Psychology

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I had a headline in mind, but it would have been gross

Well, today I am writing on my smartphone because I simply, and stupidly, forgot to bring my lapcom yesterday.  I don’t always know where my mind is, to tip a hat to the Pixies, but it often seems not to be with me.

Of course, that’s a figure of speech.  I know that my mind is me, whatever that ultimately means, so I am never anywhere without my mind, anymore than a square can be said to exist even if all its sides are removed‒really, even if one side is removed (though in that case, it can be implied, somewhat like the famous square illusion made of four incomplete circles).

Anyway, I’m going to keep it short today, partly because I’m feeling somewhat queasy, and that takes away a lot of one’s energy‒at least, it takes away a lot of this one’s energy.  I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up or anything; it’s not that bad currently.  I just feel a little like my upper GI tract is not happy with me.  Perhaps it’s a bit like a frowning parent:  not angry, just disappointed.

It’s not a great way to start a day, but there are many worse ones, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.  I will complain‒I am complaining‒but I shouldn’t.

Here’s a peculiar question that occurred to me after writing that last sentence:  are there cases where one shouldn’t do something, but one ought to do it (or vice versa)?  Or are those two words such nearly complete synonyms that such a thing would be contradictory?  One can speak a contradiction, or write it, etc., but one cannot actually bring one into being.  “Talk is cheap, mother fucker,” DMX said.  Reality, on the other hand, has a huge cover charge at the door and you have to pay à la carte for what you get.

This reminds me (I’m not sure why) of a brief, mainly inconsequential writing error I found yesterday in an article related to the new Spider-Man movie.  They used “i.e.” when they were providing an example and should have used “e.g.”.  I know it’s a minor error, but come on, they went through this difference in Get Shorty, for crying out loud (the movie, at least; I don’t remember if it was in the book).

Anyway, it’s not a very auspicious day, for me or for the world, so I’m going to try not to drag this on.  I don’t feel very well, physically or mentally, and what’s more, I don’t expect to feel well, physically or mentally, in the future.

That doesn’t quite reach the level at which I expect not to feel well, physically or mentally.  It’s a subtle difference in wording, but conceptually the states are quite distinct.  One can vaguely not expect that things will necessarily be good, perhaps based on past experience, but not really be inclined one way or the other, or one can frankly expect that things will be bad.

Of course, in the end, no one here gets out alive, but even that isn’t necessarily a bad thing (nor is it necessarily a good thing).  It’s just the way reality appears to be, as best we can tell right now, no matter what anyone claims based on “belief” and “faith” and centuries old to millennia old hearsay (also known as religious writings).

A delusion embraced by millions or billions or even quadrillions of people is still a delusion.  You don’t make dog shit into fillet mignon just by telling yourself and others repeatedly that it is, and if you eat it, that’s on you.  Don’t try to feed it to me, especially not by force.

Of course, you can sort of turn excrement into steak, such as by using it to fertilize grassland on which cattle will graze before eventually being eaten.  But the fact that nature allows this particular remarkable transformation does not mean (for example) that a cracker becomes the body of an ancient rabbi, or that some wine becomes his blood, just because someone said something in Latin near it.

All the pseudo magical crap distracts from the actual good messages that can be found (occasionally, here and there) in religions and ideologies.  People don’t want to have to do the work of really turning crap into burgers, though, because that involves actual farming, which is hard and the results are not guaranteed.

Of course, one can consider or imagine oneself more or less guaranteed to get certain outcomes from religious practices, but the actual outcomes are almost certainly going to be largely the opposite of what people want and tell themselves they will get.

Humans can be very stupid a lot of the time.  But they can also be brilliant, even the most unassuming and humble of them.  Like Ultron said, they’re grotesque and yet lovely.  Like him, I’m often torn between reveling in the human works of art and science and engineering and exploration and so on, and doing my best to wipe every last one of them from the face of the universe.

Unfortunately, right now my tummy is too icky for me to put much energy into either one.

I hope you have a good day.

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Cats, raccoons, spiders, furniture…sometimes even humans

It’s Friday, now, and I’m writing what should be the final blog post of the week, since exclusis improvisis I will not be working tomorrow—which usually means that I will not write a blog post tomorrow.

I am writing this post today on my lapcom, again.  That’s because I am still at the office from yesterday; I did not go back to the house last night.  I had called my sister on the phone after work, in the office, and by the time we were done, it was quite late.  It was too late for the train, so I would have needed to get an Uber back to the house, which would have been expensive, and by the time I got there, I would basically just need to go to bed and then get up and come back in.

What a waste that would have been.

Of course, the neighborhood (nayborhood?) cats will have had another evening and morning without food, but they are stray cats, after all.  They can handle themselves pretty well.  Actually, maybe this hiatus will discourage the stupid little family of raccoons that keeps coming in and eating the cat food after the cats have the eaten their initial amount.

They are cute, of course, bordering on adorable—the raccoons, I mean, though so are the cats—but I do not buy cat food to feed to raccoons, who can do an even better job of taking care of themselves than cats can.  They just get annoying, and although I have learned that silly string and silly foam do kind of freak them out (fire doesn’t seem to, not when it’s just seen, and I don’t want actually to burn them) it’s not enough to discourage them for long*.

I will occasionally lob a coconut (there are scores of them on the ground) in the raccoons’ general direction, which does freak them out some, but it also freaks out some of the cats.  I have even more harmful means at my disposal, but I would have a hard time using them.

