It was all a dream.

But in the dream, I began watching all the episodes of LOST, and realized that I am actually in Hurley's dream.




See: There I am, back
by that tree.




What if you are in here too?

:::> Now that we know we are not alone, it is time to rescind the popular notion that we are all in a sim. It isn't a sim at all. It's a sum. An infinite sum. Or if you like an infinite series. At least, LOST seems infinite.

Life is much much simpler as a sim than as an infinite series, but that's only because I haven't learned enough math yet. I like the way that some call it maths. Like instead of Wal-mart, Wal-mart's. Okay, so it's completely different from that.

And then it hit me during one episode that in California language, success is equated with money, viewership, youth, fashion, and the appearance of all these. No one mentions the ugly truth. No one looks back at the lower rung of the ladder.

Only the sage, who is busy going down the ladder as fast as possible, in order to get back on the ground.              

Magritte painted such a ladder as this. Only the painting has been stolen,
so his friend Georgia O'Keefe painted him another:


I ran over this same ladder in my Toyota Truck on I-10 in Houston. My son and I were on our way to a baseball game. Brad Lidge was the closing pitcher for the Astros. I hit the ladder and it bounced from under my wheels and caused a wreck in the traffic behind me. This is the second time I was involved with a wreck behind me and came out unscratched.

That Hurley, he has some wild dreams, dude.

Solipsism or brain in a vat or sim? Choices...

Now I'm running the simulation thing through my brain. We are all one big simulation, from a civilization at a future time.

We are the matrix.

Or - I am a brain in a vat, or just out here by myself, making you all up.

I think the spiritual part of my brain prefers the previous or at least other civilization, but if its insanity, what difference does it make?

The scary thing is that I really am starting to be paranoid about it. At least that's different from plain old depression. Of course, I just got through a tough time in my life, and depression was already setting in. This seems more like a sad attempt to absolve myself of responsibility without going through physical suicide. I hope to God it's just a phase.

Part of the paranoid activity includes typing into this blog, even though THEY (haha, I use the term in jest, but damn it, typing it is actually scary), if they even existed, already are aware of what I'm thinking. So I guess this one is just for me. Call it solipsism then.

What is troubling is the almost certain loss of freedom that would come with actually going to a shrink. I beg God every day to make use of me, pretty much as I was taught. Really, that's the only thing that helps me get up in the morning, is the remote possibility that my imperfect and tainted actions could somehow be part of a bigger picture. I'm not hopeful that I'll ever find out what that might be.

Probably should double my meds. What I would really like to do is simply retire and spend my remaining days reading and learning about math and psychology, still dreaming that someday I might make a contribution, until some random disease or accident comes along and ends it for me. At any rate, this brain is tired.

Lord knows, I've tried. I even ordered one of those motivational books online, by Anthony Robbins. In years past I might have just inhaled it, but now I can't even get myself to pick the thing up. Meanwhile I feel compelled to read and dabble in the math that I abandoned in college. And dabbling is probably too strong a term. 

The Bottom of the Bottom Box

I consider privacy not to be an issue except in terms of dollars. Real privacy begins and ends in the mind.

Each of us has a past and present. Our interpretation of those is eternally private, even if we try to publish them. This is because all that will get to others is an interpretation of an interpretation.

That's what I mean when I say each of us lives in the bottom of the bottom box on a bottom shelf, somewhere buried out there.

Hello out there! (Hello being open to interpretation.)

The Bubble of Perception Part One

The bubble. I know only my own. It’s a small thing really, following me around wherever I go. Sometimes it's like a cloud of cotton, sometimes it's sticky and clingy in all the wrong places like plastic wrap. It used to be invisible, but now I sense it all the time. Borrowing from my favorite bubble author, I’ll call the sensing of this bubble seeing. Where he just italicized it, I’ll also bold it, just in case.

The bubble works for us best and most efficiently when we’re totally unconscious of it. Unfortunately, it also causes immense problems: narrow mindedness, what I call tunnelvision, perfectionism, dogmatism, and a host of human biases that have been dealt with by others elsewhere.

The problem I have with my bubble lately is that it can’t hide very well anymore. At least not all of it. As a result, I’m constantly playing with the edges of it and they are getting quite worn and frayed. Most of the internet argumentation I see online seems to be argument at the edges of our own bubbles and of those we argue with.

