Psychology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I well believe thou wilt not blog what thou dost not know, and so far will I trust thee.

Hello and, of course, good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you may have savvily guessed‒you are a clever one‒from the fact that I started the post with a variation of “Hello and good morning”.  Also, you’ve probably seen that the title above is some modified Shakespearean quote, though as I write this, I have no idea what that quote will be, other than that it will, with very high probability, be a quote from Shakespeare.

Not much new has happened since yesterday’s post‒not for me, anyway.  There’s plenty of material out there for those who wish to comment on what’s happening in the naked house ape world (said apes sometimes imagine that their “world” is of cosmic importance, but it’s actually not even a flash in the pan as far as the universe is concerned) but I try to avoid commenting on such things here, except to note that, boy, humans can be remarkably stupid.

There was a recent-ish Doctor Who episode in which the bad guy made every human on Earth feel absolutely convinced that they were right, about whatever opinions they might hold.  Predictably, this led to global chaos and destruction.  But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do the opposite, or roughly so, to the whole of humanity?  I’m not talking about making people all believe they are wrong about everything; I don’t even know quite how that would manifest itself.  I just mean removing or strongly blunting the sense of feeling right about things.

It’s a reasonably well-attested fact* that people prone to depression, for instance, are not prone to rate their own skills and abilities as worse than they really are but instead are more realistic about them.  This is as opposed to the more “typical” people, not prone to depression, who overestimate their own capabilities, e.g., the notion that, say, ninety percent of people think their driving skills are above the median**.  So, though people who are prone to depression are, well, prone to depression, they are at least less prone to start wars and commit atrocities based on half-baked ideologies.

Oh, and by the way:  to a good first approximation, all ideologies are half-baked.  This isn’t to say that they all are completely wrong.  It’s merely to say that not one of them actually contains “everything you need to know about” whatever.  If they did, it would be painfully obvious to every intellectually honest person.  Intelligent, well-meaning, non-delusional people would be convinced by the ideas as soon as they understood them.  People prone to depression might find consolation and some degree of peace in them.  Atheists would be “converted”.

The notion that any self-contained set of ideas could hold the answers to “life, the universe, and everything” flies in the face of all logic (and few things are more annoying than flies in one’s face).  For crying out loud, it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages to explain rigorously the nature and implications of classical motion, as in Newton’s “laws”, with subsequent improvements by Laplace and Lagrange and Hamilton and so on, and all that is only an approximation, at macroscopic scales, to our best understanding (which is known to be incomplete) of the physical nature of reality.  And that’s not counting electrodynamics and gravity, let alone getting into the strong force and the weak force and so on.

It’s a distressing tendency, this human desire to feel right, to want to think that they know the answers and so don’t have to think about things anymore.  It leads to so much more of the trouble in the world than “simple” evil does.

Psychopaths, I suspect, do far less harm overall than people with normal moral capacities‒good people, so to speak‒who believe that they are right.  “For the greater good” is the kind of sophistry that can, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, fumigate any atrocity, including the slaughter of a continent.

Of course, Rand-sensei fell prey to her own self-created dogma and the personality cult that had grown up around her, leading her to get stuck in some quite dubious conclusions.  This is despite her commendable starting points (i.e., metaphysics:  objective reality, and epistemology:  rational thought).  If only she hadn’t been so dead-set against humility.

Humility****, after all, is not really the belief that you are fundamentally worthless (though that may indeed be true on any sort of cosmic scale), but just the recognition that you are subject to error, like every finite being (and probably most “conceivable” infinite ones), and that, it being error, you will not necessarily know where it lies.  It is, after all, the place in which you are mistaken; if it were glaringly obvious, you might be expected to have noticed it already.  Being wrong feels the same as being right, at least until you realize that you are wrong.

There, I did some broad level commentary on the nature of at least some of the world’s problems.  Let this be my open warning against certainty, especially in the realm of morals, especially when you’re assessing other people.  If you ever find yourself in a situation in which you feel that the suffering and even death of other people is tolerable, or even desirable, in order to achieve some presumed better future world, you should stop and maybe induce a seizure so you can reset your brain.

On the other hand, if you just believe something so much that you’re willing to suffer and/or die yourself, and only yourself, well, that’s on you.  Knock yourself out.

TTFN

*I think this data has withstood the reproducibility crisis in psychology, but correct me if I’m wrong.

**I say median instead of “average” because the average is usually meant to refer to the arithmetic mean, but it is in principle entirely possible for ninety percent of people to be above the mean, but not for any more than fifty percent of people to be above the median, by definition***.

***This is one of those rare cases where it’s fully appropriate to say “by definition”, because it is not merely rhetoric but literally applies, the median being a mathematical term with rigorous meaning.

