Psychology

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Brief Wednesday writing report and digressions

Today’s writing on Extra Body:

“Block” words:  738

Net words: 698

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Numbers of words and words of thoughts and thoughts of consciousnesses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The great blog itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and even though I’ve been writing blog posts nearly all this week so far—since I haven’t been writing fiction—this is now my more “traditional” blog post for the week.

I apologize for not writing fiction yesterday and the day before.  I’ve been feeling terrible and horrible and no good and very bad and all that other stuff.  My coworker is still out, though he’ll probably be back sometime today, or possibly tomorrow at the latest, and anyway, that’s not the main problem.  The main problem is that I have been just terribly tense and anxious and have had terrible nights’ sleep even for me, despite trying to sedate myself and optimize my bedtime habits and so on.

Last night I got almost six hours of sleep, which for me is quite good, though it doesn’t feel close to enough.  It would be one thing if I slept six hours and awoke feeling refreshed and healthy; then I would know that I had gotten enough sleep, that six hours was just how much sleep my body needed.

Alas, things are not that simple.  My body’s optimal sleep time is probably pretty typical at around eight hours, but that particular “pressure” in the system is countered by whatever the various sources are of tension and stress and pain and depression.  When the sleep need gets too strong, it overpowers those other vectors, but as soon as it dips below some threshold, those other vectors dominate enough to push me into unpleasant wakefulness again.

I can literally remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep; I’ve probably mentioned it here, before.  I don’t know the specific date, but it was in the mid-1990s*.  (I’m being completely serious about this—as serious as a bloodcurdling scream for help.)

Last night, I walked about three-fifths of the way back from the train station in the evening—about three miles.  It was quite warm out, certainly in the high 80s, so I think I sweated a lot.  At least that meant I didn’t need to wake up to use the bathroom!  Also, I was physically fatigued enough to rest, and I’d been careful to try to balance my walking so that my left knee wasn’t acting up, which seems to have worked reasonably well for the time being.

I know that’s all very boring.  I just don’t have anyone else to whom to talk about these things, so I share them with all of you.  Aren’t you lucky?  I guess you can always just skim over the boring stuff.  I’m not sure how it is that we can tell what’s going to be boring before we literally read it, but people do seem able to do that, and it works.  I’ve done it myself.

I apologize for not writing any fiction since Monday morning.  I don’t know if any of you were angry at me for that, but I feel that I owe an apology.  I guess I really owe an apology for being a big annoyance and a downer, but I don’t know what to do to change those things.

I don’t want to be a blind optimist, of course.  I want to understand the world as clearly as I can, as objectively as I can, and as deeply and broadly as I can.  Maybe there’s no way to do that without being tense and depressive.  The universe is, after all, vast beyond intuitive understanding, and the realms at which fundamental physics applies are tiny and intricate, also beyond ready intuitive understanding, and time is old in the past and so much longer in the future than a person with a finite lifespan can truly take on board.

But I don’t think that must be despair-inducing.  I’m much more stressed out by how little humans seem even to contemplate how small they are, both individually and collectively, than I am by my own smallness.  As I learn more about how the world really works at deep levels, I don’t feel frightened or overwhelmed by it, like some Lovecraft protagonist who goes mad when confronted with the Great Old Ones or whatever.  I feel that I have grown larger—not literally, of course, but the phase space in which my mind exists takes more and more of reality into itself, and it’s really quite cool, if that’s the right word.

I think at least one thing that makes me feel despair is that so few other people seem even to want to understand the greater universe in any depth or breadth.  They would much rather imagine that the universe is very small and brief, as long as they are somewhere near the center of it.

But of course, to paraphrase Gandalf, they can shut themselves into their tiny little world, but they cannot shut the universe out.  And this in turn invokes not merely the old saw that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed (for indeed, one cannot do anything but obey nature).  But I would say, far more strongly, that nature, to be survived—even to have a chance of being survived—must be understood as well as possible.

If you don’t know the rules of chess, you’re unlikely to be able to win a game.  Likewise with any other game, including even simple video games.  But those games have rules that humans invented.  The rules of nature have to be probed and unlocked and discovered, and they are much more fine-grained and large and complex than any human-made game could be.  They must be so, for the entire human world is but a tiny little part of that game, one of the innumerable things it allows to come into being.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?