It can be quite inconvenient and irritating sometimes, how much I empathize with things like raccoons and opossums (and stray cats) and even with lizards and spiders**, and even with ants and stuffed animals and—occasionally–furniture.  Heck, when I’m in the right state of mind, I can even empathize with palmetto bugs.

But it’s not a deliberate kind of empathy.  It’s certainly not done consciously.  It’s not the kind of empathy termed “cognitive empathy”, in which one can sort of tease apart and understand how the emotions are unfolding in another person’s mind, without necessarily sharing those emotions***.  I can do that if and when I put my mind to it, at least to a point.  But my issue is the sort of automatic, emotional empathy, in which it’s almost possible to feel what the other being (or thing) is experiencing, or at least to imagine that one does.

I experience that with humans, too, at least to some degree.  Actually, it’s often rather overwhelming, especially if there are significant numbers of people around.  I don’t think that it’s a literal sense, like sight or hearing or smell or touch, but those mirror neurons—or whatever other functions in the brain turn other creature’s reactions into literal feelings in one’s own mind—seem to want to try to take in as much of everyone’s percussive passions as they can, and that process cannot readily be shut off, as it wasn’t consciously shut on.

This can be, and has been, useful, such as when dealing with patients one on one as a doctor.  One person at a time is just about manageable, though even that can wear you down when it’s many “one persons” throughout every day.

But still, it can be done.  However, being around many people, especially ones who are not necessarily regulating themselves much, can be damnably irritating and overwhelming.  It’s a bit like being at a rock concert in which every individual crowd member’s favorite band is playing at the same time, all different songs and genres and everything, and the members of the crowd are each and all trying to sing along with their band.

It’s not a pleasant situation, as I’m sure you would agree.  That’s at least part of why being in social gatherings can be quite daunting.  It probably also at least partly explains why things like arcades, which are certainly noisier than most parties, are not nearly as overwhelming as even a small party can be.  Plus, video games can be much more entertaining than trying to talk to various people you’ve only just met, who may or may not have any shared interests with you.

A key indicator or barometer or highlighter of the comparison between the two is the fact that, if you drink alcohol in an arcade, your performance on the games is likely to suffer.  On the other hand, alcohol is all but an absolute necessity at a party just filled with milling humans.

Why do humans insist upon repeatedly arranging activities for which even they, the arrangers, need pharmacotherapy (e.g., ethanol) to enjoy?  I would ask one, but I am almost sure that none of them would have a well thought out answer to the question.

Okay, well, don’t mind me, I’m in an atypical state, for me (which doesn’t necessarily mean that one has become more “typical”, as I discussed yesterday, using the entropy diagram).  I’ll draw this post to a close now, and I wish you all a very good weekend.  I will next return here neither before nor after Monday…

…yet again, exclusis improvisis.

*I’ve read somewhere recently that raccoons are starting to show signs of early pre-domestication toward humans, much as dogs probably did way back in the day.  Cats, on the other hand, mostly domesticated people.

**Okay, I could leave them out of this list.  I like spiders quite a bit, and I more or less always have, so I don’t feel bad about empathizing with them.  In fact, as I’ve said here before (I think) when I accidentally wreck a spider web because it’s too effective at not being seen, I tend to feel really bad.  That is, after all, their extended phenotype, as Richard Dawkins coined the term, and they put a lot of effort and literal bodily resources into it.

***Psychopaths are, apparently, often quite good at this.

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Reflecting on indirect, unconscious drawbacks and their impacts, and other weird thoughts

Well, there’s no lapcom here today, alas.  I just didn’t feel enough drive or urge or energy‒or perhaps impetus‒to bring it with me when I left the office.  Maybe I should say that the magnitude of the vector for taking the lapcom with me was overbalanced by the net vectors that summed up to pushing in the other direction in this (very) high dimensional phase space that is the description of the state of my nervous system and its effects on my activity.

You’ve heard of Hilbert Space*?  Well, you can call this “Robert Space” if you wish.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’m writing this on my smartphone today, and I’m already regretting it a bit.  The arthropathy in my thumbs is complaining rather vociferously (and quite metaphorically) just from the little writing I have so far undertaken.  So, hopefully, I will be able to keep this relatively short today.

That doesn’t always happen.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, sometimes when I get rolling in habitual behavior, I keep barreling through even when I can feel the negative effects already as I do it.

Conversely (or whatever the proper term is), it has occurred to me just in the last day or so**, that my thumb pain may be part of why I haven’t been playing guitar.  It’s not that, when I think of playing it, it occurs to me that my thumbs hurt and so I consciously choose not to do it after weighing the fun versus the pain.  If it were that conscious, I would (clearly) know it already.

But the thumb pain can make the process of playing less pleasant, and that can decrease the emotional reward and reinforcement I get from doing it, and so, in the fullness of time, make me less likely to do it in the future.  It’s sort of a very low-level application of the aversion training from A Clockwork Orange.

If so‒it’s strongly possible, but I cannot swear that it’s really, definitely the case‒that may mean that what I really ought to do to increase my playing is to try to increase the magnitude of that “take the lapcom home” vector.