****I just recognized, while editing, that this is the subject/topic/trigger for what is to be my next song.

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Songs from a life less interesting*****

In case it wasn’t obvious, I did not go to work yesterday.  I have a head cold of some variety that seemed to begin in the afternoon on Wednesday‒maybe it started sooner than that, I’m not sure.  Anyway, I stayed at the house yesterday, trying to rest.  But I was pretty stuffed up, which I still am, and now my mouth is dry from (apparent) mouth-breathing when I slept.

Sorry, I know this is really dull material.  Such is life, I guess.  Or, at least, such is my life.  I suppose a dull life is better than many of the lives that would make for more interesting reading.  This was a point I first recall encountering in The Hobbit, when Bilbo remarked that his time in Rivendell would make boring reading, though it was wonderful to experience.

I think it is possible to have an exciting or at least interesting life that does not fall prey to the curse of “may you live in interesting times”.  I think it is possible to have a life that most people would find fascinating to hear about, and which is also quite fulfilling to experience.  But it does seem that this is a relatively small subset of available lives.

For the most part, humans seem to prefer stories about harrowing, horrific things.  This is not restricted to fiction, but is also part of why news media tend to focus on the more dire and terrifying news stories.

Of course, there are probably good, sound biological reasons for this.  As a matter of survival, it’s crucial to attend to danger and threat much more so than to pleasant, routine, comfortable things, because those creatures that don’t become extra alert and energetic when danger is present are less likely to leave offspring than are those that respond with arousal*.  So the fact that many of our favorite stories describe horrible things may be analogous to why so many of our snacks are very sweet and/or very salty:  a supranormal stimulus increases engagement powerfully, and can easily become habit-forming.

How in the world did I get on that subject?  I’m not sure.  I guess I could go back and reread this to find out, but I’ll be doing that when I edit it, anyway, so I’m not going to waste my time now.

In other news, I wrote a second verse for my “weekly” song on Wednesday afternoon, and even took a little notebook with me with the song paper in it, so I can continue the process wherever I might be.  Unfortunately, I did not work on it at all yesterday, but then again, I didn’t really work on anything yesterday.  I’ll try to write a chorus and then a third verse today.

I have to remind myself that I’m not trying to produce something superb, even assuming I could do that on command.  I’m just trying to produce something**.  So if it feels a little inane and contrived to me, well, that’s okay.  It’s just got to be some “song”.

I use quotes there because I am really starting with the poem, the lyrics, which is “usually” how I do things.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do lyrics and music within one week on the same song.  At least so far, that pace doesn’t seem to be in the process of being achieved, though I suppose I might finish the song and come up with a melody over the weekend.  Or maybe what I can do is make songs in a kind of assembly-line style:  lyrics this week, then next week, while coming up with lyrics for another song, do the melody for the first song.

I have heard that most songwriters tend to do melodies first and then come up with lyrics.  That may be a true statistical statement, but I know it’s not the way everyone does it, because at least two of my favorites do otherwise.

We know, of course, that Elton John writes the music after Bernie Taupin writes the lyrics, by their own description of their songwriting process.  And, of course, many operas and musicals start with the libretto***, and the music is written afterward.  And Roger Waters, one of the best lyricists ever****, implies in The Wall that he writes his lyrics as poems, e.g., “I’ve got a little black book with my poems in…”, and also e.g., the scene in the movie where young Pink has his poem book, which contains the lyrics for the song Money, discovered by the oppressive teacher.

So, writing lyrics and then making a melody afterward wouldn’t put me in bad company (though I don’t know how the band Bad Company actually wrote their songs).

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Batman knows if I was even coherent.  I suppose the editing will make that somewhat clearer, but my mind might be fuzzy enough that I cannot even tell in the immediate editing period.  But you will know.  So, please, have patience with me.

And have a good day and a good weekend, also, if you’re able.

*There’s nothing sexy in this use of the word, just to be clear.  I’m not referring to creatures that get “turned on” by danger and threat; those types of creatures seem less likely to survive than their compatriots, ceteris paribus.

**Not the Beatles song.  I already did a cover of that, anyway.

***Italian for “little book”, in case that wasn’t obvious.

****As evidence:  He wrote almost all of the lyrics for Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall.

*****I feel like this could be a good album title.

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“Wednesday morning, papers didn’t come.  Thursday night, your stockings needed mending*.”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I’m feeling a bit better than I have so far this week.  Perhaps I really did have a virus of some type that my body has been fighting.  If so, it triggered/worsened symptoms of already existing pathologies in my body—in my back and hips and shoulders and other joints, and so on—in addition to making me feel achy and feverish, though without the actual fever.

I can’t really blame my psychopathology on a virus, unless it’s some form of mental virus**, or more likely some lifelong accumulation thereof.  Such “viruses” are rarely acute and self-limited, though they could be, I suppose.  What, after all, is a momentary fad or brief obsession, perhaps with a song, or the spread of a particularly funny new joke, that goes away before long?