I guess you’re going to write a blog about it, and in the meantime, try to learn as much about the world as you can, because it is interesting at many levels.  And, of course, you can write a bit of fiction, to which I’ll try to return tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I hope the vast majority of you are getting better rest than I have been getting.  I hope you have a very good day.  And I hope you have friends and family with whom to spend your finite and precious time.

TTFN

*I remember waking up feeling absolutely refreshed, and though I was too young to think about feeling “ten years younger”, I did feel more alive than I had in some time, almost as if I’d gotten superpowers**.  I’ve known people who seem almost addicted to sleep, and if that’s how they tend to feel when they’ve slept, I can hardly blame them.

**Speaking of which, I have a stupid, joke superhero idea that I’ve been too embarrassed to share with anyone in person (I’m sure you’ll understand why):  “Bitten by a radioactive wildebeest, Anthony Edward Lopez finds himself with slightly-greater-than-human powers of strength and speed.  Deciding to use his new powers to fight crime, he becomes:  Gnu-man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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Blog post for 4-10-2024 Wednesday

I’m not writing any fiction again today, it seems.  I just don’t have any urge to do it.  The very prospect of it feels almost entirely pointless, though that could be at least partly due to the fact that I’ve felt so gormy these last few days.

I’m not as nauseated as I was yesterday (though I’m probably just as nauseous, ha ha ha), since I took two omeprazole tablets last night, and also I didn’t take any aspirin or naproxen yesterday.  I did take a few acetaminophen, though those don’t tend to work as well on their own as they do in combination with aspirin and so on.  Still, I hate the feeling of nausea*, and would rather have at least a little pain than be nauseated.  It would have been one thing if I were sick enough just to throw up and get it over with, but all I had was just general gastro-intestinal distress and discomfort throughout the day, which really sapped my energy.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about my fiction.  This week I just haven’t had any enthusiasm for it (nor for any other positive thing in life, really).  Maybe I should try to reignite my energy by sharing more of the links to my pre-existing fiction on Twitter and Facebook and the like.  Maybe if I got any feedback of any kind on any of those posts or shares it might stoke the fire of creativity a bit.

Of course, it’s hard to see why anyone other than the people who already read my stuff would respond to my posts, but who knows?  It’s difficult for me to predict what might motivate other people to do something, at least some of the time.

I feel slightly awkward sharing my links and stuff on the various anti-social media, particularly because I’m currently reading Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, about the detriments of social media and smartphones to younger people.  On the other hand, unless you’re asking an elf or a vampire, I probably would not be considered a younger person.  Also, I developed my neuro-psychiatric issues long before smartphones and even before the Worldwide Web—I come by them naturally, so to speak—so I shouldn’t have to worry too much about them twisting me in some negative way.  My personality, such as it is, is already formed.  Though, as I discussed yesterday, I do seem to be reasonably good at learning new things even though I’m an old geezer.

I guess maybe I will share my stuff on at least X** and Facebook, and maybe even LinkedIn, though I have less interest in the latter, since I don’t do the whole networking thing.  I might as well make those old posts in which I “advertised” my new stories and such work for me.  And I might as well make Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s endeavors serve some useful purpose, since it’s not as though they pay much in taxes or anything.

I don’t knew where I’m going with this today, otherwise.  At least I’m not going off on weird tangents about playing with infinite series that have obvious outcomes once you work them through.  I mean, yes, it’s rather fun to fiddle with such things in the moment, particularly when one has nothing better to do, and it’s even good when it comes back around and you realize it’s revealed something that should have been obvious with much less work***.  That’s okay.  There’s nothing too wrong with coming at something in a complicated way and finally realizing how simple the answer is.  As I mentioned yesterday, at the very least, it’s good mental exercise.