But, of course, it’s not some axial vector, aligned along only one unit vector, with a cross-product (or outer product, I think, if memory serves) of zero.  And it’s not a fundamental vector, with only itself as its input, either.  It’s a vector that is, itself, the sum of many vector inputs (and heck, maybe some scalars, I don’t know, but I don’t think tensors would apply to this situation), some of which would probably surprise me.

Still, it might be worth a try.  It’s not as though the thumb arthropathy is something I like and want to keep.  So, if I can find ways to counter it, maybe I can see what effect that has on my tendency to play guitar, and thus, finally, on my tendency to sing.

I used to sing a lot, especially when I commuted by car and could play various CDs (but not treasury bonds, ba-dump-bump) and sing along but no one could hear me.

Even when driving my scooter*** to and from work, I had a Bluetooth enabled helmet, linked to my playlist on my phone.  When you sing inside a motorcycle helmet, in traffic, you don’t need to worry about being overheard.

Now I don’t commute that way, and since I have housemates, I don’t often feel comfortable just singing when I’m in my room.  But early morning in the office, when playing guitar, it can be good.  That is, as long as playing guitar is good, which is apparently not the case for now.

Oh, well, I guess I shouldn’t dwell on it.  Everything is futile, everything is imperfect, everything is chaotic, everything is entropic.  And to paraphrase the Stones, I’m neither waiting on a lady nor am I waiting on a friend.  I’m just waiting on the end.

Speaking of the end…

*Maybe you haven’t.  Let me know.

**You wouldn’t think it would take so long for this possibility to occur to me.  I mean, I’m reasonably bright, and the connection is not a distant or particularly occult one.  Unfortunately, you cannot choose to think of something before you have thought of it.  Likewise, you cannot choose not to think of something once you’re thinking it, but you can let such thoughts go and do your best not to identify with them.  Oh, and also, by the way, no one has ever been able to “unsee” anything, ever.  The expression is idiotic.  Also, there’s no hour (or other period of time) in your life that you’re going to get back.  Noting that fact about some specific, unpleasant hour just makes you sound semimoronic.

***I say “scooter” because I guess that’s the official term, but it was a 650 cc Honda Silverwing, so really it was a full-on motorcycle that just had continuously variable transmission.  I’ve always been clumsy with manual transmission vehicles.

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A belated first post of the work week

I hope nobody was worried about me yesterday when I didn’t write a post.  I was out sick.  I had some kind of gastrointestinal bug, or perhaps some type of bad reaction to something I ate.  I’m not sure.  Anyway, it was unpleasant, as such things tend to be.

I often find myself wishing, in such situations and even less severe ones, that I didn’t ever have to eat at all.  Of course, if you see me, you’d know that I’ve tended to err in the other direction, but I would very much like to lose my sense of hunger, or perhaps more my sense of pleasure in food.  My current life is almost completely devoid of any real, reliable joy of any kind, and I am chronically depressed, so I unfortunately tend to go for biologically reliable sources of “feeling good”, however minor and evanescent, such as eating.

I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have any kind of drug problem, since I’d probably be stuck going to that for my diminishing returns of transient joy.  I suspect many people with drug problems do just that.  Actually, I often kind of wish that I did have a drug problem, because then I would be (a) more likely to be thinner than I am, and (b) might die of a drug overdose, which is comparatively faster and less painful than dying of a food “overdose” over time.  It’s a moot point, though.  I’m not the sort of person who could really manage an illicit drug habit; I would find the whole process stressful and irritating.  I didn’t even like taking opioids legally when I was given them for my chronic pain.

Alcohol, which is legal, has many drawbacks, not the least being that beyond a certain point, it doesn’t really do anything for me and exacerbates my chronic pain.  It can be useful as a social lubricant, and in that it can be very useful, considering how socially awkward I am.

But alcohol doesn’t make me feel much euphoria past the initial relaxation stage, which is definitely pretty good for short times.  However, one trouble with alcohol is that it impairs one’s judgement—it certainly impairs mine—and so when one feels a little relief from anxiety and a consequent bit of euphoria because of it, one falls into the cliché, “if some is good, more must be better, and a lot more must be great”.  Most of you probably have direct or indirect experience with how that line of “thinking” turns out.

Now, I will say that I took one medication a few times, in medical circumstances, that could probably become a problem for me, and that was diazepam (brand name Valium®).  I’ve written before about how, when I was given diazepam, even though the circumstances were far from pleasant ones—wisdom teeth extraction in one case, and a heart catheterization in the other—I felt tremendous.  I felt normal, if you understand the sense of what I mean by that—and even if you don’t.

Anyway, that’s a prescription med, and I’m not really interested in taking it.  I know too much about how rapidly diminishing are its returns, and about its long-term effects on cognition, and worst, about how tolerance to it tends to lead to increased anxiety between doses, so it pretty quickly becomes counter-productive.

This leads me to wonder if it might be somewhat useful to people with chronic anxiety to take medications or similar that increase their anxiety, and to stay on them for a while, then to stop.  It wouldn’t address any underlying issues, of course, but not all such chronic states are due to Freudian-ish causes in experience and upbringing.  Some of them are genetic or at least congenital.  Sometimes, a person’s biology can just give them an anxiety set-point that is significantly higher than average.  Some other people, of course, will have the opposite.  And most people will be somewhere in between.

This is the nature of traits in populations of sexually reproducing species (e.g., humans):  there is variability in nearly every attribute, as genes get shuffled and reshuffled, paired up with different alleles and other genes in the genome, reacting in highly complex ways, and providing the broad variation on which natural selection does its ruthless work.

