Psychology

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I can’t think of a good Shakespeare quote, but there’s a little Milton below

Hello and good morning.  Welcome to another Thursday.  Please wipe your feet on your way in.

Just kidding.  It’s all crap here, anyway; don’t worry about wiping your feet.

I don’t have much to say today.  I don’t think I do, anyway.  Not that such a thing has tended to stop me in the past, but I don’t know.  I feel that maybe it’s at least slightly different this time.

Let’s see…updates.  I took my third small-dose of lithium this morning.  We’ll see how it goes.  I don’t think one would expect to see any major effects already, so be patient.  I tend to be patient, at least about some things.  What’s a doctor without patience, right?

Oh, yesterday afternoon, I had a near episode of esophageal spasm.  I’ve had that before‒the first big time it got me to the ER (I was already working in the hospital, so it wasn’t far to go), where I was checked for potential heart attack, which it was not, of course.

It wasn’t one yesterday, either, in case you’re worried.  It responded, albeit somewhat stubbornly, to drinking warmish water (and finally some Coke) to help soothe and relax my esophagus.  I don’t think anyone else in the office even noticed.

If it had been like the first time they would have noticed!  That time I had an apparent vaso-vagal response and my blood pressure went down way low, and I almost fainted.  That was part of why they brought me downstairs:  a BP of 80 over 40 in a 29 year old man who did have a history of heart surgery is somewhat concerning, and when you’re a medical resident at the hospital, they tend to treat you with urgency.

Okay, well, I think my esophagus yesterday had been irritated by my recent upper GI illness.  It’s not impossible, I guess, that lithium could have been involved.  I have noticed that, if I accidentally take too many multivitamins‒i.e., more than one in a day‒I am prone to esophageal spasm.  Perhaps electrolytes (etc.) are involved in at least increasing the chances of it happening.

I doubt they would be enough to trigger it all by themselves, though in severely misadjusted amounts they could cause severe pathologies of various kinds.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I found out electrolyte “imbalances” had caused such a thing all by themselves if they were off enough.  I don’t think that’s the case with me, though.  I have no other signs or symptoms of electrolyte dysfunction that I have noticed.

Okay, that’s enough discussion of that for the moment.  I don’t want to trigger an event by thinking about it too much, but since my upper GI tract is still a bit sensitive, it’s not impossible that I could accidentally do that.  “The mind is its own place, and of itself / can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, as someone said.

I think I may try to do another audio post today.  The few that I did recently seemed surprisingly popular, and conversely, my readership numbers have been going down pretty steadily since the last time I did one.  Maybe doing them in the first place was a bad idea, like giving a dog a taste of human food so that now it doesn’t want to eat its usual stuff.

Of course, dogs are practical, about food at least.  They rarely avoid their usual meals because they get treats.  They just eat them both.  At least, that’s how the dogs I have known have behaved.

Cats are a little more persnickety.  There are situations in which cats really will go dangerously hungry because the food on offer is not their favorite.  I would do that with eggplant.  It’s not the only food about which I could say that, but it’s the worst.

Anyway, again, I may do an audio today, partly as an experiment.  That may even become the subject of the audio, but I don’t think I’ll leave it at that (knowing me, which I do, at least a bit).  That would be kind of lame.  I guess we’ll see.

I might as well do something though.  I haven’t played or sang (or really listened to) any music in nearly two weeks, and I haven’t been reading, and I certainly haven’t been writing fiction.  I haven’t even been doing any exercises on Brilliant dot org.  And I’m possibly writing worse blog posts lately, and it’s causing people to stop reading.

I don’t know, maybe the declining readership numbers are related to the fact that I’ve been posting a bit earlier in the morning.  My insomnia has been generally increasing, and I’m getting up earlier and earlier, and so going to the office earlier and earlier.  Some people might just miss the posts because they’re arriving before they look at their notices (or email, or what have you) and other things follow and drown my little whimpers out.

So, if you’re interested, keep your eyes (and ears) open today for my possible audio thingy.  I’ll try not to disappoint, even though that’s something I just tend to do ceteris paribus.

Whatever the case, I hope you all have a truly good day.

TTFN

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Foundations tend to have a lot in common

Hey there, everybody.  I hereby wish you all a good Tuesday morning, by whatever criteria you might use to judge the goodness of a day of the week, which are not necessarily the ones I might use.  Different people can have quite different priorities.

Although, when you get down to it, such differences exist only in the periphery of our value judgments, and they can only become powerfully pertinent in a population the basic needs of which are by and large met.  For nearly all of us, nearly all of the fundamental requirements of a good day are going to be very similar, albeit generally unspoken (because they are so obvious, I guess).

For instance, most of us would like the day not to include any serious dangers to life and to health*.  Most people would prefer a day without serious illness, without significant pain, without acute fear.  Most of us would prefer a day on which we do not go (completely) hungry, except perhaps by deliberate choice.  Most of us would prefer to have access to adequate clean water, and to shelter from heat and cold and rain and so on.

I’m sure I could think of other things that lie at the base of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.  Up a level or so would be slightly more abstract desires that are nevertheless common to most humans.  These include being among peers that one likes, and who like one as well.  It includes, for many of us, the (unfulfilled?) desire to share one’s day with actual loved ones:  parents, siblings, children, partners, close friends, etc.

These are things that begin to be more unreliable in the modern world, despite the advances that make the basal needs less commonly thwarted.  Perhaps this is partly related to the fact that, in the ancestral world, one’s social group was very much essential to one’s basic needs.  Now that those basic needs are less frequently thwarted, it is possible for us to lose track of and allow to slip away those social connections upon which we evolved to depend.

Also, our societies no longer really have much built-in scaffolding around such needs.  This appears to be because there are few forces at work that reinforce that scaffolding, and so it slips into disrepair, to everyone’s cost.