I’m of the older cycle and am seeing the newer cycle in my children’s generation. Unlike some other philosophers, I don’t see my view as necessarily superior. It works for me and worked for my time. It is most of the bubble I still carry around.

Castaneda spoke of tearing out of this bubble, but as I’ve said, mostly I’ve succeeded in fraying its edges. True madness has eluded me, which is what it would look like outside the bubble: incoherent shapes and patterns.

Maybe the easiest way to sense your own bubble is to take a textbook or other book on a technical field you know nothing about and attempt to read it. Or even a book in another language. You’ll immediately see the limitations of your own bubble. A way to play with the edges of it is to look up random articles in an encyclopedia. You’ll soon see how tiny your bubble really is.

Most of us spend our lives meandering around our bubble, keeping it tidy and self consistent. This is called sanity.

A change in culture Part One

The fundamental change. It's taking place in our culture right now. As information becomes more fluid, turbulence seems to be increasing. Conversations online are rude and belligerent. Polarization is more common than consensus now.

Part of it is the economy, maybe even a major part. Let's face it, even as computers and capital flow have made things more efficient, they have also led to formerly sidelined nations getting a piece of the pie, which simply hasn't grown fast enough to accomodate everyone.

Americans don't understand this. We've allowed, even encouraged our elected government to keep the status quo, that is provide the illusion of economic expansion with government spending. Twenty years ago Tom Peters predicted what is happening now. He didn't have an answer for the capital drain that is flowing downhill into China and India and soon Africa. I don't have one either, but I'm pretty sure that government can't do anything about it.

A good while back I remember an analogy made about putting a penny into the fusebox. When an electric circuit gets overheated, a fuse or breaker trips and shuts everything off until the problem can be repaired. By putting a copper penny in the break and getting electricity going, you forestall the power failure, but at the risk of burning up all the wiring. When the government pumps money or other controls into the economy, it's analogous to putting the penny in the fusebox.

It is against this background of unfocused hopelessness that todays unemployed and others are protesting against the big guys on Wall Street and beyond. They can pretend for awhile that they aren't the big guys themselves, but a look at the world will reveal the truth. Not that it makes any difference.

Today will be different

I'm donating my time today to the Infidel Museum, an obscure branch of Motion Unlimited. As an introduction, let me say I'm delighted to be here and frankly consumed with eggplant.

To those of you who don't understand, the score goes highest to the ones who make the most sense of nonsense. Solipsism, the subject of my upcoming book, gets extra points.

I've been spending most of my free time lately at a home for the elderly, planning my upcoming stay there with the staff. They're a nice bunch, so far very friendly as far as I can remember. They snicker a bit, probably because I'm so young, but then everyone does. It doesn't matter to me as long as I get my meals and a WiFi connection. I think I'll be allowed to go outside when I want to, and the grounds are beautiful. 

Thanks all of you for your comments, and especially those who send spam. I adore it. Bring it on. I read every one of them.

More later on this incredible journey.

Caution: Inside my head.

I just turned away in the middle of a decision to go up on top of the roof and sit and draw. It felt so wrong. Like I would have been adding a weight to my life that I don't want right now.

This happens often during the creative process. The emotional feelers are out, wanting good vibes and then bad ones come in and shut everything down.

And now I feel as if I were to go up there, I might want to jump off. But no, that's just indulgence. The building isn't high enough.

I almost deleted those last words. Somehow even in an anonymous blog I didn't want to sound suicidal, maybe not even to myself. The funny thing is, my antidepressants seem to be making me more volatile, more impulsive and hotheaded than I've been in years. But I don't really feel good about it.

Living inside infinity

There are too many things to talk about, too many things to seek or search, too many pages to the book of sand. One carves out a path at one's peril, to find later that it has all been filled back in.

I want to reach you. I want you to know I exist, at least for a little while longer.

The Answer

I believe the Internet is becoming the place we turn to for answers, but more importantly for THE answer. And it won't give you that.

Hint: I am at least two people, probably more.

Today I almost started a new blog using my real-world name. It would have been like this blog, a meandering of my personal thoughts, but with my real-person name.

