the things that can help virulent mind viruses spread.