This is what is largely behind the famous phenomenon of the moths that changed coloration in industrial age England compared to their pre-industrial age colors, matching the new soot-encrusted bark of trees.  They did not develop the trait or attribute de novo; there was always a variability in that physical aspect (color).  But in different circumstances, different colors were more likely to survive to reproductive age, and so they began to predominate when a persistent change in circumstances happened.

The same sort of thing surely has happened with humans many times, over and over, as civilization changes, and our own effects feed back on our natures and alter their own causes.  If people could step out of their little, provincial world-views, this would likely be obvious to all but the most benighted of souls.

How did I get to this subject/topic*?  I don’t know, though maybe it will become obvious while I’m editing.  Anyway, I’m going to draw this to a close just with the revelation that I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  Was there any difference between its style and that of one written on the smartphone, now that I reveal the fact to you only at the end?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I truly hope you have a good day.  And I really wish I could actually hang out with some of you or with someone today with whom I could have a comfortable interaction.  But I am not good company anymore, if I ever was.  So I will probably, and appropriately, continue to be alone, and will die alone, and hopefully fairly soon.

*I never really have been able to discern a consistent and sensible difference between these two terms, but people often use them as if they are two different things, rather than simply synonyms.  Possibly that’s just a function of pretentiousness.  But maybe I’m just ignorant.

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Oversharing again on a day on which to be fried

It’s Friday at last!  I get the impression that a lot of people feel an “at last” feeling when Friday arrives, so I am simulating that response, though it doesn’t really pertain to me this week.  There are only 22 shopping days left until Halloween.  Then the year goes a bit downhill.  I guess everyone can watch and see what happens then, if anything.

I don’t know why, but that last sentence sounds like a sort of hinted threat or worry about the future.  Yet all I really meant, if anything, was just that we can only wait to see what the future holds, though we can make predictions to some degree.  Also, I just like to hear myself talk, as it were.  I’m damned if I know why (and apparently, I’m damned even if I don’t know why).

I’m going to try to keep this a bit short today, despite the preceding statement about hearing myself talk.  Yesterday’s post was too long.  Yet, despite its length, it accomplished nothing that did me any good whatsoever as far as I can tell.  It’s all just me oversharing online, because I have no one with whom I can overshare in person.

And while there is some degree of a chance that such oversharing might be used to harm me by someone in the future, nevertheless, as far as I can tell, there’s almost no chance that it will be used by anyone anywhere ever to help me.  That’s just the way it goes, I guess.  Or maybe it just goes that way for me, because I’m particularly…I don’t know, particularly weird, particularly unpleasant, particularly disgusting, something like that.

Anyway, I believe I’m going to be working tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so you can feel justified in expecting that I will write another post tomorrow.  As for today, I already feel exhausted.  I wish that meant that, if I tried, I would be able to sleep, perhaps for quite a long time, but I experience leads me away from expecting that to happen.

I think I’m going to try a more concerted, formal bit of meditating again, at least for a bit.  I have to try to do something.  If it makes me more depressed, as meditation often does, and therefore more actively self-destructive, then let those chips fall where they may…and any other trite figure of speech that might apply here.

I don’t know if I’ll play any guitar or sing today, but I guess I might.  If so, I will probably play many of the same things I did on Tuesday, and about which I spoke on Wednesday.  I might throw in Pigs on the Wing, or One Headlight, or Ashes to Ashes, or even play A Space Oddity again.  I haven’t played that in a long time, probably not since I made the video of me playing it.  It’s weird, but once I’ve made a video of something, I rarely play it personally anymore.

It’s like, “Well, ‘me performing that song’ is out there in the world, so I don’t need to do it anymore”.  It’s strange.  I can’t even recall the chords and stuff from my own original songs since I released them; I would need to relearn them if I were to try to play them again.  It may sound strange, but I don’t think it has anything to do with ego, whether good or bad.  It is more that, whatever force created the pressure to write and then record the song(s) was released by doing them, and the pressure has not reaccumulated.

It’s weird, yeah.  There is more ego involved in my fiction writing, I think‒I want people to read and enjoy my stories and to appreciate me for them‒and maybe that failure is part of why I don’t feel capable of writing fiction anymore.

I don’t know, probably most of my troubles spring from my chronic pain.  I’m quite sure that many, many things would be easier and would go better if I were just able to get the pain under control.

Maybe meditation will help that.  It never has before, but “past performance is no guarantee of future results”, despite the supposed pop culture idiotic “definition of insanity” falsely attributed to Einstein.

Whatever.  Have a good day.

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‘Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a blog-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

Well, hello and good morning to you, too.  It’s Thursday, and so I have used a version of my “traditional” Thursday blog post opening, and I will use a traditional Thursday ending.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m glad that at least some people liked my rather atypical* blog post yesterday, in which I basically just described what I had played (and sung) the morning before.  Somewhat ironically, I did not play, nor did I sing, yesterday morning, and I don’t expect that I will do so today.  This is mainly, or at least pivotally, due to my chronic pain.

I don’t tend to talk that much about my chronic pain anymore, or at least not as often as I think I used to talk about it.  I don’t know, maybe I talk about it roughly just as much as I have all along, at least in the time since this stopped being a Thursday-only blog.  Still, it feels to me that I’ve been discussing it less, because I fear it’s not only boring for people but also depressing, and I am depressing enough without talking about pain.