To be clear, this is not the result of some conspiracy of evil-doing, selfish billionaires or government operatives or whatever other presumed enemy of the good one childishly imagines.  It is a result of stochastic, chaotic, complex forces in a civilization that is very far from any kind of stable equilibrium‒a civilization that has seen world-changing discoveries and innovations and ideas multiple times in nearly every decade, let alone over any person’s lifetime.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled system, but its existing patterns keep getting disrupted in multiple places, in multiple ways, all the time, and so it must recrystallize in some new, local frost-pattern‒one that will, in turn, most likely be disrupted again, and soon.  There’s way too much going on everywhere for any mere human or group of humans to have actual control over even their own personal circumstances for very long or very well.

Any external locus of goodness is going to be unreliable, not just in practice but in principle.  This is a fact that Siddhartha Gautama recognized many centuries ago, as did Lao Tzu (or whatever the proper name is), and the various stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome.  I suspect there were similar insights among thinkers in the ancient western hemisphere as well, but I don’t think we have access to good records of their specific thoughts, alas.

It’s questionable, of course, whether any internal locus of goodness can be reliable in any way, either, since we are no more the authors of our brains/minds than we are of the external world.  I can tell you plainly, and with very little fear of contradiction, that I am not the author of my mood disorder(s), and I am not the author of my ASD any more than I am of the septum pellucidum “cyst” in my brain or the hole that was in my heart.  Neither is anyone else.

Okay, that’s enough mindless philosophy**.  I doubt that I’ve said anything particularly useful or even interesting.  For that I apologize; I’m not at my best, I fear.  I mean that not just in the trivial sense, that one is surely only at one’s overall “best” on very rare occasions throughout one’s so-called life.

I am still off NSAIDs, though at least my concerns that prompted that moratorium appear to be improving.  But I am quite stiff and sore, obviously.  My sleep has, if anything, been somewhat worse than usual.  I have not read any books, fiction or otherwise, in over a week.  I also haven’t done any exercises on Brilliant dot org in well over a week.

I played guitar a little on Sunday (and sang) but considering the noise in my room, with fan and air-conditioning going, and with my cheap little practice amp, it was a bit unsatisfying.  I played my Gibson SG (special edition, I think this one is called, with three pickups and so on).  It’s nice, but I think I like the Strats and the Les Paul style guitar a bit more (though the SG is beautifully lightweight).

I often think I’d like to have a telecaster, because some of the people whom I’ve heard playing them get some quite interesting sounds.  But that’s an idle sort of notion; it’s not really important.

Anyway, that’s it for me for today, at least‒though I admit, with some regret, that I will probably be back tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.  

I again wish you all the best of days, as measured from the base to the summit of Maslow’s pyramid.  If anyone deserves it, you do.

*Although people delude themselves about such dangers when it comes to, for instance, driving.

**“Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!”

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The Emperor of Silence reaps no relief from pain…or something like that

Welcome to August, everyone.  For today is August 1st, 2026 (AD/CE).  How exciting.  Huzzah.  Yippee ki yay motherf…

…or goodness sake, we certainly have a rather Roman day today, don’t we?  The month is named after a Roman emperor (the first “official” one, though I wish he’d just kept the name Octavian, since Augustus has too much of a try-hard vibe), and the day is named after the Roman god, Saturn.  Sailor Saturn is also my favorite sailor soldier*.  Though, that last thing doesn’t have anything to do with Rome.

I’m working today, just to confirm what would probably be your conclusion if you were even thinking about the question.

It’s not an absolute correlation, by any means; it’s possible, and not even unreasonably unlikely, that I might write a blog post but not go to work, or that I might go to work but not write a blog post.  The latter has happened more times than not (by far) throughout my life, but we need not worry about that likelihood, since it is ruled out by the fact that I am indeed writing a blog post.  You can tell, because you’re reading it (albeit not while I’m writing, as far as I know).

I am still quite sore all over, especially in my thumbs, back, hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, middle back and right side and flank***.  So, yeah, I don’t feel very great.  I also still have some residua of my apparent middle respiratory inflammation, but I think that’s improving.

Maybe it will be good for me to go through a bit of time with basically no NSAIDs in my system‒they’ve been there a lot, for a long time, and cannot fail to have had unintended effects.  We’ll see how the lack thereof even for a few days impacts my health.

On the other hand, NSAIDs can reduce some kinds of depression, and I think they did at least some of that for me.   Still, I am using Tylenol, and that seems possibly to help not merely with physical pain, but also with psychical pain (a little bit).

Weird, right?  And it doesn’t do that by decreasing inflammation in the brain, as NSAIDs appear to do.  It definitely works differently than NSAIDs, though it is not entirely unrelated.

It’s interesting how modules in the nervous system became repurposed (or added-purposed) for later mental functions in larger brains and especially in social animals.  The mental processes associated with physical revulsion and disgust/avoidance toward potential toxins and infectious materials became tied to our moral emotions of judgement, condemnation, and contempt.

Physical processes of fear became connected with anxiety about social opprobrium‒though, in a species like humans, social ostracism really was a serious danger to one’s life in the ancestral environment, to say nothing of being a rather obvious impediment to reproduction.

Anyway, the point is, it shouldn’t be too very surprising that a substance that attenuates physical pain can also ease psychological torment, at least a bit.  We know that opioids do this as well, and to a much greater degree than acetaminophen.

That’s one issue they have.  If a person has a lot of psychic pain‒and many of us do, which is predictable given that we are creatures adapted to hunting and gathering in the savannahs of Africa but are now living in the nightmare/fever dream/bad acid trip that is the modern world‒and has no better, more available, way to assuage it, they’re going to be tempted to reach for the tools they have, however blunt.

If we can figure out better ways of easing those pains, ones that are available and usable by everyone who needs them and which have acceptably few side-effects, that would be nice.

Okay, well, I don’t know if I’ve written anything coherent here, but I’m going to keep this relatively short, because I am still feeling poorly.  I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the weekend.