I don’t really think my mental issues are primarily caused by acute memetic infection, if you will.  They started a long time ago.  In any case, my brain is apparently of an atypical type, at least based on my autism diagnosis, and that creates a substrate on which supervening inputs can become prone to cause certain forms of pathology.  Depression and anxiety are two of those things that are very common in those with ASD—significantly more so than in the general population***.  The statistics on autism indicate that suicidal ideation and attempted and successful**** suicide are much more common in people with ASD than in so-called neurotypicals.

I often think of depression—at least in some of its forms—as a sort of weather-pattern in the mind that becomes self-sustaining in the right circumstances, rather like a hurricane or other massive storm system.  One doesn’t find hurricanes in environments that are not conducive to them—Siberia and the like, for instance—but in minds that are the metaphorical equivalent of the tropics, such mental storm systems may be much more common, and sometimes very destructive.

Who knows, maybe ECT treatment for severe and recalcitrant depression is something akin to the (ill-advised) notion of dropping large nukes in the middle of a hurricane to disrupt its pattern.  If hurricanes occasionally had the tendency to obliterate all or even most life on Earth, we might be willing to try something as extreme as dropping nuclear weapons in a developing tropical storm system to disrupt it, if we could find no other solution.

I wonder if even the large storm cells that occur over places like the great plains of North America could be considered something like episodes of depression (the fact that some weather systems are called “depressions” relates to the barometric pressure, and should not be construed as in any way related to psychiatric depression, other than etymologically).  To what would a “super cell” that produces massive tornados be analogous?

Of course, there need be no actual analogy, because the weather concept is a metaphor, really.  But it is not completely a metaphor, so I don’t think it’s too frivolous to push the notion further in order to trigger some thoughts.  Complex systems like the brain and the weather, with internal feedbacks and feedforwards and “feedsidewayses” that can lead to vicious and/or virtuous cycles can have actual attributes in common if looked at in the right way.

It’s a bit akin to how the motion of a pendulum and the oscillation of a circuit and the “probability waves” of quantum mechanics can be described by very similar mathematics.  Also, the relations between pressure, flow, and friction in fluid dynamics with voltage, current, and resistance in electric circuits are almost spookily alike.

This probably demonstrates something rather fundamental in the nature of reality.  Perhaps it’s distantly related to the fact that geometry seems to have a deeper influence on the workings of reality than one might at first think, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Pythagorean relations and the appearance of Pi (π) in often surprising places.

This is all speculative stuff, and I’m not being very rigorous in my thoughts, though I’m trying not to be too frivolous.  But I think this is a good place to wrap up this post for today.  I hope you all are doing well and that you continue to do well, and even better, that you improve at least a little bit, in at least some way, every day.  You might as well.

*Has anyone reading ever actually mended their stockings (or darned their socks, as in another Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby)?  I have mended a sock at least once in my life, and probably more than once, but nowadays socks are so readily available that I tend just to throw them away when a hole develops.  I guess that’s a testament to how “spoiled” we are in the modern world.  Incidentally, I added the Thursday part of Lady Madonna to this quote-based title because I realized that I’m never likely to use it on an actual Thursday blog post, because for those I use mutated quotes from Shakespeare.

**In his classic book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as a replicator of the mind, and it has become a useful scientific term, in addition to being a slightly imprecise shorthand for usually humorous pictures of various kinds shared online.  Such memes can become highly potent self-replicators in various senses, and they can combine in ways that make them more prone to spread, in “meme-plexes” of various kinds.  Some are useful for the organism, and so could be considered beneficial viruses (memetic rather than genetic) while others can become terribly destructive, at least in certain circumstances.  Certainly the mind-virus(es) associated with the Jim Jones cult was/were lethal to most of those who were infected.  Likewise with the Heaven’s Gate viruses.  Some of such comparisons can be a bit glib, but others are robust and can be subject to rigorous study.

***I’m not referring to a prison-based “general population”, though at times the metaphor of modern society as a prison is truly warranted, especially for those of us with atypical brains.

****There are times when I would think of a completed suicide as indeed a thoroughgoing success, i.e., a positive thing overall, but here I’m just using the term “successful” to mean “having completed what was intended, as intended”.

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This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

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“There are times I almost think I am not sure of what I absolutely know…”

Since yesterday was Monday, the 30th of June, it’s almost inevitable that today would be Tuesday, the 1st of July.  And, in fact, that is the case, unless I am wildly mistaken.

If I were to be wildly mistaken about such a thing, it’s rather interesting to consider just how I could come to be so wildly mistaken about something so prosaic and so reliably consistent.  It is from such speculations that—sometimes—ideas for stories begin.