I couldn't do it. My mind refuses it. I'm of at least two: The real-world me is conservative, humorous, sarcastic, and quite boring to people, although intelligent and very creative. Almost everything he posts on Facebook is ignored. He is considered by others to be quaintly out of style and harmless, a great human being who can help you out in a pinch, rather absent-minded but often quiet and usually lost in a fog.

He wears his body uncomfortably and contorts his voice and face into strange expressions that are bizarre. He comes across as being effiminate and singsongy, even though inside he hates this. He uses his hands a lot when talking, as if all his expression isn't enough. You would call him animated without being entertaining. He tries to avoid using long words and obtruse sentence structure, which he replaces with a faux-folksy gee-whiz stupidity.


Oh God, I am so sick of being more than one person. The fact is that most of me, if not all of me, are people that others can't waste their time to fathom. The strain of it all is overwhelming me. I spend most of my time physically alone in crowds, or physically alone at home. The fact that I tend to be more than one person is probably the most interesting thing about me, but certainly not the most strange.

Lately I've been reading books that illustrate the danger of living an isolated life. You are at risk of being attacked and isolated and taken advantage of. Feeling myself in danger of this, I retreat more and more into a world where I am my own company, except as required. I've managed to put one of me, the most unsocially acceptable one, to rest for now, but the others are really no better. If I weren't of middle age and moderately successful in life, I'd be a perfect target for cults.

Flying

Last night I dreamt I was flying again. This time there was a Japanese kid who was flying indoors where I was and my admiration of his technique caused me to climb up on something and dive off, landing inches from the floor and swimming about in the air, gradually gaining altitude.

Flying is something that you can’t really describe in words until you’ve done it. While very much like swimming, it takes a certain amount of mental focus to sustain. Just a little bit of arm movement can get you fairly high in the air, although with the proper concentration, almost no motion is needed. Probably the best part is the look on others' faces when they see how easy it is.

One of the best ways to learn to fly is pole vaulting, but flying on a swing is almost as good. The trick is to get the air and your momentum balanced to create weightlessness, which a pole vault does very well. Most people, once they are airborne, panic as their stomach rises, which is the main reason they fall back into the earth.

I remain convinced that the mind has plenty of energy to overcome the puny but persistence pull of gravity. That this focus happens in dreams isn’t surprising.

It’s interesting to note that levitation and flying are coming into the mainstream attention and fascination of adults.

It's happening

It's not so much that the line between reality and unreality is blurred. It's more like someone has stuck a stick in your brain and stirred the real and unreal sections together.

I could have a lisp. I could have a wine colored birthmark across my face. Then I would have reason to complain. But I only have emotional fracturing and inner thoughts that won't go away. And a world that is oblivious. I shouldn't complain. I'm not complaining. I'm just telling you what it's like.

What if?

What if it's all bogus? What if your brain really is the only one? What if all these allusions to parallel worlds are just hints or remnants or reverberations of what is really going on?

What if you really are living in a fragile bubble, and every discontinuity, every mis-apprehending, every deja vu, every scrap of paranoia is real? Would it matter? Would you do anything different? Would you just scrap morality and kindness and go for life as entertainment? Somehow, I don't think so.

The only thing that would be different, what would that be? You'd still feel lonely. You'd still feel singled out for all sorts of crazy treatment, from wonderful serendipities to a face bruised from closed doors and being ignored. You'd still feel frustrated by your faults. You might cry a little more. Or less.

This is what dissociation feels like: a disconnect between what people say and do and what is really happening. Forgetfulness. Mistakeness. Loss of hearing and buzzing in the ears. A sudden ability to lose 35 lbs of fat. A hidden ability to do the unthinkable task of caring for an aging parent. Double rainbows ending on the highway in front of you. Shadows getting longer in one day.

I guess if I knew that it was all bogus, I'd at least know something for sure. Right now, I don't know anything.

Even if it all comes down to chemicals

Sometimes I consider that all our emotional states come down to the chemicals running around inside our bodies. It's easy to make a case for this. So if that's true, why would life and all the things we do have any meaning?

I think the answer is that the chemicals are there as a result of processes: interactions, thoughts, the food we eat, and so on. In short, our daily lives and the choices we make are where the chemicals come from in the first place.  A case can easily be made for this too.