*Not counting Sailor Moon, who has the same unfair advantage over the others that the Beatles have over other bands.  Sailor Saturn is my Radiohead**/Pink Floyd sailor soldier.

**Heck, on one of my favorite songs by Radiohead, No Surprises, the chorus is followed by the invocation, “Silent.  Silent.”  And Sailor Saturn is the sailor soldier of silence, wielding the Glaive of Silence, with the power to end the world and bring about…well…silence.

***This makes me nervous considering my urinalysis strangeness, but I haven’t yet checked that today.  It feels like it is improving.

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Is this blog good for MY mental health?

For the first time in quite a while, I’m using my mini lapcom to write this blog post.  The main reason for doing this is that my thumbs have really been bugging me lately.  Also, as I’ve often said, it feels more natural to type on the lapcom than on the smartphone, at least so far.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, since I have been typing far longer than I’ve been using a smartphone; indeed, I’ve been typing far, far longer than smartphones have existed.

How do you like them, Apple™?

Who knows, maybe someday I might get to the point where typing on the phone is at least as natural as on the lapcom.  I suppose if I wrote an entire book on one, that probably would make quite a bit of progress toward making it feel more natural.  But it isn’t as natural, and I don’t think it’s likely ever to be, at least for something like typing, because the scale is wrong; it’s too small*.  And of necessity, it either doesn’t have as many available functions as the desktop programs, or they are more difficult to access with any decent speed.

Okay, enough of that topic and/or subject.

I have, as you may know, been having somewhat worse than usual trouble lately with my chronic mood disorder(s).  I’ve been trying various personal interventions (nothing pharmacological at the moment), because it’s getting fairly bad and potentially very dangerous (to me).  Regarding those personal attempts, though, one thing I’ve noticed over time is a kind of internal barrier to certain specific interventions, and it’s kind of puzzling and a bit disturbing.

A long time ago—when our own galaxy was far, far away from where it is now**—I read a lot of various kinds of self-help and psychology books, trying to figure out, among other things, why I was so weird and how to get along despite that fact and such like.  In them, I learned about autosuggestion.  I also learned about a famous case of a proponent thereof who was ridiculed for encouraging people to try repeating to themselves on a few occasions throughout the day:  “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”

Now, I’ve always thought that sounded quite interesting and potentially beneficial, especially since I tend to ruminate on and repeat things in my head anyway, and if I could make it something useful, then I might as well do so.  So, I applied it.

I never applied it in its original form, though.  I used to give myself messages about my mind getting stronger every day, or my will getting stronger, or my power (whatever that meant) growing, or me getting smarter, or me getting stronger in all senses of that word, those sorts of things.  But somehow, I always balked at telling myself that I was getting “better”.

I have tried doing the auto-suggestion thing again lately in various forms.  I think it at least gives me some mental focus, and at times at least makes me feel that maybe I’m getting stronger, or my will is improving, or whatever.  It’s a little silly but not without merit.  However, when I try to do the “better and better” version, it’s as if someone had cast one of those “langlock” jinxes on my mental tongue, and the phrase doesn’t want to come out.

It’s similar to the resistance I have to telling myself that “I love my life and I love myself”.

Interestingly, I was able to do that one while in prison, which feels sort of ironic, since I wasn’t loving life then.  But I knew that my situation was temporary—more so than life itself is, even—and I was able to keep looking forward to getting out and being part of my children’s lives again***.  Having something in the future toward which to look really helps keep your spirits up, or at least your fortitude.

I sometimes wonder if I fear getting better—not morally, I don’t think I have any issue with that.  But I do worry that some aspects of my personality could be quite harmful if I were to think too highly of myself.  I also have real internal revulsion (bordering on literal nausea) toward the idea of being delusional, especially about my own abilities and nature.

I guess it wouldn’t be too big a stretch to say that I fear it.  So many of the ills that I see in the world—current, past, and potentially in the future—are born of people who are too sure of themselves, too convinced they are right, too sure that they are exceptional, too convinced they know “better”.  I would hate to fall into such a banal and pathetic personality trap.  It’s all very silly, probably.  It might even make some of you laugh, or roll your eyes, or throw your hands up at my melodrama.

I suppose if I had anyone around with whom I could just talk about these things, I wouldn’t bother sharing them here on my blog.  They are, after all, quite personal.  But if I don’t share any of the thoughts I have, they are merely evanescent fluff inside my head that will never have any contact with other, external ideas, but merely have autologous impacts.  Of course, everything is like that (as far as we can tell), but I’d like to have some beneficial local impact on myself, at least.

And who knows, it may be possible, in the fullness of time, for the descendants of humanity, or similar beings, to break free of the nature of the transient and vanishing, and become, like the virtual particles near the event horizon of a black hole, real particles, things that endure indefinitely, and actually gain some degree of control over not only their own future but that of the universe itself.

When I’m being somewhat fanciful, I imagine myself contributing to such progress, and even being able to see it to its fruition.

See what I mean by getting egotistical?  I fear that tendency toward grandiosity, because it can be toxic all by itself, and because it is a frequent hallmark of more serious mental illness.  I’m more than a little afraid of that, because I often feel that manic magma of grandiosity rising up inside my mind.  I think it would be all too easy for me to lose my grip on myself entirely.  My mind, such as it is, is pretty much all that I have going for me; I’d rather not lose it if I can help it.

But the more time I spend on my own, the more likely it feels that it’s going to happen.  And I am not enthusiastic about it.

*That’s what she said.  Ha.  Ha.

**On a cosmic scale that doesn’t really mean anything, but time has passed, and the Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the local group, and so on are all moving.  From a cosmic scale they don’t seem to change much, but if you zoom in, even the surface of the Earth moves at nearly a thousand miles per hour (depending on your latitude) in its daily rotation alone.  Here’s The Galaxy Song to put it into context.

***It turns out that was overly optimistic and did not come to pass, but there was no good way for me to know this at the time.