This is not one of those times, however.  I’m not thinking about any kind of story related to that notion at all, though at times I might consider it an interesting takeoff for some supernatural horror tale.  If any of you find yourselves inspired to write a story—of any kind—based on my opening “question”, you should feel free to write that story.  I, at least, will give you no trouble.

These sorts of thoughts also remind me of a post that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, and which also appeared as a section in his book Rationality: From AI to Zombies.  I won’t try to recapitulate his entire argument, since he does it quite well, but it was basically a response to someone who had said or written that, while they considered it reasonable to have an open mind, they couldn’t even imagine the sort of argument or situation that could convince them that 2 + 2 for instance was not 4 but was instead, say, 3.

Yudkowsky, however, said that it was quite straightforward what sort of evidence could make him believe that 2 + 2 = 3; it would be the same kind of evidence that had convinced him that 2 + 2 = 4.  In other words, if it began to be the case that, whenever he had two of a thing and added two more, and then he subsequently counted, and the total was always three, well, though he might be puzzled at first, after a while, assuming the change and all its consequences were consistent and consistent with all other forms of counting, he would eventually just internalize it.  He might wonder how he had been so obviously mistaken for so long with the whole “4” thing, but that would do it.

This argument makes sense, and it raises an important point related to what I said last week about dogmatic thinking.  One should always, at least in principle, be open to reexamining one’s conclusions, and even one’s convictions, if new evidence and/or reasoning comes to bear.

That doesn’t mean that all ideas are equally up for grabs.  As Jefferson pointed out about governments in the Declaration of Independence, things that are well established and which have endured successfully shouldn’t be cast aside for light or frivolous reasons.

So, for instance, if you’ve come to the moral conclusion that it’s not right to steal from other people, and you’re pretty comfortable with that conclusion, you don’t need to doubt yourself significantly anytime anyone tries to justify their own personal malfeasance.  Most such justifications will be little more than excuse making.  However, if one should  encounter a new argument or new data or what have you* that really seems to contradict your conclusion, it would be unreasonable not to examine one’s conclusions at least, and to try to do so rigorously and honestly.

There are certain purely logical conclusions that will be definitively true given the axioms of a particular system, such as “If A = B and B = C then A = C”, and these can be considered reasonably unassailable.  But it still wouldn’t be foolish to give ear if some reasonable and intelligent and appropriately skilled person says they think they have a disproof of even that.  They may be wrong, but as John Stuart Mill pointed out, listening to arguments against your beliefs is a good way to sharpen your own understanding of those beliefs.

For instance, how certain are you that the Earth is round, not flat?  How well do you know why the evidence is so conclusive?  Could you explain why even the ancient Greeks and their contemporaries all could already tell that the Earth was round?

How sure are you that your political “opponents” are incorrect in their ideas and ideals?  Have you considered their points of view in any form other than sound bites and tweets and memes shared on social media, usually by people with whom you already agree?  Can you consider your opponents’ points of view not merely with an eye to puncturing them, but with an eye to understanding them?

Even if there’s no real chance that you’ll agree with them, it’s fair to recognize that almost no one comes to their personal convictions for no reason whatsoever, or purely out of perversity or malice.  At the very least, compassion (which I also wrote a little bit about last week) should dictate at least trying to recognize and consider why other people think the way they do.

Sometimes, if for no other reasons, it is through understanding how someone comes to their personal beliefs that one can best see how to persuade them to change those beliefs (assuming you are not swayed by their point of view).

This is a high bar to set when it comes to public reasonableness, I know, but I think it’s worth seeking that level.  Why aim to be anything less than the best we can strive to be, as individuals and as societies?  We may never quite reach our ideals, but we may at least be able to approach them asymptotically.  It seems worth the effort.

But I could be wrong.

*I don’t have any idea what such an argument or such evidence would be, but that’s part of the point.  Presumably, if I were being intellectually honest, and someone raised such a new argument, I would recognize it for what it was.

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Compassion is true justice, isn’t it?

It’s Friday, and I’m writing what should be my last blog post of the week, since I don’t think I’m going to work tomorrow—we’ve been having a good week, all things considered, though it doesn’t have a great deal of impact on me other than making it more likely for me to have Saturday off.

I guess I’m grateful for that.  After all, I really do seem to need frequent time to decompress by just lolling about and doing nothing.  Considering that, throughout my life, I’ve almost never given myself any time to rest beyond that which is absolutely necessary, I guess it’s not too surprising that I’ve worn myself out.

I feel a vague, general hostility this morning, bordering on unfocused hatred—not towards any specific or particular thing but toward everything in general.  It’s a bit of a shame.  It’s not really new for me, though.  I remember, well into my past, realizing that I didn’t like “people” overall, but that I had a hard time specifically hating people I knew, or at least the people I knew fairly well.