Still, I shouldn’t go off on too many tangents like that too often.  I don’t think people like those posts very much.  Though, for all I know, they might think they’re the greatest thing anyone’s ever done, they’re just too shy to say anything about it.  I simply don’t know.  It’s like firing a photon off in the direction of an intergalactic super-void:  I’m not ever going to get any feedback about what happened to that photon if it doesn’t interact with something relatively nearby very soon****, and even if it does, unless it reflects back, or unless some intelligence sends a signal in response, it’s still going to be lost.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I expect to write my usual Thursday post tomorrow, so if you look forward to such things, you can look forward to that.  If I don’t write it, it will be either because I’m not feeling well (more so than is typically the case) or I’m dead, or perhaps that some other, unpredicted alternative possibility has interfered.  I’d give well over 50% odds that I’ll write a post tomorrow.  But for today, this post is already too long and is almost entirely without substance (and I don’t mean that just because it’s written on a word processor and shared online).

I really do hope that you all have a good day.

*I know, how unusual, right?

**Does Mr. Musk realize that by calling his platform “X” and putting its symbol in the upper right corner of the various X-cretions, he makes it look as though one is supposed to click on that symbol to make a “tweet” go away?  I know that’s the way I feel, and I’ve even tried to do it once or twice when I was distracted.

***In this case, for instance, if you add some (single) fraction of an original number to that starting total, the amount that you added is now one integer step smaller fraction of the new total.  In other words, if you start with some number, then add a ninth, say, of the original number, you now have ten of those ninths in your new total, i.e., 1 and 1/9.  But that 1/9 is now 1/10 of your new  total, trivially.  So, if you want to tip, for instance, 20% of the new total (including the tip) then you need to tip 25% of the original amount before the tip.  In other words, to tip one fifth of the total including the tip, you tip one fourth of the original, pre-tip total, since then you will have five fourths.  Anyway, let me stop this now.

****Unless, I suppose, the universe if both closed—i.e., it loops around on itself like a torus or a sphere—and smaller than anyone has any reason to suspect.  It would have to be small because, based on the expansion rate of the universe as currently measured, any photon of reasonable wavelength would probably have red-shifted into undetectability long before the time I could receive it from the other direction if it circumnavigated a closed universe on anything like the minimum scale we think the universe is.  A photon of too tiny a wavelength, i.e., of high enough energy, would have too high a chance to spontaneously decompose into some particle-antiparticle pair somewhere along the way…I think.

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Won’t you spring into silence with me?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the day of my old, traditional blog posts.  It’s also my second and the planned last blog post for this week.

In the morning, I entertained trying to write a post in the afternoon yesterday, and I even thought about it in the afternoon for a bit.  But there was just too much noise and irritation, and I couldn’t summon the concentration.  This is a bit similar to what often happens with my thoughts about studying during slow time at the office.  I consider it often, and in the morning, while I’m walking, if I’m listening to some science-oriented book, I think with truly eager anticipation about cracking open one of the texts I have at the office.

But the overhead noise and the people being late and saying silly things and all that just wears down my concentration.  I have to use all my energy just not to go berserk and/or leave the office.  Even when I am the one who chooses the overhead music playlist, as was the case on Monday and Tuesday, it’s not enough.  The only playlist I want is the original sound of silence, and I don’t mean the song by Simon and Garfunkel.  I mean silence, like that abyss between the stars I mentioned a few days ago.

There’s a reason Sailor Saturn is my favorite Sailor Senshi.  She’s the sailor of silence, the bringer of total destruction (and also rebirth, but no one’s perfect).

Anyway…

I walked to the train yesterday.  It was a good day for it, since it was relatively cool down here.  I also wrote a little over a thousand words on Extra Body, and that’s also good, of course.  I really find it tempting to want to write some on it every day, but I fear that I would lose my motivation if I did.  Also, as I’ve said before, this blog is my only frequent contact with the “outside world”, and my only personal “cry for help”, though that last part isn’t doing so well at its purpose‒which makes it pretty typical for things that I try, come to think of it.

The whole thing highlights one of the big problems with the various forms of serious mental illness:  The very nature of the problem significantly hinders the ability of the sufferer to seek or ask for, let alone to obtain, help.  If no outside person actually does anything, no assistance arrives, except perhaps after some true catastrophe, by which time it is often too late.

I suppose part of my problem in using this blog for that purpose is that I leave readers subject to the bystander effect.  Read about it.  It’s quite disheartening, and is yet another way the world sucks.  Basically, a person is more likely to help someone in need if he or she is the only one who can help.  When there are more people around, not only is each individual less likely to provide assistance, but the overall chance of anyone helping the person in need is less than if there was just one person to help.  At least, that’s if I recall the overall data about the effect well.