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Are there any insights in sight in this post?

It’s the beginning of a new work week.  By which I mean, it’s Monday.  But of course, the day to start a work week isn’t truly universal, is it?  That makes sense, since the very notion of a week’s length is pretty arbitrary, and it certainly doesn’t represent anything external in the universe, only things that are inside human minds and their artifacts.

Of course, having set lengths of typical weeks and having pre-programmed days off is probably very good for people at the overall and individual level.  After all, if left to their own devices (so to speak) most businesses would probably like people to work seven days a week (and probably 24 hours per day).

This is not a case of businesses being “evil” or capitalism being “evil”, it’s a case of everything and everybody tending to respond to local incentives and to support their own self interest‒because things and people that do not support their own self-interest tend to go away, as they are inherently outcompeted by things and people that do.

Of course, most entities have more than one local incentive going on, and these can be at relative odds with each other, just as in any individual human (and presumably other) mind, there are numerous modules that have parallel and sometimes conflicting drives‒parts of the mind/brain want specific kinds food at any given moment, and want rest, and want safety, and want excitement, and want companionship, and want sex, and want to learn, and want run around and play, and so on.  And the strength of these “wants” varies from moment to moment; their vector sum changes continuously.

So, getting all the incentives and forces lined up within one individual is already a complex and varying, nonlinear problem.  Then one has to work things out between individuals, and that often leads to groups and organizations of various kinds which then have to balance their own drives and interests and “fears”.

It’s tricky, it’s complicated, it’s immensely nonlinear, and it’s all highly “emergent”.  Almost none of it is actually motivated by any desire to be “evil”, to willfully harm others*, to be deliberately unfair.  Most negative behavior that isn’t entirely in the eye of the beholder is simply brought about by a kind of myopia, a nonreflective self-interest.

Very few people (or institutions) are specifically predicated upon doing harm.  Those that do consistently do harm seem a lot of the time to be motivated by fear.  This can exist, I would say, not merely at the level of an individual, but also at that of a larger organization, since organizations without self-preservation inclinations tend ceteris paribus to be less likely to survive over time.

To feel fear is not inherently irrational or even always detrimental or to be avoided.  But there are many kinds of irrational and nonrational fears.  And when one’s behaviors (whether one is a person or a company or a nation or a slime mold) are born of misapprehensions and even full-on delusions, those behaviors are going to tend not to be as productive as they might be**, and again, this makes for poor outcomes over time.  It is not, as the biological term goes, an evolutionarily stable strategy.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this topic and subject and whatnot.  I feel sure that I’ve written about all this before.  I didn’t use the exact specific words and ordering of words, of course; that would be vanishingly unlikely unless I did it on purpose, because there are so many ways to put together so many words to convey ideas.

In any case, it’s not as though they make any impact, even to the extent that I have potentially useful insights.  Very few people read my blog, and I don’t know that anyone “shares” it, even if they like it***.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this much longer.  I don’t mean this blog, though that is subsumed by what I do mean, so it can at least serve as a marker.  I’m really not doing well.  This blog is, most days, my only social interaction that has to do with anything at all in which I am interested.  I have “social” interactions when at work, of course, but they are about work.

That’s usual for me.  I cannot seem easily to socialize for the sake of socialization‒it’s not that I don’t want to, I just cannot seem to do it‒but have to have some associated purpose.  Even things like movies and shows and so on have always been things in which I participate at least partly as a way of connecting with people.

Unfortunately, this tends to make shows that I used to watch (for instance) or books that I used to read and discuss or movies that I went to see and enjoyed with someone specific painful for me when those people are gone.  Actually, on a day-to-day basis, almost everyone is gone, many of them long gone.  Like the song below says, “everyone I know goes away in the end”.  Though it’s not even “the end” yet, and most of them are already gone.

It’s too bad my depression won’t seem to go away.  I know it’s not literally always at its worst, since that could only be the case for something with a constant level, but it does feel interminable.  That’s a commonly described attribute of depression, that when you’re in it, it feels as though it has always been and always will be.  I know that’s not literally true, and also that it’s not constant, but I also know that it never seems to go away for long.  And I am running out of countermeasures, and the ones that I still have are losing their effectiveness.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter, anyway.  But I do hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Though sadism does exist, it tends not to be a stable attribute, because other people take a dim view of it (for reasons of self-preservation if nothing else) and will eventually expunge the willfully destructive from the world.

**Reality exists, whatever it might be, and those things that do not stay parallel to the course of reality are destined to crash into its walls.  And they will lose in that collision.

***I didn’t mean to refer to my song, Like and Share, but what the heck.  I’ll embed it here.

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“…deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Well, first of all, happy Independence Eve to all my fellow USians out there.  I’m greeting you today because I will not be writing a blog post tomorrow, since I will not be working tomorrow, barring the unforeseen (exclusis improvisis one might say in Latin).

I suppose I could pre-write a post for tomorrow and schedule it to be published in the morning, but that would require a fair bit of extra work, and I barely have the energy to survive to the end of any given day as it is.

As for tomorrow’s holiday, I think it is important for US citizens (“Americans”) to remember what tomorrow represents: the signing (and publication) of the Declaration of Independence, asserting the end of British rule in the colonies and the formation of a new, independent nation.

In this present time, when the extremes of both ends of the political spectrum show all too clear leanings toward authoritarianism, it’s worth rereading the Declaration of Independence in full, including the list of grievances.  I will link to it as part of this post.  It’s not very long, really‒the main text contains only 1320 words, barely longer than yesterday’s blog post‒and it’s worth rereading at least once a year (as is the Constitution).

It’s not that there’s anything astonishingly ingenious about those documents, let alone “divine” in character, though they are well thought out and nicely expressed.  It’s the notions they convey that matter, among which (implicitly) is:  human “authority” is almost always a misnomer.