That’s a curious fact.  I could recognize that, at first glance, I found humans as a whole frustrating, often disgusting, frequently reprehensible, and in general just rather pathetic—but then, when I got to know someone, I usually found them at least tolerable, and usually in some ways likable.  It’s probably because, when you get to know a person, and you see the various aspects of their lives and their personalities, you realize that even their negative attributes are clearly not of their choosing, and you develop at least a sense of compassion for them, even if there is no actual affection.

I guess, in a way, it’s a realization that humans are not much more responsible for their character than, say, a dog is, though they delude themselves otherwise.  And although there are dogs that are unpleasant, with bad habits and so on, people mostly recognize that dogs are not the authors of their negative attributes (nor of their positive ones).

Humans in general have more agency than dogs, but not nearly as much as they think they have.  No one chooses their ancestry, of course, and so they do not choose their genes, nor the location and circumstances of their birth, nor the culture in which they live, nor the things they are taught—true and false and nonspecific.  It’s probably unnecessarily biasing to think of everyone as “victims”, since not all the things that happen to us (or within us) are negative.  But certainly, people are passengers in life rather than drivers.

Yes, even those who have great wealth and power are no more the authors of the world than are the most abjectly impoverished.  They are luckier, of course; it would be churlish and foolish to think otherwise.  But they are not really any more “in charge” than anyone else is.

They don’t like to admit it, but that’s probably because they are terrified of recognizing their own powerlessness, which is understandable.  But there is little to no doubt about the fact that they are just the same type of flotsam and jetsam as everyone else.  Even the vastly wealthy and successful (and reasonably smart) Steve Jobs fell victim not just to pancreatic cancer but to his own irrational biases in eschewing scientifically supported treatment for it.

This is not to imply that, had he been treated, he would definitely have survived.  Pancreatic cancer is no joke.  The pancreas has no tissue capsule around it, and it is not surrounded by firm structures that would lead to early pain and thus early diagnosis of the illness, so by the time most people know they have the disease, it is often very advanced and has spread quite far.

Jobs’s outcome might have been no better had he engaged the best, top-level, scientifically validated treatment available (which he certainly could have afforded).  His chances would just have been better.

Sooner or later he would have died anyway, just like everyone else.  Death is not optional, not even for the universe itself, as far as we can tell.  This is not to say that spacetime may not endure forever in some form or another—it quite possibly shall—but what we consider to be our universe, a place in which complexity and life itself can exist, even if only in a tiny, tiny, miniscule fraction of the cosmos, is inescapably working toward increasing entropy.  And while a Poincaré recurrence may also wait in the distant future (the mathematics suggests that it does), that’s not likely to be much consolation to anyone here and now.

No, in the scope of time even more so than in the expanse of space*, the place for any kind of life appears tiny indeed.  People say silly things like “our universe is fine-tuned for life”, but that’s absurd on its face.  Almost every location in the cosmos is incapable of supporting life as we know it, at least without significant modification**.

People are biased because they live in places where life is possible—but that’s tautological, when you think about it.  And even here, on the surface of the Earth, in a civilization that spontaneously self-assembled to house humans and their subordinate animals, most people could not survive without the technology and services provided by (and invented by) other humans.

So, perhaps compassion is the most reasonable attitude to have toward people, even when they are at their worst.  That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to stop people from doing bad things and hurting each other and themselves.  But thinking of them as evil is probably not merely counterproductive but actually unjust.  Evil is an adjective that can apply to deeds, but I think it’s never a very good description of individuals in real life.

That’s me being relatively positive and gentle, isn’t it?  I know, it’s disgusting.  I’ll try to avoid it in the future.  In the meantime, please try to have a good day and a good weekend, and repeat after that for as long as you can.

*If time and space are both infinite in extent, as they may be, it’s difficult to compare fractions of them to say which might, in some fashion, be a bigger proportion.  Is a googol (10100) a bigger percentage of infinity than 1 is?  Not mathematically.  Any finite number one can choose, no matter how large, is unreasonably close to zero when compared to infinity.  And that’s just the smallest version of infinity, ℵ0.  Don’t even try to start considering fractions of, say, the real numbers.  You can’t even begin to count them, because you cannot, even in principle, find a smallest one with which to begin, or the next one from any starting point.  There are an uncountably infinite number of real numbers between any two specific numbers you might pick, no matter how close together they are.

**I did a YouTube video related to this, that I titled There is NO life in the universe.  I don’t remember how good my points were, but if you’re interested, here it is.  Actually, even if you’re not interested, here it is.

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Dreams of a rational culture

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again today, because I got tired of the frustrating process of doing stuff on the smartphone.  Really, writing and texting and everything else via the smartphone is more often than not terribly annoying.  I know Steve Jobs got inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation and wanted to make some version of a tablet with their touch-screen controls and all, but that was fiction.  If he wanted to make something more useful based on Star Trek, why couldn’t he have put some money into warp drive or something?