The most famous case of it turns out not to have been as clear-cut an instance as is often believed, so I won’t describe or link it here.  But there is some data demonstrating that people are less likely to offer aid to those in immediate need if there are other people around.

There’s at least a fair chance that someone will catch any events surrounding someone crashing and burning on their smartphone, though, and will share the video to social media.  If anyone ever wonders why I often express the sentiment that the human race ought to be destroyed, it’s these sorts of things that engender such a sentiment.

I don’t really know what else to write about today.  I’d love to discuss psychology and physics and math and economics and biology and philosophy, not to mention writing, but I’m frankly just exhausted.  I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, and I feel less well-rested after getting up than I did when I went to bed.  This is not unusual.

Also, the arthrosis in the base of my thumbs is getting worse, and I have not yet figured out any adequate therapeutic intervention.   Even doing the small amount of note-taking by hand that is required by my job is quite uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not horrific pain or anything like that.  I’ve had and continue to have far worse.  It’s just yet another straw laid across the dromedary’s hump, which would be fine if there were a good reason to keep carrying the load, but I have no such reason; I merely have the habit.

Life, for me, may be merely that:  a bad habit that I need to break.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week, and so on.  I hope you’re having a good first few days of Spring in the northern hemisphere; I hadn’t realized on Tuesday that the equinox was that day, slightly earlier (from a Gregorian calendrical point of view) than is typical, and by the time I did, the post had already been published.  Oh, well.  I’m probably the only one who cares, anyway.

TTFN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On months and writing and self versus other mastery, and other mental flotsam

Well, it’s Friday now, and it’s actually the first of the month, which would normally have been yesterday, but this is a leap year (and so, in the US, a presidential election year).

I really do think the days of the months as we have them now are stupidly erratic and irrational.  I think it would be more fun if we had 12 thirty-day-long months and then just, at the end of the year, a five-day-long festival, when most people are off work and we celebrate the passing of the winter solstice*, and the coming lengthening of daylight.  Then, on leap years, there could be an extra day to the festival, and that would be a joyful thing.

Oh, well.  I don’t think that’s likely to happen.  But it’s a nice thought, I guess.

I did manage to write a page of Extra Body yesterday, and it was a computer-written** page, so it was maybe four hundred to five hundred words.  It is a slight shame, but writing on the laptop computer is just much more natural for me (ironically), and it doesn’t exacerbate the soreness at the base of my thumbs like writing by hand.

Of course, writing this on my smartphone makes the base of my thumbs get a bit sore, too.  I should probably just do both things on the laptop computer if I’m going to keep doing them.  I communicate best by writing on the laptop computer, anyway, probably much better than I do by spoken word.  I don’t know.  Maybe not.

Anyway, I guess it’s a good thing that I wrote a bit of fiction yesterday.  And I mean to write a page today, and tomorrow as well, since I work tomorrow.  The story is going okay so far, and since it’s not a horror story, it shouldn’t get too dark, which is a relative rarity for my fiction.  Once I finish it, I guess I can see if I’m ready to write HELIOS.

I guess, given the state of my thumbs, I’ll write that whole thing on the laptop computer.  It is a shame to have to let the two new spiral-bound notebooks go to waste, but I don’t see any other reasonably available alternative.  I suppose it would be nice if I used them to practice calculus and linear algebra and physics problems and so on, and if I do such problems, I guess I will use it.  But it seems unlikely that I’ll find the gumption to do those things.

I have my science and math books out and around my desk:  Classical Electrodynamics, and Calculus, and Gravitation, and Euclidean Quantum Gravity, and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, and Spacetime and Geometry.

I would love to get through all of them, but my mental energy is sapped and drained by having to deal with all the nonsense of the human world.  Unfortunately, I have to make a living‒no one is offering to support me and provide my basic needs while I study up on my physics and mathematics.  Why would they?  People have a hard enough time having me around even when I’m paying my own way.

I’m so tired of the world.  It’s really just a bastion of idiocy and irrationality and dirt and unnecessary suffering.  And it’s not as though I’m some exception to that description.  I certainly don’t see myself as superior to the nonsense around me.  Maybe if I did, I would feel better, but it probably wouldn’t be good for the other people in my life, in the world.  I could all too easily see myself becoming a hyper ambitious villain of some variety.