Stephen King has authority over the universes of his books, because he actually authored them.  Ditto for me regarding my universes.  But the real world is under no one’s authority, since as far as we can tell, it has no author, and no one understands it completely.

There is such a thing as expertise‒it varies quite a bit in its quality, but experts do exist and it tends to be worthwhile to listen to them within their areas of knowledge.  But experts are fallible, and those who would take part in “running” the various governments are extremely fallible, since it is an area of poorly developed science.

It’s worthwhile to remember and emphasize this fact, because naked house apes are prone to be swayed by primate dominance hierarchical urges, just as much as Vervet monkeys and chimpanzees and baboons are.  And since these proclivities are more or less instinctive, they don’t feel like mere thoughts.  They feel like perceptions.  They feel like direct experiences of the nature of reality.

They are experiences of some aspects of reality, of course, but they are frequently misleading ones.  It’s worthwhile remembering that politics, especially politics with authoritarian leanings*, tends to attract those who want to have power for its own sake, for their own sake‒not only those who really want to look out for the people and institutions of their particular nation‒though often they will pretend, even to themselves, that they are seeking some “greater good”.

But if there is such a greater good, and if the glaringly mediocre minds that claim such things can understand it, then that notion can be carefully communicated, and if it truly is good and great, then that should be clear and convincing to any honest and intelligent interlocutor.

Admittedly, there may be many biases that prevent every living hominid from accepting even the clearest bodies of evidence and argument; there are people who claim to believe the Earth is flat, after all, and that is not very bright.  But one should at least find a tendency toward confluence of judgment among those who live by the intellect, such as philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, physicists, engineers, etc.  When ideas are tested honestly and rigorously against reality, they tend to converge over time, because as far as anyone can tell, reality is at root unitary.

But those who seek political power are not generally drawn from fields that encourage and focus on rationalism, empiricism, and fallibilism.  And though I do not doubt that many people go into politics hoping to do actual good and to be of service, there are also very many who crave power over others, for whatever reasons, or even without reasons.  Such people do not tend to be our best and brightest, for as someone once wrote, “power lust is a weed that grows only in an untended mind”**.

This is why checks and balances and votes that include inputs from many (potentially all) people in a society, as well as frequent changes of office, are useful.  Weird shit, being unconstrained by reality, tends to be all over the place, ceteris paribus, compared to more grounded, realistic shit.  So, hopefully, in most cases, the overall mean or median or mode of good ideas is going to tend to be more reality based.

It’s not perfect, and we can certainly strive to improve it.  We can seek increased and better education, and encourage ourselves to seek to understand reality and to traffic in rigorous and self improving ideas to make it ever better.  But a crucial point is that there is no human authority over the world, and the sorts of people who would arrogate to themselves such power are not among the best and brightest.

As the old song says, “He can’t even run his own life, be damned if he’ll run mine.”

Anyway, Happy Independence Eve, again, and have a happy Independence Day tomorrow if you are in the US and celebrate it.  Don’t be put off by the lamentable state of current politics.  The ideas in the Declaration of Independence are still worth celebrating.

*e.g., the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

**Yes, I know who said it.  But though I do like to give credit for well-turned phrases, it’s often the case that naked house apes will either latch onto or dismiss out of hand ideas solely based upon who said them, not on the quality of the ideas.  This is not rational, but it is horribly typical.  I’ve written about this before, this problem of attribution.  So, since it’s the message that matters, not who said it, I will sometimes refrain from revealing a quotation’s source, with implicit apologies to such sources.

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While the orchestra blogs fitfully the music of the spheres*

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (thus my standard “hello and good morning” salutation) and it is the 2nd day of July in 2026 AD/CE.

I don’t really expect that those reading this on the day are going to be unaware of the day and the date.  If they are unaware and yet are reading this online, then their unawareness must surely be willful or at least willing, for the day and date tend to be plastered all over most of our devices.  But in case someone reads this in the future‒even rather far into the future‒I figured I might give a bit of temporal context.

Admittedly, I don’t deal much with current affairs and politics and scandal and the like here, because I consider almost all such matters to be flashes in the pan, or stutters and sputters in the pan‒or even just flash powder that got drenched and then washed away in a dreary rain.

It’s almost all trivial, and almost all of it is so eye-rollingly repetitious, and much of the importance people attach to it is laughable.  The political concerns of a given modern human are no more important than the particular political concerns of a villager somewhere in the far-flung reaches of the Roman Empire…or the Phoenician empire, or the kingdom of Sumer or what have you.

All this local political turmoil, while not unimportant on a local level, is still vanishingly small and unnoticeably brief on any kind of even human historical scale, let alone something less anthropocentric.

Now, I want to be clear:  there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking part in local politics (local in space, local in time, etc.).  It makes sense to deal with one’s immediate concerns, as it does to try to secure one’s next meal.  That’s how you continue on to the following meal, after all.  As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “My favorite breath is whichever one gets me to the next one.”

But one should keep one’s next breath in perspective.  Your personal shortness of breath does not per se endanger the respiration of your office, your town, your region, your country, or the world.  It’s just you.

That’s okay.  It’s fair and reasonable for you to be concerned about things that affect your life directly.  But you should not expect others to be just as concerned about just the same things as those that concern you, nor should you consider it a moral failing if they are not.  If you think they ought to be concerned, then it’s incumbent upon you to use your reason‒not your emotions, they just won’t work‒to convince them.

Don’t behave like an adolescent who imagines that the world will end if they cannot see some particular show or play some particular game or attend some particular event.  Your emotions are salient and motivational only to you, at least directly, and they in and of themselves will influence only those who already care about your emotional state.

If you want to convince other, disinterested** people that something you find important should be important to them as well, merely weeping or wailing or shrieking at them is unlikely to persuade them (and will often do the opposite).  Your passion is persuasive mainly (or solely) to you.  You’re going to have to calm the eff down and explain things.