But my chronic pain has not diminished, though it is variable from day to day and moment to moment.  There are times when I feel that something I’m doing is making it improve, but it usually ends up just to have been a normal part of whatever complicated cycle the pain intensity and character undergoes.

There are cyclical and periodic phenomena at nearly all levels of the cosmos, it seems.  Biological processes, which often involve thermostat-style feedback controls, are far from being an exception.  So, chronic pain goes up and down‒in a complex pattern that has differing periods and amplitudes overlapping** each other‒in ways that can be particularly misleading if you’re also trying to reduce it by various means.  Also, the things you try, even if they don’t truly work, can nevertheless affect the periods and amplitudes of one’s pain cycles.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’ve been having a lot of pain over the last several days‒more than average, though I am almost never not in pain.  I have also been eating an unusual number of legal CBD/delta 9 gummies.  They don’t seem to make the pain go away, but they change how I respond to it a bit, decreasing the amount of spasm and disordered walking and posture and tension and grumpiness that I experience, at least a bit.

But they make me groggy, if that’s the right word.  They also make my time sense rather weird, though that’s rather interesting, since it calls attention to the subjectivity of the experience of time*** which I discussed the other day, I think.  They also engender some minor perceptual illusions, especially auditory ones, possibly because of my poor hearing, but that is also rather interesting.

So, they make my pain experience a bit less intense and maddening, and they make it feel less as though one or the other side of my body is being forcibly twisted and contorted as I move, which is often how this shit feels.  At least, they make that sensation less stressful, and they seem to decrease some of the muscle spasms.

They also make my mathematical figuring and other mental processes feel less reliable.  I already have a seemingly deficient sense of being right‒for instance, no matter how often my mental figuring of sales amounts and so on is shown to be correct, I never for a moment feel secure enough about it not to check a few times using the computer.

Even then, I feel somewhat worried and uncomfortable, but sooner or later, I have just to go on to the next thing, because I will never be able to convince myself that I am correct beyond even a reasonable doubt, let alone to mathematical certainty.  It’s like the classic OCD thing where one has to keep going back to the house to check that one hasn’t left the stove on even though one empirically knows they have, or things along those lines.

To be clear, the gummies don’t appear to affect the quality of my mental work‒as far as I can tell, I can do mental figuring and other, similar processes as quickly and as accurately with it as without it.  But it makes me feel less sure, if anything, than without it, though I guess it also makes me slightly less anxious about being wrong.

It also takes away some of my mental focus, and also generally makes me feel a bit less motivated.  Perhaps, if I were able fully to embrace that lack of motivation, I might eventually come out the other side of the phenomenon and have a new, purer kind of motivation, one not born of constant tension and anxiety (and even some paranoia).  But I don’t know how to accomplish that, and even if I did, my credence in the possibility of it working is not nearly high enough to make me willing to try it.

Anyway, so, these are some of my thoughts on why I didn’t play or sing yesterday, and why I almost certainly won’t play or sing today.  It’s also part of why I don’t write fiction or draw or paint, and also part of why I don’t finish teaching myself professional level general relativity and quantum mechanics.  Yes, my interests tend to go all over the place and get in each other’s way even when I am at my best.  But even I know that I could accomplish so much more, so many more interesting things, if I were not in significant pain every fucking day.

So, yeah.  I’m out of it more than usual, which I don’t like, since mental acuity is my primary strength, and the thing I like most about myself.  That may not be a high bar to clear, but still, it’s what I have.  And I’m enervated and discouraged, and I’m tired of bothering to do anything, but I can’t seem to convince myself that, no, the stove is not still on, it doesn’t need to keep being checked.

What a pain.

TTFN

*I’m not sure if there really is a typical blog post type for me, so maybe “atypical” isn’t a very useful adjective here.

**Fourier (I think he was the one) famously showed how any kind of waveform can be produced by the superposition of sine waves of various periods and amplitudes, and this insight has tremendous impact on the nature of quantum mechanics and its particular types of superpositions.  It’s also the deeper explanation of the Uncertainty Principle.

***This has no effect on actual time itself, of course, at least based on all the best information we have about such things.  It’s just a perfectly understandable product of the nature of a biological computer’s (multiple) means of keeping track of time and reporting on that process to the rest of that biological computer (i.e., the brain).  It’s simply not true that experience is reality.  One’s experience is part of reality, of course, and need not be treated dismissively, but while toilets are necessary in any office skyscraper, it would be absurd to say “toilets are skyscrapers”.  Unless, of course, one built a toilet 50 stories tall.  Even then, that’s just one edifice.  So one could say, “that toilet is a skyscraper” legitimately, but that doesn’t make it any more sensible to speak categorically about toilets being skyscrapers.

This is not about buildings and plumbing.

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Monday morning meandering moaning

Well, it’s the start of a new work week, which means it’s the end of a weekend off, at least for me.  I’m sure many people are on various different schedules, but this one (Monday through Friday working and Saturday and Sunday off) is still probably the modal one, if I had to guess.  Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the situation has more than one mode, or perhaps one mode but a very broadly tapering and irregular slope for the rest of the schedules.