Yes, but why not use shortcuts? Why not just throw some of the right chemicals in and make everyone happy? Don't we all want happiness?

In other words, rather than trying to feed our hunger, we could just dope ourselves up until we don't care. Or we could take soporifics and immerse ourselves in a virtual reality that resembles heaven. Or any other variation on chemically induced happiness that you care to think up.

The fact is that this happens all the time. The most common daily example is drug use, especially those drugs that cause psychological dependence. They are showing us a better time than we could get in the non-drugged-up world. 

You could also say that a great portion of our online activity is another form of escape from reality, even though these examples beg the question of what reality is. If we play the game and define reality as 'natural human experiences, interactions, and the physical world' then I suppose we might be speaking of the Amish or other societies that minimize technology and stress physical presence and personal interaction.

In a more mainstream sense, we might say that reality consists of waking up and for most of us going to work and doing some sort of interaction with others to make our daily bread, having and raising children, getting old and dying. Even though none of us, hardly, do this without sometimes escaping reality, through daydreams, liquor, movies and other technological distractions, or drugs. 

If we jump through all these definitional hoops, we've pretty much defined any chemical shortcut to happiness as bogus. In effect we're saying that it doesn't all come down to chemicals, negating the title of this article.

So it comes down to reality and how you define it. Mathematicians have the same metaphysical problem when dealing with paradoxes that arise because of infinities. All in all, discussions of this nature are a great escape from reality, don't you think? Say, pass me that bottle.

The Ultimate Work of Art

Looking longingly again for some opus interactive online but accessible venue in which to place every single thing that is important to me and have organized access to it.

That's pretty extreme, lets try again: I would like to have ideally, a book, one that I could write in and access my philosophy, my thoughts, my being from, should the need arise. An interactive "who I am" combination diary and resource that I could use as a toy when I'm bored and as a legacy when I'm dead.

That was better. Now: I want this and its accessibility and its searchability without having to work very hard at it. Also,

I would like to have it suggest to me what to think- or rather, what to think next. I would also like to have it tell me what I need to review. What I really want is everything in my head, everything, but this would be the next best thing, all my thoughts about everything from Shogun to aesthetics to the hivemind to dreaming to everything, including what I've read, where I've been, etc etc. . All the disconnected connections that live in my head and in years of computer and written notes, searchable, as in totally searchable and sortable, from HG Wells Door in the Wall to Wolf Kahn on video to my thoughts about my curdled personality.

I would call this an idle obsession.

I mean, we have this wonderful technology and storage media. This would be a work, an artwork, a cyber power object. To what point? Schizophrenia?

Time Warp

This morning, you've had mornings like this, Lafferty wrote about them: Time seemed to pass like molasses. I got a ridiculous amount of work done, before anyone else got here, in about 15 minutes time. There's no way I could have done this.

It's very much like a dream state, and I think that it's important to note that waking dream states are more tenable when we are isolated. The absence of human interaction somehow makes reality unreal. This is probably why people in isolation go insane.

Is space Like a Chessboard?

Electrons seem to acquire a type of spin when they move along a graphene molecule. This could help explain how the quantum nature of space allows electrons to have angular spin while being point like.













Read the article.





Via Scienceblog.com

2011: The Year of the Black Swan

Free Elections in Egypt.  Nuclear Fallout in Japan. 

These are two Black Swan events by Nassim Taleb's definition.
In my book, a Black Swan is something either too unlikely or terrible to contemplate, or an event that arises for completely unexpected reasons. No one expected something as seemingly  innocuous as Facebook and Twitter to ignite the fires of revolution,  and no one seriously expected  a Tsunami to cause a nuclear reactor meltdown.  What will be next? By definition, you don't know.

Via CNN. com

Singularity May Be Real, But Kurzweil’s Still A Jerk

Ray Kurzweil, live forever guru. Excellent salesman for the Singularity.

 

Via   Disinformation

Don't Drink The Water

It had to happen sooner or later.

From The J-Walk Blog

Apple Water is Here!

Experi-mental

Theme of the Adjustment Bureau.

It's all for nothing, isn't it?

There is beauty. There is the world. And then, there is your life. A life that careens from euphoria to anguish and back, all the time being just a little unbearable, tedious, and nervewracking all at once.

Words that you once used are now obscure, unspellable. The gods of the future have won.