Of course, the real reason I don’t see myself doing such a thing is that it would be irrational and illogical.  While there are surely people who are exceptionally gifted and creative and productive, it’s absurd to think that any one person is the greatest of all, or is destined to rule, or is “special” in some fundamental sense.

No matter how smart you are, there is always going to be someone out there who is smarter than you at least at some things.  If there were no such one alive right now‒and there almost certainly is such a one‒then there will be in the future or has been in the past.  Going beyond even that, in the space of all possible minds there are potential thinkers compared to which Einstein would be as an amoeba is to Einstein‒and more so.

Also, in the real world, all people who have ever achieved great “power” have only had it through and by the acquiescence or cooperation or loyalty or whatever of other people.  And any power “over others” that requires the consent or the cooperation of others is not any power at all.  It’s just a transient configuration in a complex and chaotic system.

There is a line in one of the “chapters” of the Tao te Ching that reads something along the lines of “mastering others is strength; mastering oneself is true power”.  It sounds very Stoic in nature, though I seriously doubt that Lao Tzu ever met a Stoic.  Still, the similarity is not a mere coincidence.  One of the hallmarks of true knowledge and understanding is that it will tend to be converged upon by disparate people as long as they are all legitimately and honestly seeking to understand the universe.

I would quibble with the first half of the quote, maybe; I’m not sure that mastering others really is even any kind of strength.  It can probably be useful, but it’s not going to give one much beyond transient benefits.  And it’s certainly questionable whether one ever does or can master others.

This is corollary to something I often tell a coworker who troubles himself all the time about “why” people in the office (or on the phone) say and do the things they do.  I point out to him that even the people themselves who say and do things rarely (if ever) know why they do and say what they do and say.  There’s no point in him trying to figure it out from his third person standpoint.

Just observe what people do and respond to it and adjust to it as best you can‒but don’t dwell on how it reflects on you or what you might have done to deserve it, or whatever.  Just try to let inconsequential things like insults or jokes at your expense wash over you, like the chattering of squirrels or the crowing of a rooster.  Try only to pay attention to useful things.

And, of course, the Tao to Ching is not wrong to encourage mastering oneself, as much as possible.  That’s more than enough challenge for a single lifetime, frankly, and I am far from convinced that anyone has ever truly succeeded.

I certainly know that I haven’t.

*Yes, this is northern hemisphere biased, but the majority of humans live in the northern hemisphere.  Five days off in the beginning of summer wouldn’t be so horrible for those in the south, anyway.  They could go to the beach, for one thing.

**Meaning I wrote it using a computer, not that a computer wrote it.  Then again, my mind is a form of computer, a universal Turing machine (or nearly so), but if I were approaching the matter that way, then any writing I do, even with pen on paper, is computer-written.

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I should take a flying Leap Day

Hello and good morning.

Happy February 29th.  This is a date that only comes approximately once every four years.  I say “approximately” because as I’ve noted before, on three of every four turns of centuries, there is no leap day.  This is because the length of a year is ever so slightly less than 365.25 days…though I don’t recall if that’s measured in solar days or sidereal days.

Anyway, I’ve gone over this ground often enough already‒too often, probably.  I won’t bore you with more of it for now.  Probably I’m the only one who really finds it interesting, anyway.

Yesterday was a miserable day overall, though I did start off somewhat productively, typing all of what I’d written so far of Extra Body into the laptop computer.  It was almost five handwritten pages, which turned out to be just shy of 1400 words.  That’s roughly how much I used to write on any given day when producing a draft of a new work of fiction.  Anyway, I didn’t write anything new after that yesterday , but at least it’s primed and hopefully I’ll do a page of new writing today, once I’m done with this.  I’m heading to the office early‒even for me‒to try to make sure I have plenty of time to get that started.

I ended up leaving the office really late last night, because now it turns out that even the two people I like most there are getting to be part of the group who is willing to roll over the guy who’s not capable of just shutting out and walking away from work and saying to Hell with people who don’t worry about how what they do affects others.