Anyway, it was just now the weekend, and I did not work during that time‒not in the sense of “employment for compensation”, anyway.  I did do some walking, though.  On Saturday, when it was overcast (and looked like it was going to rain, but never did), I walked a bit over 6 miles, umbrella in hand but forlornly unused the whole time.  On Sunday, when it was appropriately (not ironically) sunny, I walked just about 4 miles.  That’s still not too bad, but it was a bit more unpleasant because of the heat.

I guess I like walking in cloudy, gloomy weather (and at night) more than when it’s bright and sunny.  Of course, bright and sunny days in autumn‒real autumn, not this Florida bullshit‒can be delightful things in which to walk around, when the sky looks like a giant, freshly and expertly painted watercolor.  Even bright winter days (again, do not count south Florida, there is no winter here) can be truly uplifting and enjoyable.  At least, they are if you’re wrapped up warm.

Other than the walking, though, my weekend was completely without substance.  I did not read anything new (and precious little old), I did not watch any sports/games or regular TV of any kind‒no, not even any football.  I think the only person with whom I spoke, other than a delivery person, was an older guy whose phone had died and asked me the time while I was walking on Saturday.

Oh, and on my Sunday walk, I passed by a guy who might have been homeless‒perhaps he was just odd‒who held his arms out wide as I came nearer, as if looking for a hug.  I don’t think he was actually looking for a hug, though.  It was probably a gesture intended to intimidate, perhaps so I wouldn’t try to steal his stuff or something.

Anyway, I don’t give a shit about those kinds of things, so I just nodded, said, “What’s up?” and walked on.  He said nothing.  I suppose he could even have been a figment of my imagination, but that seems unlikely.

I didn’t speak at all otherwise.  Well, no, that’s probably not quite accurate.  I probably spoke “to” some of the reactors on some YouTube videos.  These are pretty much the closest thing I have to friends with whom I do things.  It’s rather pathetic.

I didn’t even watch many new videos, and I certainly didn’t watch any that were informative or useful or even interesting in any deep, novel sense.  Of course, if something catches one’s attention, it is “interesting” per se*.  But it’s not necessarily a durable kind of interest.  If you see movement out of the corner of your eye, you turn to look, but if it’s just a rustling of a curtain (purple or otherwise) or if when you turn to look it’s gone, as happened in Comfortably Numb, then that interest is basically spent.

I did notice, just this morning‒while I was pretending to try to be able to go back to sleep right up until it was time for me just to get up‒a video titled “There is no hard problem of consciousness”.  Now that seems at least somewhat interesting, and it’s a statement with which I’m inclined to agree, but I am curious to hear what this person’s arguments are, though I have not yet watched it.

Usually‒almost always‒such videos are rather disappointing; they just rehash basic ideas that I’ve dealt with long ago.  But sometimes someone says something actually thought-provoking.  Anyway, it’s nice to know that people are at least thinking about such questions (I think, again, that our culture’s mental health might be better if instead of going to therapists so often we sometimes went to philosophers instead).

I, on the other hand, have been having more and more difficulty finding any depth or interest.  I must have watched dozens (literally) of reactions to the Avengers: Doomsday “special look” trailer, because that actually got me excited.  Doom is my favorite villain, after all, and it looks as though the MCU might actually be doing him justice.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t come out until December, and I’m losing interest already.

Like the Pink Floyd song says**, “Nothing is very much fun anymore”.  I haven’t played any music on any instrument in weeks now, and I sang for all of two minutes or so while watching somebody react to Baker Street.

I think I might try to do a personal “try not to laugh” challenge today.  I think I tend to joke too much and make light of things to much, probably as a defense mechanism, but it’s a bit of a distraction.  Maybe I would be able to do more if I took things more seriously.

I don’t know.  Maybe I won’t even make it through the first work conversation without joking.  I certainly can’t seem to write a blog post without some kind of joke in it.  But it would be nice not to feel anything much at all:  No fear, no regret, no pain, and no joy or hope or optimism.  What’s that Vulcan practice on Star Trek?  Kolinahr?  Something like that.

I suppose it doesn’t matter.  It’s all fiction, anyway.  Meanwhile, I hope you all have very good, real-world days*** today.

*Is that the correct usage of “per se”?  Somehow it looks not-quite-right to me, but I am far from sure why that’s the case.

**One of My Turns, this time.

***I’m conflicted about whether that should be singular or plural.  There are arguments for both choices, or should I say, for each choice.

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“When I try to get through on the telephone to you…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and as I foresaw and predicted, I am writing a blog post.  Yes, indeed, as Pink said, I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight‒I’ve got amazing powers of observation.

It’s not all that impressive when you stop and think about the fact that I’m predicting (after foreseeing) my own actions, over which I presumably have some degree of control.  Such control is far from complete, but for stuff like this, it’s fairly effective.

I’m going to try to keep this post short today, mainly because I know people don’t seem to like it when I get too negative and depressed and morbid, but that’s very much how I feel this morning.  So, I can’t really express my feelings without bringing discomfort to my readers.  That feels churlish to me, and anyway, it doesn’t seem to do me or anyone else any good at all.

That’s no real surprise.  It doesn’t seem to be in my nature to do or to be good; it requires specific effort for me to do good in the world.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be my natural inclination.

Then again, the argument could be made that, because I choose to try to do good (at least sometimes) that means I am good by nature.  After all, if one is simply inclined to do good, or at least to try to do good, then one will simply tend to do so.  That’s good, of course, and such people are welcome.  But it’s not that impressive.  Like a very tall person easily getting something down from a high shelf for a shorter compatriot, it’s good and helpful, but it’s not that impressive, and it’s certainly not heroic.