If I existed in isolation, I would die of loneliness. I exist in constant connection, and am dying of isolation. No, it cannot be the fault of the world. The fault is with me.

I'd like to stop it.

I'm moving into a new reality where I might not die.

Don't look at me like I'm crazy. Oh, I forgot. Go ahead and look at me like I'm crazy. But here's my reasoning:

I've pretty much been able to accept the fact that I am in a tunnel. Reality is not an illusion. It is a tunnel. Everything may be put there or not, but I'm moving through it.

This tunnel, this reality, as I'm moving through it, is changing. Much like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, things come into view and others go out, some persist for awhile, sort of move with me. You might say that reality is an accumulation as I move through the tunnel. It also appears that when I fixate on certain things, they tend to accumulate and persist.

For example, I loved the Seinfeld Series. Although the series finished, the episodes have essentially become fixtures in my world. In a sense, it feels like I create the world as I move through the tunnel. I certainly can't prove that this is not the case.

This week (in the tunnel) I'm accumulating information on longevity. (Accumulation has been made much easier by the internet, itself an accumulation.) And I've also been accumulating information on robotics,
exponential growth, mathematical transformations, matrix algebra, and the idea of the low carbohydrate diet.

Now here's the interesting part. It appears, without exception, that the futurists and mover-shakers that know something about science are sold on the low carbohydrate diet. All of the information I'm accumulating is coming together very fast. It's now conceivable to imagine that I'm moving to a reality where I may not die.

Whether this is a desirable state is yet to be determined. In any case, there seem to be multiple possibilities accumulating wherein this could happen.

My little well of depression space.

Last night someone I love very much ragged on me for awhile because of an incident that I had nothing to do with and suddenly I was in the middle of it, the cause of the incident and a whole lifetime of loneliness and pain.

Love causes you to bear things like this, because sometimes the ones we love just need some moments of release. In this instance, more because of who I am than anything else, the feeling of being beaten up has persisted into the morning.

Might as well jot down the feelings, right? I mean, in a little while, things will brighten up and the person concoction that is here-me-now-inward-depressed-batting-at-moths will be gone for awhile, giving way to another me.

So for now, I’m realizing that every song I wrote about my family members has come true, including my own. And some of those songs weren’t pretty. This god fixation I have is getting worse. It’s not like a particularly powerful thing or overlord type of emotion. More like every offhand thing I do seems to have long reaching consequences that turn out to be my own direct fault or responsibility.

And as a result, I’m quite fearful of even moving. Two cups of coffee would probably dispel these feelings.

But, and this is the thing, I’m right now in this little well of depression space. Later I can go out and interact with my coffee-mind turned on and more or less be human. But part of me knows that I’ll be back in this space again at some point. And all the things done out there, will come back to haunt me in here.

So, if I go out today and have a laugh at the expense of some thing or some one or some event, you can bet that event or one or thing will be here with me at a future time. And they will either be dead, or angry or deflated or otherwise ill-effected, partly or completely but inexplicably related to the laugh I had on them.

It is this connectedness that is eating at me. Certainly the calculating part of my mind can reason that all this connectivity is mental gymnastics, after the fact sleight of hand. I’m reading a book right now that points to the illusion of connectivity through data flooding: somewhere in the endless human data that comes across my mind, there will be connections, parallels, analogies, predictions. All I have to do is watch the river flow by and pick out the parts that I choose.

Even so, this process of assemblage (which is really probably interrelated to the assemblage point idea) is pernicious. It seems my brain works overtime on it, draining me.

PART 2

In emerging from my little well, distractions and the pull of the world will slowly pull my space inside out until I’m standing in the open with the rest of you. We’ll interact and I’ll have a break from self-aggrandizement and solipsism. Relief will give way to assertiveness, moving into annoying humor and what I use as a stand in for my life with others. Given enough time (minutes can be enough if they stretch across the universe) I’ll even forget I was ever here, and about the well entirely.

See you next time.

This will be my last post into the future.

Really. Ray Bradbury notwithstanding.

Mainly because, with the new advances in quantum experimentation, everyone will be doing it soon anyway. Or should I say, everyone will have already been doing it.

Co tinuity i nt t e o ly t g we h ve be o e us.