I was already really depressed and frazzled to start the day.  I even put ear plugs in and then wore my airport-style hearing protector muffs to block out the noise of the music and the people saying silly things.  Neither of the two measures works adequately on its own, but together they do a decent job.  However, the ear muffs give me a headache after a while, because they squeeze my head.

I should just sabotage the stupid sound system; unfortunately, it is both fixable and replaceable.

Sometimes I feel almost as if a collection of a few people in the office‒among them people I thought were my friends‒are trying to drive me to quit, or to kill myself, or perhaps just to lose it in some other way.  I know it’s pretty silly to think such things, but in some ways, it’s emotionally less horrible to think that people are deliberately out to cause me harm than to think that people about whom I care, and who I thought cared about me, are willing to cause me distress and pain just out of thoughtlessness and inconsideration.

I’m probably being oversensitive.  I’m probably actually just on the verge of seriously losing my mind.  That probably wouldn’t surprise anyone.

Anyway, I ended up getting back to the house quite late, and then‒because commuting is not inherently relaxing‒I was a bit wound up and had trouble getting to sleep, so I watched several videos of people “reacting” to songs that I know.  This can be kind of fun, to a limited degree, because it feels almost like listening to a song (or similarly, to watching a movie or show) with a friend who hasn’t seen it before, though there is no actual give and take.

It also doesn’t give you the experience of watching some new thing (or listening to some new song) that you yourself have never seen with a friend, because the YouTube videos can’t really embed an entire show or movie, without being taken down due to copyright.  One has to join Patreon groups to watch things like that, and I’m really only following two people on Patreon.

I joined one of the two to see reactions to Doctor Who, but they are now all caught up, and there won’t be new Doctor Who episodes until May, I think.  They react to other shows, most of which I haven’t watched, but unfortunately, most of those shows are ones in which I am not interested.

I might be interested in them if I truly, literally had someone with whom to watch them; I watched many shows with my (now-ex) wife that I probably wouldn’t have watched on my own, because she was interested in them, and it made me happy to enjoy them with her.  Also, of course, we had similar tastes in many things; there was, after all, a reason we got married.  Or, well, there was a whole set of reasons.  Just one probably wouldn’t have been an adequate incentive for either of us.

But I’m a tiresome person, even to people who honestly love me.  I can sympathize, since I find myself tiresome.  Maybe people at the office really would prefer me to be gone, but are too kind to allow themselves to think such thoughts in their conscious minds, but end up acting on them nevertheless.  I couldn’t blame them, really, for such a thing.  How can someone be blamed for their subconscious thoughts?

I should just take myself out of everybody’s way.  I don’t make other people happy in any kind of reliable sense, but I do make many other people unhappy, though I would prefer not to do so.  Since I’m a net negative on the world, any personal return to zero on my part would be a net gain for the world at large.  And after that, it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.

Time will tell, I guess.  I’ll try to screw my courage to the sticking point and see if I can eventually succeed.  Well, actually, I will only see if I fail.  Only others will be able to see if I succeed.  That’s the nature of the thing, as far as I can tell, and is one of the most potent arguments against it, given I would be causing problems for which I could provide no possible assistance.

But since other people seem sanguine about inconveniencing me‒and it seems to be a general tendency among humans‒I shouldn’t let it be an absolute barrier to my choices, though I still think it should be a relative one.

Anyway, that’s that.  I hope to get a page written on Extra Body today, if I can.  I suppose, if you’re unlucky enough for me to be still around tomorrow and writing my blog, I’ll let you know.

TTFN

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My poisonous (or poisoned) thoughts

I’m disappointed to have to tell you all that I did not write any fiction yesterday.  I didn’t write any in the morning, having written a longish blog post.  Then, by relatively early in the workday, I had become mentally exhausted.

The “music” in the office doesn’t help, since it’s loud and basically unrelated to anything about what we do‒it’s just there for background noise, to dampen the sounds of other people on their phones, or to camouflage it, to break up its signature.  But also, it was just maddening to see again how slipshod and unreliable people are, how little they care about how what they do affects other people (or themselves).

Early in the day, a few minutes after our official starting time, I looked out at the office‒as the person who keeps track of who’s there and who isn’t and when people arrive and leave‒and could see that perhaps only half of the people in the office were there yet.  I noted this to my coworker, who grimly nodded with obvious resigned disapproval.  I told him, as if realizing it for the first time, that it really bothered me.  And it really does.  It’s both contemptuous and contemptible.