Whereas if a person has a tendency to be angry and to wish people ill and to become easily frustrated and to desire to lash out, but they don’t do those things because they feel it would be wrong…well, that’s got a certain degree of admirability, since it requires conscious effort to restrain one’s impulses.  I’m not saying that it’s particularly impressive; almost everyone restrains a great many impulses in order to exist in society.  But it is something that requires at least a modicum of effort.

Okay, well, enough of that nonsense.

The point is, I’m going to try not to dwell too much on my depression and self-destructive thoughts, because it doesn’t do anyone any good, including me.  I’ve yet to receive any significant help from anyone or anything because of it, and though certainly I receive some well-meaning suggestions or thoughts or what have you, most of them are things I’ve already considered or tried.

So, it’s not doing me any good, and it’s not doing anyone else any good, as far as I can tell.  I’m just getting steadily worse over time, though that may not be obvious from the outside.  But the fact that I neither do music nor write any fiction any more is telling.  In fact, I don’t really do anything creative or artistic or scientific or whatever.  I just exist most of the time.  And it’s hard to see why I bother.

Ah, well, it probably doesn’t help that I had a particularly poor night’s sleep last night, even for me.  I’m already mentally exhausted, and I’m just starting the work week.

I did get some decent walking in yesterday‒about five and a half miles total.  Fortunately, I’m not having any negative consequences from that so far, and I would have expected to have them by now if they were coming.

Of course, my various chronic problems continue, including my chronic pain, my chronic depression and I guess my ASD (it’s congenital, so I guess that makes it chronic, in a sense).

Anyway, again, enough of this.  Even though I said I would try not to do so, I am dwelling on negative things, not just in my head but here on my blog.  I can only apologize.  I guess that’s one of the dangers of “stream of consciousness” writing.

It doesn’t really matter.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  October starts this week already, and it’s normally my favorite month, but there’s nothing really to which I look forward this time around.  It’s just blah.

Meh, whataya gonna do?

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There are more things dreamt of in your philosophy…

Well, you can’t in good faith claim that I didn’t warn you.  I told you yesterday that I would likely be writing a blog post today, because I am working today, which I am.

I am writing this on my mini lapcom, because I happen already to be at the office, and the lapcom is at the office, and I might as well enjoy making use of it, right?  As I’ve often noted, it’s much easier for me to write on the lapcom than on the smartphone.  That often means that I write too much when I use the lapcom, but today I think it less likely than usual, since I’m already quite tired and my energy is not at its best.

As I noted, I’m already in the office this morning.  I spoke with my sister on the phone yesterday evening, from the office, starting nearly right after I finished work.  We spoke for quite a while, and by the time we hung up, it was rather late—not crazily so, but still, it made little sense to go all the way back to the house, to try to get to sleep, to try to stay asleep, then to get up and come to the office again.

It’s not as though I had anything to do at the house other than put out some food for the neighborhood cats, and they’ll be fine until this evening; cats are pretty durable and adaptable.

So, yeah, here I am in the morning in the office, having slept on the floor, using the hoody that I keep in my backpack as a blanket of sorts (and using the backpack as a pillow).  It was a surprisingly good sleep, all things considered, though I wouldn’t call it good overall on an objective level.  I think, relative to what many people do, my sleep was rather poor, but that’s the norm* for me, anyway.

I will not of course be working tomorrow, and I will therefore not be writing a blog post tomorrow, though I expect to write one on Monday (exclusis improvisis).  That time will take of itself, however.  There’s no need to dwell on it at the moment.

I’m not sure on what to dwell, however.  I guess I can note that it’s been 24 days since the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom, which I can tell because I save them by date.  That’s a fairly long stretch.  And yet, it’s so much easier and more natural, more pleasant, for me to write using the lapcom.

It feels like an extension of me, like something almost directly connected to my nervous system.  It feel much more a part of me than the phone does, a fact which may be slightly ironic.  After all, I have the phone with me most of the time, and I read books on it—that’s by far its greatest strength—and use it to check the weather, and to send texts that are related to work and other matters.  It’s also my alarm clock, and in a pinch I can use it for emails (though that’s never very wieldy compared to a lapcom or desktop computer).

Okay, whew, I’d better slow down and calm down, so I don’t overexcite all of you with this gripping blog post!  I would hate to cause someone to have an increased risk for a heart attack.

Well…there are people for whom I think a heart attack would be good, for everyone else if not for the one who has the infarction.  There simply are people who cause a great deal of harm and suffering to those around them; even if nonfatal, a heart attack would likely take the wind out of their sails as it were.

I’m sure you could all name political figures and business people and even entertainers—let alone people you know in your own life—who would benefit the world by being significantly sickened or weakened by a health crisis, or even killed by one.

It’s not evil to wish for the ill health of highly detrimental people, but it may not be great for your own psyche to dwell too much on such things.  This is partly because wishes don’t do anything in and of themselves, and also because such negative dwelling is almost certainly not good for your own mental health.

It’s better to approach things with a Stoic sort of attitude:  you cannot directly change other people, and you cannot change the laws of nature nor most of the circumstances therein, so dwelling on them (except when literally, practically useful) is only going to tend to be futile and frustrating.  Instead, work on making yourself better, on not letting things bother you that are deeply unimportant, and focus on those things over which you do have some control.  There are fewer of them than you might imagine.