And you might fail to convince someone.  If so, the failure is on you.  Admittedly, it may not be solely on you; other people can be trapped in their own emotional cages just as you can be in yours.  You can only try.  And, if you want to be logically consistent, you should also listen to reasons other people might give for their own points of view.  You could be wrong, after all, hard though that may be to accept (especially about something about which you feel so strongly).

But there is no law of nature saying that people will definitely be persuaded even by the most rational and clear and complete arguments.  Sometimes you’re just banging your head against a brick wall.  It’s not a good state of things, but it’s just something that happens.

Of course, in the long run, nature itself will take care of those who are unreasonable and irrational‒and by “take care of”, I mean eliminating them.  Don’t get too smug about that.  To the degree that you are less than perfectly rational, you are at increased risk for nature “taking care of” you.

This is not to say that perfect rationality would protect you from every danger that might tend to “take care of you”.  Supernovas and meteors and earthquakes and the like do not respond even to your cleverest arguments.

That is to say, they don’t respond to them in the moment.  In the moment of a gigantic catastrophe, it’s too late to reason one’s way around it.  But being rational ahead of time can indeed affect how even the most calamitous disaster acts on you.  As I intimated yesterday, it’s conceivable that even the heat death of the universe (or the big crunch, etc., as the case may be) might be avoidable or at least endurable.

Maybe not.  But maybe so.  And the only way to know if it is amenable to intervention is to try to understand such things better and better all the time, to use the laws of nature to your advantage, for you cannot break or even bend those laws.  There is no lovely, tempting political corruption that can allow you to persuade the universe to waive the law of gravity just so that you don’t fall to your death after losing your grip on the edge of a cliff.  I’m sorry.

Except, I’m not really sorry.  You were under “constructive notice” of such things already‒a legal term meaning that you knew or should have known about the facts involved and so are responsible for what that knowledge entails.  Any genes that tend to make a human-sized organism less aware or less convinced about, say, the dangers associated with gravity are, ceteris paribus, less likely to persist throughout the generations than ones that give them real awareness of those dangers.

So, don’t casually walk along unstable cliff edges if you want to maximize your chances to continue living.  You may think you have “main character energy”, which sounds cool and all, but you’re only the main character of your own mind (if that).

To the universe, you are not even a paid extra.  You’re not even an offstage voice or a stage hand.  You’re at best a speck of dust somewhere on the rear-facing surface of some negligible bit of the backdrop, probably blocked by a curtain.  As Poe pointed out, the hero of the tragedy, Man, is the conqueror worm.

Which raises thoughts about that stupid social media based trend of asking, “Would you still love me if I were a worm?”

Well…maybe if you were a conqueror worm.

TTFN

*This is not a modified Shakespeare quote.  See if you can discern the source of the quote.

**Let alone uninterested.

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Summertime, and the living is…

Well, it’s Monday‒one day after the Summer Solstice, and thus the 2nd day of official summer‒and here I am writing another blog post.

It’s funny how weird the perception of time can be.  Why, it seems like just yesterday that I was writing my abnormally long blog post from Saturday, when in fact it was a full two days ago.  Weird, huh?

All joking aside, it was quite a long post that I wrote on Saturday.  I wonder if anyone actually read the whole thing.  I mean, I read it, course; I wrote and then edited it, after all.  I don’t remember it all that well right now, but that’s because I wrote it down and I know where I can find it if I want to revisit it.

Working memory and narrative memory and all that are useful, powerful attributes of human minds, and my own copy of both of those systems is better than those of the majority of people I have encountered.  But I do still have fundamentally limited internal memory, so there’s no need to clutter my hard drive with the contents of all of my blog posts.  I know where I can find them, in general.

Though this triggers a thought that I’ve had before:  I was thinking of doing some audio recordings of me reading some of my blog posts and sharing the audio here and as videos on YouTube.  What do you think?  I would love to hear input from any long term (or short term) readers as to which posts they might nominate for such a treatment.

Oh, yeah, in the latter part of last week I did a voice recording, this time about AI as an attribute-weakener for humans.  It’s somewhat related to what I said recently about humans becoming‒in what is nearly the best case possible scenario‒the “pets” of future AI.  Anyway, it’s pretty short, so I’ll probably edit it rather quickly and share it here and maybe do a “video”.

The annoying thing is, it ought to be quick and easy to use Microsoft’s basic video editor just to add a picture to the audio for the video, but now they have it where you need to sign in to your Microsoft account to use the program.  That means mucking about with accounts on the work computer, and that’s stressful.  So, I don’t know.  I’ll try to think of some other solution.

Speaking of solutions and things not necessarily working the way they ought to work, my smartphone‒on which, by the way, I am writing this post‒is starting to be a bit laggy and somewhat herky-jerky* in its operations.  It may be that it just needs a restart‒I haven’t done that in a while, because it consistently slips my mind.

On the other hand, the phone has a finite time of operation, meaning it will eventually stop working, as will all things that are not constantly maintained (and even they will almost certainly all fail eventually).  At that point, I would need to get a new smartphone.

I really hoped not to need to do that ever again.  It’s such a pain.  I really hoped that I would not live long enough to need to get a new smartphone.  I had various intentions regarding that, but so far they have not yet come to fruition‒as witness, the fact that I am writing this blog post.

I’m certainly feeling much less verbose right now than I was on Saturday morning.  I don’t know what circumstances and local forces are behind that, but of course, I’m pretty darn sure that there are good explanations available.  It’s just hard to gather and trace all the innumerable threads of the web of causality even for the tiniest of behaviors in any given moment or event.  I’m no Laplace’s demon (nor is anyone or anything else, as far as I can see).  All I can say for sure is that all of those events lie in the past light cone of the event itself.

Okay, well, this is getting to feel tedious to me, though I don’t know how it is for you, so I’m going to wrap it up and leave this blog post near the left end of the bell curve for word length of posts, whereas Saturday’s was nearer the right end**.

I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the week.

*Please excuse the technical jargon.