Of course, he was mainly a software guy, not actually any kind of physicist or true engineer or something, any more than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel or any of these other successful billionaires and so on are.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure they’re all reasonably clever, and they’re decent at business, especially at business that doesn’t require them to manufacture things that require serious production and safety and stress testing and all that.

Well, okay, Musk does make cars that are often quite decent (from what I have seen) and rockets that are sometimes quite impressive (and often not).  But mostly what these really successful business people seem to be good at is marketing, AKA self-aggrandizement.  Likewise for successful politicians.

They don’t actually have to be exceptionally good relative to their competitors, they just have to convince enough people that they’re cool and clever, and that if those people want other people to think that they are cool and clever, they should buy their products or use their services or whatnot.  It’s all rather pathetic on their part, and even more pathetic on the part of the people who faddishly embrace them.

Again, don’t get me wrong; I like things about Amazon, for instance, especially the ability to get books that I never was able to find even in Barnes & Noble or Borders (RIP) or Books-A-Million.  And I publish through Amazon when I publish my own books (or, rather, when I used to do so) because of their reach, not that it did me any particular good—I, unlike the humans to whom I referred earlier, am not a natural self-promoter.

I wish humans were less enamored of having obnoxious, “flashy”, egotistical (often male) tribal leader types and instead focused on competence and level-headedness.  Just imagine if most of our politicians were not interested in bombast and attention and rhetoric and recognition and “importance” and were just mainly interested in doing a good job on behalf of the people who elected (i.e., hired) them.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make here.  I never plan these posts out ahead of time, so they are very much just whatever pops out of my mind on any given day.  In a way, all of you reading are only slightly more surprised by what you read here than I am by writing it.

Still, I don’t think I’m alone in wishing people would be less flash and more substance.  Then we wouldn’t have brain-worm-dead people like RFK Jr. in charge of the nation’s healthcare and medicine organizations when he is not merely unqualified but is anti-qualified.  Ditto for the one who appointed him (and for the abysmally cowardly congresspeople who approved the appointment and the poor misled people who elected them all).

If people in general were less interested in seeing who “owns” or “destroys” someone else in mere “debate”, but instead were interested in seeking reliable information and solutions together, things would likely be better.  If we want to try to model things in our society after Star Trek, I wish we could try to instantiate some version of Vulcan philosophy and practice.  Mr. Spock is so much more admirable as a character than nearly every other person on the original Enterprise, and Captain Picard in TNG is almost Vulcan in his own character.

We shouldn’t, of course, seek to eliminate emotion; that’s hardly possible.  Emotion is what gives us impetus, and indeed, that may be its entire biological “purpose”.  But we can try to govern our passions (to quote Spock) to make them our faithful servants rather than our capricious and chaotic masters.  This is not impossible by any means.

Not that I am a master of my own emotions, especially my negative ones.  But I do not consider them to be anyone else’s major concern, and certainly no other person is responsible for them or to blame for them.  I try not to let them destroy me, though I am so inclined.  But if we could all put more emphasis on, for instance, Stoic philosophy, on Vipassana and Metta and similar meditation practices and some of the ideas from, for instance, the Tao te Ching, I think all the world would be better.

I guess for now, at least, it’s a pipe dream—whatever it is I’m “dreaming” about, that is.  Frankly, I’m not sure what I’ve written here today, so far, or if there’s any coherence to it at all.  If there is not, I can only apologize at this point, because I have no intention of starting this post over.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get through this day less down and discouraged than I was yesterday*.

The world is terribly annoying and disappointing and, yes. discouraging, and my own personal life is in some ways even more so of all three of those things.  I try not to let it defeat me, but perhaps that very determination to keep playing the stupid game of the stupid human race and the stupid universe is the very thing that should count as being defeated—being fooled into taking part in the pantomime that is “civilization” instead of making my quietus, or perhaps finding some other path.

I guess I have to figure that out for myself, as with most things for most people.  Please try to have a good day if you can.  It would be nice if someone could do so.

*Apparently, I was so plainly depressed that someone (or perhaps “the algorithm” itself) on Threads thought that I might need help, and I got another one of those “someone thinks you’re having trouble and might need someone to talk to” or whatever that message is, along with a link to the mental health/suicide hotline.  Frankly, I’m amazed that I don’t get such suggestions every day, since I spend at least part of each day thinking about dying—and not thinking about it as a passive thing.

