mind

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“…who could think you under the table.”

Well, I feel a bit better than I did yesterday, at least.  I guess that’s not necessarily all that impressive, when you consider how grumpy and gloomy I was yesterday.  Honestly, I can barely remember what I wrote then or what thought process was going through my mind.

I think maybe some of the difference today (which can’t be due to pain levels, because they are pretty steady) is because I got a few hours’ continuous sleep last night‒maybe 2 or even a little more before any stirring started to happen.  I don’t want to get too excited about this; after all, it’s possible that I’ll never sleep that well again for the rest of my life.  That may not be likely, but it remains possible, at least until I do have a better night’s sleep in the future.

Still, you take what you can get, right?

I find myself quite chagrined‒quite often‒by how grumpy and angry I have become.  This is largely due to my chronic pain, of course.  Even the most loyal and lovable family dog may growl and sometimes snap if it’s hurt and someone seems to mean to touch it.

Not that people seem to mean to touch me.  I’m not drawing that tight an analogy.  Nobody touches me, and for the most part I’m okay with that.  I really dislike it when, for instance, acquaintances want to pat me on the shoulder or what have you.  I can tolerate handshakes, but I like fist bumps better.  They feel almost like something Klingons might do.

Though, more often, I prefer the Vulcan salute, which I use to greet people who know me (and sometimes, without thinking, people who don’t know me).  I even use the emoji for it when texting: 🖖

In addition to the preceding, I created my own Vulcan-salute-based flip-off (there’s no associated emoji), and that is basically to do the Vulcan salute but with the back of my hand outward instead of the palm.  In my mind, the meaning is pretty clear and harsh:  Since the usual Vulcan salute means “Live long and prosper”‒at least, those words accompany the salute*‒then the Vulcan flip-off means roughly “suffer, and die young/soon”.

I know, that’s not a sentiment the Vulcans would be likely to endorse, but in case it wasn’t clear to anyone, I am not a Vulcan.  Quite apart from the obvious physical characteristics, Vulcans are a fictional species, and I am not.  At least, as far as I know, I am not.

I suppose I could be a work of fiction in a sense, as could you:  we could be simulated in some fashion, including being simulated within the mind of some truly vast intelligence, one powerful enough to imagine even all the thoughts of the things they imagine.

But, of course, if you simulate someone right down to their mind, their thoughts, their feelings, then they are not a simulation.  Or, rather, even if they are a simulation, they are nevertheless thinking, feeling, experiencing beings.

It’s possible, of course, to simulate a person without simulating an inner mind.  You could put the whole range of responses you want them to give to most situations in a very large lookup table, and you would have something like the NPCs in computer games (or older-fashioned role-playing games).  Then you are not actually simulating a mind, you are only simulating external behaviors.  It would be something like a very advanced animatronic.

But once you actually simulate a mind, you have created a mind, something with (in principle) moral valence.  Then, even if you are the creator, you still have moral obligations toward your creations, at least if you have them toward anyone.

Maybe this is why God** doesn’t try to anticipate what humans will do, but gives them “free will”, because to know what they will do, God must simulate what they will do, in all detail, in various versions of all possible situations, so God could choose the best outcome.  But to do that would be to create all those versions, including ones that suffer horribly, and God may not be keen to create‒of necessity‒the worst possible versions of these lives and make its creations live them.

So, God leaves them to their devices with the intent to steer events to a very limited degree, and to make things up to them when they die.

It’s an amusing thought, isn’t it?  Maybe not.  If nothing else, this bit of mind play should demonstrate why you shouldn’t really pay too much attention to religious apologetics, especially to theodicy.  Any reasonably good writer of sci-fi and/or fantasy can come up with oodles of scenarios that can explain almost anything; these don’t have any bearing on external reality.

Huh.  How the hell did I get to that line of thought?  I guess I’ll see as I edit this.  In any case, I think that’s enough of my weirdness for the moment.  I hope this was better to read than yesterday’s post must have been.  Who knows what state of mind I will be in tomorrow?

Well, probably, it will be the state of Florida.  And as everyone probably knows (unlike the New York state of mind) Florida is a state of mind reminiscent of the “killer on the road” in Riders on the Storm:  it’s a mind that is squirming like a toad.  Or perhaps it squirms like a snake, or an alligator, or‒worse‒like a Florida politician.

Whatever.  I hope you have a good day.

*The usual, formal response is to return the gesture and say “Peace and long life.”  It is not always done with the right hand; I’ve seen responses to a right-hand Vulcan salute given with left-hand Vulcan salutes.  I don’t know if this was deliberate or just an “acting choice”.

**I’m assuming arguendo, and only arguendo, that this God exists.  So, then I am imagining God, including God’s thoughts.  Does that mean, in this sense at least, that God exists, if only in my mind?  I suppose one could say that, but only in a trivial sense.  I don’t have the processing power to simulate God very well.  And any God simulated by my mind would probably welcome its own rapid dissolution.

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Minding primes and priming minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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