Yes, it is all for laughs but the laughs have become hysterical laughs, very much related to hysteresis, or returning to a state we were almost in, and also to the hyster, the shape of the nemesis of man. It is no small wonder that this strange word finds its way into our vocabulary of illness that is based not on symptoms of the body, but of the mind, itself an abstraction (Is the body an abstraction? Think about it.)

Increasingly, I do not care, I do not like green eggs, Sam. Play it. Say it, don't spray it. Spray it with PAM, Sam, and cook your green eggs and ham.

Continuity isn't the only thing we have to worry about (Part 1)

Before and after is such a simplification of even linear data, that the idea of non-linearity drops on us like a ton of books, we who are conditioned to see things in terms of cause(before) and after(effect).

This is why stock market analysts and meteorologists can hold down jobs. It is so easy to fish data out of the air, that we are just now beginning to understand that linearity is even more of an illusion than continuity.

Indeed the idea of discontinuous everywhere at once space is exactly what makes quantum theory operate. And armed with this science, we are finally doing things our parents only dreamed about, pulling energy from nowhere, creating intelligence from carbon chains, and in essence, creating new life forms.

Where does this leave mankind? Devastatingly behind. We will only be able to keep up by morphing with machinery into something more. The Quantum concept is the Pandora's box of our generation, much as the printing press was to the 15th century and the photograph was to our grandparents'. To survive, we will have to embrace all that we are capable of becoming, because if we don't, someone on this planet will, and they will destroy those weaker than them.

There, now I've passed from confusion to paranoia. How many stages are left?

Continuity isn't the only thing to be concerned about (Part 1)

It is starting to become noticeable. There are periods of time when I seem to be across a continuum. The linear self is beginning to take a backseat to the personhood that is in several places, if only mentally, at one time.

This is not a lot of fun, either. It becomes difficult to keep track of things. The only recourse is to focus in on one thing for as long as I can, at the expense of everything else, because there is just too much else. When I stop and look up, I can see it all around me, the different levels on which things work, the different responsibilities, the different personalities I am capable of wearing.

If all of this seems abstract and hard to visualize, that's because it is. An example: I find that posts I have never made are in my memory on some level as having been made. So I make them. It's sort of the reverse of Alzheimer's. It's as if my short term memory is not functioning on one, but a thousand things at once, and they all get compacted together. What I had for supper last night is lost behind where my keys are and the ten things on my incomplete to do list, and my need to journal my latest observations on continuity:

My latest observations on continuity: It is an illusion. Continuity is an idea that takes infinity and compresses it into every place you look. To assume that finite man could operate on a continuum is gross hubris. We, humans, are painfully discretized beings, only capable of a thin version of continuity. Indeed, we are so impressed with infinity, which is just continuity at the end of things.

We don't think about the mind-numbing case of infinity everywhere and all between. We blank it out. Discrete infinity is child's play next to this, but we get the two confused.

Consider: an infinite lifespan is to us just somewhere out there past our 100+- years, 101 is just as infinite as 1*10exp1000000 if we die at 99.

But continuity implies that every moment is infinite. Yes, it sounds like a trick, but what I'm talking about is the mathematical presence of divisibility completed, throughout one unit and the next. And physically, we are just not capable of that. Even though we work on the nanoscale now, for true continuity, we can just go on breaking things down forever. That is true continuity.It is an asymptote around every corner.

Is this the path that Georg Cantor traveled on his way to madness?

Falling against the sky

Over-sensitized today. This could be good for you. There are several forms of paranoia that work for me today.

1. I am a subject of observation, and the rest of you are in on the secret. A more general variant of Truman Show Syndrome, because I can't really assert who the observers are, I only know that this is all a sham.

2. The various headaches, annoyances, and interruptions that always plague me are particularly bad today, and at this point are a clear sign that the world is either a)meaningless or b)malevolent.

3. The knowledge that tonight or sometime in which I'm not conscious, adjustments will be made to my brain and I'll come out of this funk with a dumb grin and again putty in the hands of whoever is manipulating me.

4. The realization that whether or not 1) or 2) are anything but hallucinations, the outcome expressed in 3)will almost certainly happen, pointing to the fact that something is going on, regardless of how I may feel about it tomorrow.