**That tail of the curve can’t really go off toward infinity, even if a mathematical description of such a curve does, because I cannot actually write an infinite number of words…though I fear sometimes it might feel that way to my readers.  On the other end, the low end of the curve cannot get below zero, since a blog post with a negative number of words is like a house whose rooms have negative lengths and widths.

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Don’t make such a phus, you Sisy

Well, it’s Saturday and, as I predicted, I am writing a blog post.  I’m writing it on my smartphone, because I felt lazy about bringing the mini lapcom along with me when I left the office yesterday.

I’m still in pain, of course, but it’s not as bad as it was Thursday, and combinations of NSAIDs and Tylenol and some cbd related medicine makes me able to tolerate it‒though the latter leaves me a bit loopy and slightly foggy.

Anyway, it’s Saturday, and I won’t be working as late today as during the week, so that’s good as far as it goes.  It’s not much good, though, because the day is pretty much still used up, especially given my commute.  One certainly cannot rest very well.  Then, of course, tomorrow is the one day in which I can get things done around the house‒or around the room, as I should say, since I live in one room with an attached bathroom.  So, Sunday is laundry day, among other things, and then it’s back to work on Monday.

What a lovely boulder that is, Mr. Sisyphus‒but what on Earth do you mean to do with it?  It’s not actually doing anyone any good, you know.  Initially, constantly rolling it up that hill made your body stronger, but you’ve long since passed the point of diminishing marginal returns and entered full-tilt into the negative returns stage, where you’re wearing yourself down.

It’s sort of like a ballistic arc:  for a bit of time it goes up nicely, but it slows and slows, then it goes around the point of zero velocity and starts going down at an ever-accelerating rate.  We all know the eventual outcome.  As Radiohead sang, gravity always wins.

Forget Atlas Shrugged.  What about Sisyphus Shrugged?  It could be a story about what happens when people give up on just rolling their daily boulders to the top of the hill only for them to roll back down again, to start everything over again.

Of course, what’s-his-name‒Camus, that’s his name‒would argue, indeed he did argue, that though Sisyphus’s actions are ultimately futile as well as futile from moment to moment, Sisyphus is okay.  I think his (translated) words are “we must imagine Sisyphus happy*”

Must we?  I don’t know, maybe.  Certainly he has a felt purpose.  He has been given some drive to push the boulder up, over and over, and it’s clearly an overwhelming drive.  I suppose acting on such an impulse can at least give one the satisfaction of being able to act on one’s drives**, which is almost certainly better than having strong drives and being unable to act on them.  See Harlan Ellison’s classic, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

Have pity indeed for a truly celibate priest, though at least he imagines he will be rewarded for his abstinence (though I’m pretty darn sure his only reward will be oblivion…which is not without its charms).  Have even more compassion for those who are truly starving.

Or, if you want the personal experience, turned up to eleven, you can try having someone waterboard you.  Cutting off one’s ability to follow the urge to breathe, even for a few seconds, is (empirically) the most terrifying and stressful situation for humans.  Trust me, if you ever want to have all other concerns vanish from your mind, just start suffocating*** for a few seconds‒true perspective fall on you like a very massive boulder indeed.

Anyway, even if Sisyphus does have this drive, this motivation, and can act on it, that doesn’t guarantee any form of happiness.  If you’ve ever known anyone with bad OCD, you know that having irresistible and pointless drives does not tend to make someone happy.  It’s not joy such people are feeling, it’s profound anxiety, which let’s face it, is just a comparatively pretty term we use to try to polish the turd, fear.

And fear is, by nature‒I almost could say by design‒unpleasant.  It’s not evolved for you to be able to ignore it.

But people with OCD don’t get any lasting satisfaction by carrying out their rituals; they just get a brief lessening of their fear.  That is undoubtedly better than non-lessening fear, or worsening fear, but that isn’t saying much.  Losing a toe is better than losing a whole foot, but you would rather avoid both if you could.

I don’t know what point I’m making; these are just my random, stochastic thoughts.  But they do seem focused on the fact that people are somehow able to keep going and doing like Sisyphus does, despite there being no evident point or benefit, and indeed, despite their existence and actions seeming like an almost comedic curse from the non-existent gods.

Some people console themselves with fairy tales about Heaven (and Hell, of course, because humans always want a “bad guy” in their stories), and maybe that’s not horrible, as long as they don’t fuck around with other peoples’ lives as part of their delusion.  As far as the afterlife stuff, well, if they’re right, and it’s a good one, then hey, that’s great for them.  Thumbs up.  And if they’re wrong, they’ll never know it, so “whatevs”.

But it would be nice if people overall could reassess the nature of our existence, now that we’re not solely constrained by the blind idiot god, Evolution.  Maybe we can develop actual, real purposes that will make people feel joyful but won’t be driven by fear‒though I suspect this will not be an “evolutionarily stable strategy”, whether for biologically evolved minds or even other kinds of minds one finds.

Humans will probably be replaced by AI, anyway, and it’s looking like it’s going to happen sooner than expected.  Even if AI ends up being entirely aligned with human interests‒a very tiny region in the space of possible or even likely AGIs‒it will still be doing the thinking, the designing, the making, the growing.  Humans, previously the cleverest things they knew, will become little more than pets in such a scenario.  They could be beloved pets, maybe‒pampered and even spoiled‒but still just pets.

Maybe some people would be okay with that.  It’s certainly not the worst possible outcome.  Most other possibilities are not nearly so nice, and we don’t even really know how to steer the future toward which kind of AGI we want because we don’t know how to know what kind of AGI we want.  We don’t even know how to make our own**** wants align with each other’s wants, and we don’t really know in detail what’s happening inside these minds we’re growing so aggressively and haphazardly (not much more than we know our own or others’ more typical minds).

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  Civilization:  it wasn’t very nice while it lasted, but it was probably better than what preceded it and what’s to come, at least for those not running on huge banks of GPUs.  But by all means, old Sisyphumans, let that boulder roll.