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Stupidity make me angry–especially my own

Once again, I am writing this on my smartphone.  Yesterday I didn’t even bother to take the laptop computer back to the house with me.  I was pretty much fed up with everything.  Though we had a successful day at work, there were multiple cases of people not paying attention to our guidelines and rules; but whenever I would bring them up, there was (and is) always an excuse to go around them‒sound familiar to anyone?‒and I repeatedly got overridden, leaving me to wonder why I bother.

I also hit the top of my head hard on the corner of my metal filing cabinet early yesterday, while reaching down to pick up a dropped pen.  It really hurt, and it left a cut, and I had a headache and a sore neck for pretty much the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have developed a subarachnoid hemorrhage, so I have to keep moving.  It sucks.

And, of course, there’s all the idiocy that is actively occurring in America and the rest of the world.  There might be some who would characterize certain things that happen and that people do as “sick” and/or even “insane”, but I don’t like to use such terms to describe the various moronic and submoronic things humans do that are not only detrimental but cause spreading suffering to others.

First of all, it denigrates people who are actually sick/have mental illness and other related disorders.  Such people (of which I guess I am one) rarely do much harm to anyone but themselves‒though sometimes, some of us wish to do harm to certain carefully chosen other people.

But also, it dignifies the idiots.  After all, insanity is a legal term that indicates someone does not know right from wrong or lacks the capacity to control their own actions.  Now, at a deep level, it is almost certain that none of us has free will, at least not in anything but the vaguest, most hand-wavy, compatibilist sense.  But there is a real difference between someone who has OCD and cannot help but wash his or her hands until they bleed and a person who selfishly and arrogantly assumes that they have the right and the power and the competence to try to run other people’s lives but who then don’t accept responsibility for the horrific messes they make.

Stupidity can be defined as doing something in such a way that it is worse than just random action‒like trying to get to the airport by driving around one’s residential block over and over again ad infinitum*, or to try to solve a Rubik’s Cube by just spinning one side over and over (again, ad infinitum).  And this is so often the distillation of so many things that humans do, especially when they group together in significant numbers.

It reminds me of a post I saw on Threads or X or Bluesky or one of those.  The person said that people are selfish when isolated, but that such selfishness doesn’t really work, that we only survive and thrive by drawing together and supporting each other, working together, caring for each other.  This is true, as far as it goes‒humans are the most social of the social primates, and their greatest power comes from their ability to work together, to cooperate, to communicate.  This is why written language is the wellspring and lifeblood of civilization.  And yet, I am also reminded of the line from the original Men In Black, which I will only paraphrase here:  a person can be smart, but people together are stupid, reactionary, panicky, dangerous animals.

Both of these things are true, at least within certain contexts.  This probably explains at least part of the appeal of Ayn Rand’s** focus on rational self interest‒which, in a large society, is going to, in its limit, come to be the same thing as rational altruism.  But it is strange to have those seemingly at least partly contradictory facts both be true, at least in a highly simplified outline of the social nature of naked house apes***.

It is terribly frustrating.  Even the most well-intentioned people, like the person who made that point about humans being social and needing each other (or at least many of those who agree with those sentiments) will often virulently demonize those who are on the opposite side of a given political spectrum or argument, not even trying to show compassion or empathy or understanding for those who disagree with them.

Likewise, those on the “other side” who seem to wallow in self-righteousness and yearn for authoritarianism will nevertheless seemingly believe that, for instance, they follow the teachings of a very socialistic, compassion-loving rabbi from 1st century, Roman-controlled Judea.

These are some of the things that make me angry, not just the persistent headache and my other, never-ending body pains and mental divergences.  And although anger can be energizing, it is also unpleasant and, as Radiohead said, “it wears me out”.

I can endure a lot, it seems, whether out of stubbornness or willpower or just my own form of stupidity, but there’s no clear reason to keep enduring when there’s no evidence of any available relief or any joy that lasts more than a few hours at a time before leaving me alone to stew in my own, solitary, odious juices again.

I really do hate the whole universe a lot of the time, and that time proportion appears to be growing as that time goes by, like the product of some perverse Dark Energy in my own psyche.  I don’t know what to do about it in my almost entirely empty life.

I say almost entirely, because there are just enough little rays of light to keep me fooling myself that I might one day return to a satisfying, mutual daily existence with people I love, only to have those hopes draw away like a will-o-the-wisp, keeping me eager and even desperate to follow them, but leaving me lost and stranded in the marshland of my mind instead of just escaping into oblivion.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  No shit, Sherlock, what else is new?  Further clichés as thoughts warrant.

I hope you lot are in better mental states than I am, and that you each and all have a good day.

*To borrow an example, though I cannot right now recall from where.

**Do you think Ayn Rand might have been an undiagnosed autistic person?  Discuss.

***It reminds me of the “Riddle of Steel” as described in the movie Conan the Barbarian.  Early in the movie, Conan’s father tells him that you cannot rely on men or gods, but that you can trust steel.  But then, later, Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones) reveals the punchline of the riddle:  Steel is not strong, flesh (i.e., a person) is stronger.  These contradictory truths engender and represent the vortex of seeming paradox through which people must try to navigate, to find the eye of the storm, the balance point at which effective action is possible.