Of course, I also have several motives for believing such absurdities, in fact could come up with new ones on the spot. It remains, however, that these shifts in perception and significance, whether random chemical imbalances or careful manipulations, have been with me for some time. Of course, Mondays can be particularly bad.

My favorite justification for these paranoic thoughts is that some form of mental illness would lessen my personal blame for all the unbearable tragedy and injustice that I'm seeing in the world more and more these days. Add to this the fact that I'm my own best friend and feel like I have to hide behind a ridiculous pseudonym (actually I have several, for various personalities) and you have some idea of what I'm putting up with.

If you really think that I'm indulging in sympathy, let me remind you that mathematically 0% of blogs are visited by others and therefore I'm mainly typing this here because my computer's hard drive doesn't have room for such drivel.

Syncthink

[This article is a perfect example of syncthink, the ability to take changes and upsets in our worldview and by either massaging them or ignoring them, assimilate them into our wholistic vision of our reality. At the end of this legitimate article, the author blithely returns to orthodoxy in the prediction that this political upset is basically a non-event in the larger political picture. ]

From the Washington post, Sept 15 2010

Marketing consultant Christine O'Donnell upset Rep. Mike Castle in the Delaware Senate primaryDelaware Republican Senate primary tonight, handing the tea party movement a major victory and giving Democrats an unexpected chance to hold the First State seat.

O'Donnell, who is making her third run for the Senate in as many elections, relied heavily on national surrogates -- from the Tea Party Express to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- to fuel a shoestring campaign against the iconic Castle who had held elected office in the state for more than four decades.

"The people of Delaware have spoken," said O'Donnell in her victory speech. "No more politics as usual."

(Photos: O'Donnell stuns the GOP)

The O'Donnell victory, which was considered a political impossibility as recently as a month ago, is a major boost for Democratic hopes of holding the seat once held by Vice President Joe Biden. New Castle County Executive Chris Coons was unchallenged for the Democratic Senate nomination.

"I'm sad to say the Delaware primary results tonight are straight out of Harry Reid's dream journal," said prominent Republican strategist Mike Murphy of the O'Donnell win.

While the Delaware race was the marquee contest of the night, it was far from the only one on the ledger as seven states and the District of Columbia voted in the final major primaries of the 2010 election.

In New Hampshire, former state Attorney General Kelly Ayotte held a narrow lead over attorney Ovide Lamontagne in the battle for the Republican Senate nomination. The winner will take on Rep. Paul Hodes (D) in the race to replace retiring Sen. Judd Gregg (R).

In New York, embattled Rep. Charlie Rangel cruised to victory in a crowded Democratic primary field in the 15th district while Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D) easily beat back a primary challenge from businesswoman Reshma Saujani in the 14th.

Also in the Empire State, tea party favorite Carl Paladino crushed former Rep. Rick Lazio in the fight for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Paladino will be a major underdog this fall against state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is heavily favored in the fall.

But, there is little doubt that O'Donnell's victory is what will dominate headlines tomorrow.

In the wake of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R) primary defeat late last month, Castle went harshly negative against O'Donnell in hopes of using his financial advantage to define her in the eyes of likely voters.

But, tonight's result suggests it was too little, too late for Castle whose political career, which began when he was elected to the Delaware state House in 1966, ends in a shocking defeat.

"This shows that conservative energy at the grassroots is at tidal wave levels," said Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman and GOP lobbyist. "It may well cost us the Delaware Senate seat, but the same phenomenon will help Republicans, particularly in House races in November."

State and national Republicans have made no secret of the fact that O'Donnell's questionable personal finances and public misstatements -- she once said she carried two out of the state's three counties in her 2008 race against Biden but she didn't -- made her close to unelectable.

"We congratulate Christine O'Donnell for her nomination this evening after a hard-fought primary campaign in Delaware," said National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director Rob Jesmer in a terse statement released after the race was called.

The Delaware result is also a major blow to Republicans' hopes of winning back the Senate majority this fall. To do so, the GOP needs a net gain of 10 seats, which, with Delaware now likely to favor Democrats, means that Republicans need to close to a clean sweep in states like California, Wisconsin and Washington. - [emphasis added]

----Syncthink is rampant today, but then it has always been. The internet just allows us to accelerate and emphasize its (mis)use. An antidote would be to often realize that we are NOT sure of future events, that the so called pundits are just as prone to syncthink as ourselves, their perceived authority and expertise notwithstanding.