We long ago moved our starting time back an hour, nominally to make sure people could get to work on time more easily, since traffic in south Florida really can be terrible.  However, that did not change people’s lateness at all.  It made no discernible difference.

Unfortunately, people suffer no consequences for being late, so there is no incentive for anyone to do otherwise.  They are also not penalized for working over into lunchtime or past the official end of the day (it is often the people who arrive late who also stay late).  So, basically, I never get an adequate break time, since there’s no sensible way for me to go anywhere outside the office during lunch, and those who started break on time restart work on time, and so need support people to be available.

Anyway, it’s appalling that already, by Tuesday, I was simply mentally (and emotionally) exhausted.  And I know it’s not just the specifics of this job that wear me out.  If I were to do any job I’ve ever had in the past, I think I would be similarly worn out; the exact time until it happens might vary slightly, but I don’t think it would do so by all that much.

Even as early as high school, I used to get into these states in which I felt just completely empty, and would have been “happy” to stop, to end right there.  They didn’t happen as often, and I lasted longer between them‒that’s redundant, isn’t it‒and I think I recovered more quickly and easily.  But it went on into college and med school and residency and practice and all that has come after.

The medical work, though harder, was somewhat less enervating, because there were intellectual challenges and the ability to make a real difference for people, and there was a degree of respect.  Also, one was working with professionals at all levels, and that’s reassuring.

I was labeled with depression (then later also, and more generally, with dysthymia) fairly early, and certainly started having these feelings of wanting to die, and more specifically wanting to kill myself, at a young age.  Obviously, there’s some inherent degree of “typical” depression here, but I wonder how much of it might be due to undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder‒assuming that even applies to me, which I think it probably does.

I have no real capacity to seek out diagnosis or help for it or for anything else, frankly, so it’s hard to get any kind of “official” feedback.  Between a kind of learned helplessness from chronic internalized stress (and chronic pain), and my own social dysfunction and my ever-present self-hatred and self-destructive urges, it’s hard even to begin to take care of myself.

Actually, I don’t know if it’s the case that, fundamentally, I hate myself so much as that I hate my experience, my moment to moment interaction with reality.  It’s so often so very unpleasant.  At the very least, there is no single day that I can recall that didn’t include some significant moments of what one might call “spiritual revulsion”, a kind of nausea and stress about how unrational and unsane the world is, at least from my point of view‒and ultimately I have no other viewpoint from which to gaze upon reality.

I think my self hatred is a kind of rationalized conclusion combined with a sort of “halo effect”*.  If the world is so anathema to me, so much of the time, then I must just not be suited for this world.  So, I’m defective, or at least, I’m not the right organism for the job.

Also, since so much of life is persistently unpleasant, and since the single common variable in all aspects of that unpleasantness is me, then I cannot help but have residual disgust and hatred stain my image of myself; it accumulates over time until it’s thicker than a rhino’s hide and as disgusting as the slime of a hagfish.

I don’t know what I can do about it, unfortunately, other than either declare myself the enemy of the world and act accordingly or destroy myself.  Or, I suppose, I could do both.  No matter what, I don’t think I can go on much longer.  Then again, I’ve felt that way off and on for quite a long time.  But it’s becoming more frequent and more persistent‒the pulses are longer and closer together.

My reserves may be deeper than I would ever have expected them to be, but they cannot be infinite.  Certainly on the scale of the duration of the world, I must either lose my mind or destroy myself (or both) before much longer.

In the meantime, I’m going to have to do my fiction writing in some other way, if I do it.  I’ll need to do it earlier in the day, before the troglodytes start arriving and making their noise.  I may give up and use the laptop computer, because the handwriting is really exacerbating the soreness at the base of my thumb.  Maybe I’ll do it in the mornings after my blog post, or instead of it on some days.

I did fiddle with my guitar a little yesterday, so to speak, but that’s far less fruitful than writing, so maybe I’ll just give up on that.

Ultimately, I should probably just give up…period.  Until I do, I guess I’ll keep poisoning the Internet with these, my gloomy thoughts.  Enjoy!

*Perhaps “horns effect” might be a better term in this case.