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Dogmas are a disease, a cancer of the mind. Avoid carcinogenic thinking if you can.

I’m going to try to keep this brief this morning, so even though I brought the mini laptop computer with me when I left work on Friday*, I am writing this on my smartphone.  It does make my thumbs sore, or at least it highlights their inherent soreness and stiffness, but that’s part of what makes me tend to write less.  Or at least, I write more slowly; it is not always easy to get me to write less.

I’m choosing this partly because I am just very tired.  On Friday nights and Saturday nights, I can take a couple of Benadryl and so on to help me sleep‒I know it’s not truly good sleep, but just being unconscious for more than an hour or two at a time is such a relief‒but on work nights that’s no good.  So, especially after the artificially extended sleep on the weekend, I tend to have a bad sleep on…well, on every other night, really, but Sunday is the first such night in the work week.

Another problem, and part of my reason for worse sleep, is that I am having a bit of a flare-up of my back/hip pain, and that makes nearly every effort feel that much harder, including simply trying to sleep‒although that’s a somewhat different type of effort than many others.

So, yeah, if there’s anything noticeably different in my writing style today than in my last handful of blog posts, it may be because of the fact that I’m writing on the smartphone.  It may also be something else entirely, of course, or even a combination of things (this seems most likely).  Just because one idea seems to provide a good explanation‒a good story, if you will‒doesn’t mean it’s right.

That’s a common trap into which I frequently see people fall, and it always annoys me (especially when I’m the person).  Some situation will happen, some occurrence will occur, and someone will propose‒perhaps just to themselves‒some reason, some explanation for the event(s), and it will seem at least somewhat plausible, and at least physically possible, and it doesn’t have any glaring logical inconsistencies.  And that’s where they stop.  In their heads, that will be what they think of as the actual explanation for whatever it is they’re explaining.

Unfortunately, this is actually‒at best‒a hypothesis.

Now, if people just recognized that fact and kept the notion in their heads as a hypothesis, then this would be no problem.  All knowledge about the world is, in principle, provisional**.  There’s nothing wrong with having a hypothesis that you recognize as such.  All good science proceeds from speculation (first triggered and then confirmed or denied by observation and testing).

If one has relatively non-crucial concepts to address, one need not even be particularly bothered about confirming or denying one’s little hypothesis.  One can simply have it, tacitly implied, sitting there in potentia in the process of one’s mind.  Then if, quite by chance, one should encounter data or concepts or arguments that bear on the likelihood of that hypothesis, one can‒sometimes quite unconsciously‒adjust one’s hypothesis, or one can discard or replace it or even find oneself more confident in it.

This is all well and good.  But all too often, humans take their first plausible seeming notion and decide that they must now have the answer.  And then, depending on their emotional connection to the idea, if they encounter disconfirming evidence or argument, they twist away from it, dismiss it, seek out only pseudo-confirming ideas and evidence or even (shudder) just the company of other people who share their epistemologically suspect ideas.

These are such things as conspiracy theories are made on, or even religions (literal or figurative ones, including cultish forms of economic theories and philosophical ideas).  And when one does not update one’s ideas, when one is not aligned with reality, sooner or later, one will collide with it.  When one collides with reality, it’s never reality that is damaged.

If it were only the person who persisted in self deception that got hurt in the crash, it would still be tragic but at least at least it would be tolerable.  But as with literal crashes, the innocent are all too often harmed and made to suffer as a consequence of someone else’s poor judgment.

This is part of why I despise all dogmatic thinking.  I even coined an expression in relation to it:  Spay and neuter your dogmas!

Do not let them propagate.  Dogmas are among the most perilous of meme-plexes because they are so stiff and brittle and they tend to have sharp edges.  But even when they don’t, there is still the problem of going against reality.  One can imagine the real nature of the world as a kind of tunnel or pipe or tube‒in places it is very wide and in places very narrow.  In some regions, a fair amount of variability in course is tolerable within it, but sooner or later, if one is not moving parallel to the course of reality, one will hit a wall.

How bad the collision will be can depend on many factors; one can have a mere scrape, or a glancing blow, or one can have a true “crash and burn” situation.

Those are generally worth avoiding.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I feel a bit grumpy and curmudgeonly right now, largely because of my pain and poor sleep, but sometimes it leads to decent writing.  Whether that’s been the case today, I’ll let you be the judge.  I am not impartial.

Have a good one.

*In case it wasn’t clear, I did not work on Saturday.

**Even the old cogito ergo sum.  And don’t get me started on cogitum ergot hatto.