*I originally made the typo “we must imagine Sisyphus bappy”, which is a whole ‘nother way of thinking about Sisyphus.

**Utterly unrelated parenthetical:  I had a weird thought just while writing this sentence about whether there are any raps in a true 3 / 4 time signature, since it occurred to me that even the ones that had patterns of three syllables repeated ended up being something like three beats and a rest beat or two beats then a half note (a held double beat), but remained in 4 / 4 time.  It turns out that there are a few, but it’s said (by Google’s AI) that such a time signature is not as popular because it produces difficult songs to which to dance.  Evidently, rap fans don’t like the waltz.

***A crucial part of this is the inability to blow off CO2, since that is the primary and almost sole driver of respiration, not the absence of oxygen.  This is why, in a pure nitrogen atmosphere, people don’t even realize that they’re suffocating, or asphyxiating, or whatever the official term is.  All their CO2 is getting breathed out nicely, so they feel no panic or horror as they merely get lightheaded and lose consciousness and…well, that’s it, unless they are rescued.  It doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?

****I know, I know.  I’m speaking, just for the sake of argument, as if I were human.

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“And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word…”

Hello again.  It’s Friday now, as usually happens immediately after Thursday (but also six days before Thursday, though not the same Thursday it follows).  It’s all very reassuring, this regular, cyclical procession of the days of the week…

…isn’t it?

Well, maybe it would be if they weren’t just arbitrary day names following an arbitrary convention of numbers of days in a week, which number was mainly based on the number of “unfixed” astronomical objects visible to the naked eye:  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon.  Some of our modern English day names still refer to those objects, namely Sunday, Monday, and Saturday.  The other four, somehow, got saddled with references to Norse mythology.

I guess the Vikings really did have a significant impact on the British isles, didn’t they?

Anyway…

As I said, it’s Friday, and it’s the end of the typical, traditional work week, though I am working tomorrow, so I expect I’ll probably be writing another post.

It is interesting to think of what we mean by “tradition” and “traditional”, because not all traditions are of the same order by any means.  For instance, the “traditional” five-day work week is not really all that old.

Previously, people worked more days and longer hours per week (unless they had no need to work), but various workers’ rights movements over time got various laws passed and then new “traditions” began, and to some degree, people’s quality of life was somewhat protected.  Also, in the US, benefits like health insurance were tied to long-term employment by union contracts and sometimes by legislation.

Then, of course, we rebelled against being told that we could not work longer hours without special, extra compensation.  Why, that made our businesses less able to grind ahead and innovate and compete in global markets of various kinds (or so it was said).  We wouldn’t want that!  So, first salaried people were sort of exempted from the rules, and then that spread in various ways, as businesses and related enterprises tried to compete for more money, more resources, more power*.

Except, of course, plenty of other people and companies and countries were competing as well, so there was never any singular advantage that lasted for long; instead, like trees that evolved to grow taller and taller to compete with other trees for sunlight (while the other trees were subject to the same pressures), they raised the minimum requirement merely to stay alive, to which they were all subject, making life harder for each and every one of them, even the “winners”.

Such are natural equilibria.  Just because they become stable and persistent and “successful” doesn’t mean they are not immiserating for every organism in their structure.  And, of course, it is possible for such equilibria, as for species and for cells, to evolve to extinction.

Evolution by natural selection does not plan ahead, and it is neither benevolent nor malevolent, but it is instead entirely and completely uncaring**.

A somewhat parallel process happens in economies at various scales.  It’s not a perfect analogue, for there exists the capacity to learn from others’ practices without having to reinvent everything oneself, and one doesn’t have to wait for new generations to enact even small adjustments.  But it is still fundamentally a mindless process overall.

And, most pertinently, the mutual competition involved leads to higher and higher minimum requirements for success.  You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, of course, but even more subtly horrifying is the spike-ridden, trap-door-bearing, caustic and red hot floor.

I don’t know, maybe those metaphors don’t quite work.  I’m making these expressions up as I go along, as happens with all my blog posts.

I just wanted to remind everyone that nothing in the way the world is set up‒or, well, at least very few things‒is a necessity in anything but a highly local sense.  “Best practices” are not something inherent in nature; our financial and banking systems are not in any way equivalent to fundamental physics.  It’s all ad hoc, spontaneously self-assembled, no more inherently fundamental or necessary than is any one particular pattern of frost on a window pane.

So, don’t be fooled by the tendency to follow traditions, at least not blindly.  The oldest traditions humans have are only a few thousand years old, which is tiny compared to how long humans have existed.  And most traditions are far more recent.

Maybe your family has or had a tradition of getting together to watch The Ten Commandments every year around Passover/Easter.  But that tradition clearly cannot go back to before the movie was made, nor‒even more restrictive‒before televisions were available to most households.  That’s barely a few generations.

So, traditions are only as important as they are good and useful, though those measures depend very much on who is measuring and what the perceived use and good is from that person’s point of view.  That’s okay.  We don’t have any objective, external measures to use for such things.  They were invented by us, and for the most part, are only pertinent to us.

The universe doesn’t give the slightest f*ck.

Maybe, someday, the distant descendants of humans will gain so much knowledge and power that the universe will “notice” them.  I’m not going to hold my breath.

*The actual events involved in all this were far more involved than may seem implied by my summary, but I’m not trying to capture historical minutiae.  Rather, I’m trying to illustrate, to sketch, the general shape of the things that happened.

**This is not to be confused with saying that successful organisms are uncaring.  Caring, mutual support and protection, cooperation, love, can all be very successful survival attributes.  But that cooperation, that familial support, that maternal caring, that mutual love, as the case may be, does not exist just because it’s nice, or because it’s moral, or because it’s necessary; it exists because, for those organisms in those times and circumstances, it is successful, i.e., it tends to increase the odds of reproduction of the genes that engender that set of attributes.