I’m being fairly vague about that, I know, but I don’t know what the specific thoughts and feelings and focuses are that might be optimal for your life, and it would be foolish of me to pretend that I did know such things.  The onus is on you, unfortunately.  That wasn’t my decision, it’s just the way things are.

In closing, based on the preceding paragraphs, I’ll just note that I suspect that people in general, and younger people more specifically, would do better if instead of all the therapizing that’s being done nowadays, they did more philosophizing.  I think studying and discussing philosophy, especially things like Stoicism and Buddhism and maybe Taoism and Existentialism, would be far more conducive to mental health, and might even enhance mental strength in developing minds.

And all minds are developing, despite what you might think, for as long as the lights are on.  You might as well make the best you can of it, whatever “best” might mean in your case.

Have a good day and a good remainder of your weekend, please.

*Norm!!

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Wouldst thou blog that which thou esteem’st the ornament of life?

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.

TTFN

Ha ha.  I’m just kidding.  It would be absurd for me to let you all off that easily.  Not that you don’t deserve to be let off easily; you probably do.  Whatever “deserve” means.

But it rarely matters in this world what you “deserve” or think that you deserve or have been told that you deserve.  Nature, physics, biology, the universe‒they don’t notice anything at all about what you might “deserve”.  They just do what they do, and if you don’t want to be ground into nothingness before your time, you’d better learn to surf on that chaos.

The notion of people deserving things has always been a bit strange to me.  It is nebulous and ill-considered in almost all situations.  What does it mean, for instance, for someone to deserve love?  How can you deserve something that is dependent on the judgment and emotion of another person or people?  You can’t have an innate right to another person’s esteem.

You can have a right, of sorts, to be left alone (as long as you’re not infringing other people’s rights) but not necessarily to be supported or admired or rewarded or what have you.

I suppose you can have a legal right, for instance, to health care (in principle), depending on the laws where you are.  But you can’t exactly have a moral right to it, because somebody‒a lot of people, really‒has to provide it, both the substance and the processes, the knowledge and the infrastructure.  You cannot morally own another person’s effort without a freely chosen mutual exchange for it.  Otherwise, you’re just enacting a form of slavery (which you’re only willing to do precisely because the service being provided is so important).  Think about the moral illogic there.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve come to the pretty strong suspicion that “universal” healthcare is generally very good for a society.  It helps make the life of those in that society more stable and more worth living, and I think it tends to help people be more creative and productive, ceteris paribus.  And it can be made a legal right, as I said.

But it cannot be a moral right, and it’s important for people to remember that.  Because when people start feeling truly entitled, they tend to become unreasonable, forgetting that in the real universe, everything requires energy and effort and understanding, and there is always some tradeoff somewhere.

Again, I want to reiterate, I think universal healthcare is generally a good use of resources, one that has a sort of money multiplier effect on a society, at least when administered well (which is not a low bar to clear).  But, again, it cannot be a moral right.  It has to be paid for by somebody, somewhere.  You don’t have a moral right to a particular bridge being built, say, or to cable TV and internet access, or to a luxury car…or to any car at all, really.

How could people have an innate right to a car, for instance?  What would that mean for the billions and billions of people who lived before cars ever existed?  What about air travel?

Heck, what about space travel?  In the future, space travel might become necessary for most people to be able to work, rather as cars are in some places and situations now.  Will that imply that there is and has always been a moral right to space travel?  Have we all had our rights systematically thwarted by the tyranny of linear time and causality?  Whom do we sue?

I think we should dispense with the notion of “deserving” things in general, except specific performance or products for which one has paid through mutual, freely chosen exchange with someone else.  In other words, if you made a contract and you held up your end of the bargain, it makes sense to say that you deserve for the other party to hold up their end of the bargain.

Everywhere else, the notion of deserving things tends to be subjective and self-serving, and it tends to turn people into entitled assholes who appear to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

Of course, physically, each person is the center of their own visible universe.  Congratulations, you are experiencing the phenomenon of a 3-dimensional horizon.  It happens to us all.  You are not special.

Well, you are special in some senses, of course.  You have various specific, local aspects and attributes that are not exactly duplicated anywhere within our visible universe.  This makes you unique.  Which, ironically, makes you just like everybody else.

Dash was right; saying that everybody is special is just another way of saying that no one is.  And, in fact, except from the highly parochial, anthropocentric, myopic, terrified point of view of the typical human, no one is special‒not from “outside” anyway.

Still, it’s okay to think that the ones you love are truly the most wonderful people in the universe, because‒in the universe of your mind and experience‒they are.  Unless you don’t think they are, but that’s a different sort of problem.

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with the concept of “deserving” things is that it is a powerful impediment to feelings of gratitude.  And that’s pretty pathetic, both for those around the ungrateful ones and for the ungrateful ones themselves.  If you think you’re entitled to many things, you’re likely to be miserable, because you’re unlikely to get all those things to which you feel entitled, and you’ll be prone to make the people around you miserable, too.

You don’t deserve to read my blog.  And I don’t deserve to have you read it, nor to have you like and share it (as in my song, below).  But I am grateful that you are reading, and would be pleased if you decided to spread it around.  I am lucky to have any good things at all, as are all people who have good things.

And now, for real this time:

TTFN