Reinterpretations around us

Of COURSE change is inevitable. Yet we strongly yearn for things to stay roughly the same. Indeed, a great part of our consciousness is based on arguments (some would say facts) such as the law of identity and the Little Orphan Annie Law (the sun will come up tomorrow).

The Bible draws its strength from this concept, as does Capitalism.

But hold on. If all these things we are hanging onto are so fool certain, then how come change seems to be coming at us with increasing speed?

It's time to look at focus and framing. Jack Canfield, the Chicken Soup for the Soul co-author, rightly says that we control our destiny (some might say our very reality) largely by how we choose to respond to the events around us. Respond with resort to stability and logic, and to some degree you can tame the tiger of rapid change. Simply discard those inputs which don't fit into a framework and keep the ones that do. Occasionally you'll be blindsided and even perhaps knocked to your knees or killed, or driven insane. But that has always been a possibility.

This induced blindness is what we call rationality, and in terms of efficacy, it is rational indeed. The easiest way to stay on course is not to look at what's happening in the other lanes or on the side of the road.

Of course, we need to be aware that we are living in a culture of voluntary mass distraction. That simply means that it is trendish to be distracted as much as possible while still performing at a passable level. Never mind that the real work getting done is accomplished by decidedly old-fashioned drive and initiative. You can't tell me that the recent discoveries in technology and psychology were the result of whistling over beers in the parking lot while listening to the latest device. Focus is very much alive.

Why then, the emphasis on the distraction? Might we not argue that mass distraction very nicely serves the engineers who are driving society? Are we not easier to predict, influence, herd, control, when we are barely able to function, all because of a voluntary movement to conformity masked as relevance?

We can even see this phenomenon in past times, if we frame it properly. What was World War II, but a conveniently botched result of world economic stagnation, which was used to focus and drive conformance for the next 50 years?

Making my head swim. Reading the Traveler.

Why I'm presently barred from the future

It has long been assumed that time travel is not possible because humankind would foul things up. As if they weren't already fouled up.

In fact, it seems obvious that this is exactly what has been happening, these people from the future keep coming back and trying to fix things. What they don't realize is that computer viruses and many other things are also from the future.

Hear me out.

Ever since quantum theory was formulated, it has been dastardly in its accuracy of prediction. Even though these predictions are in the form of probabilities, it remains that they are incredibly accurate.

And ... I'm falling off a cliff here. Something is interfering with my mind. More ina later post.

Move over Garrison Keillor

Poor Garrison!

Let's face it, big guy, there are only 24 hours in a day. I've never read any of Garrison Keillor's books, although I've listened to Prairie Home Companion once or twice and saw the movie, which I bought for my father-in-law. The midwest holds no romance for me, I'm one of those southern idiots whose accent you make fun of while I make fun of your attempts to imitate it.

There are tons of great writers out there, and their books are still available, many for free.

Do we really need a publisher/gatekeeper? Well, you sort of have one. It's not even human, it's called a search engine now. And trust me, we have a long way to go when it comes to decent searching.

For example, if you type Garrison Keillor books "most nostalgic" into Google, your first hit is a heap of drivel (much like this blog) called physics 198-101. It's not about physics, even.

So, publishers, get a life and go into critiques. Volunteer to help us find the good stuff that we are doing. You can't get rich on it? Well, no one is going to be rich in the hive, except for the beekeepers, and they are all getting jobs with the government.

Will this push back creative individuals? Sure! But hey, you wanted Democracy, and everyone is equal in the hive, just not very fat or well rested.

Still, we can envision somewhere the hive coming up with its own American Idol brand of writer judging, and eventually we'll see niche judging until, finally, the hive is ordered and structured in a way that we can all search.

Meanwhile, guess what, we're living in web anarchy. For the adept, that's not so bad, as long as you're unemployed and have plenty time on your hands. Have you idly ever wondered who invented those infernal coat hangers? Look them up. Facts we can find. It's judgment that is lacking on web searches, evaluations, and because these are personal, the solution is for all of us to get in line and think the same. You don't think it'll happen? When's the last time you searched for an article and didn't find the best one on Wikipedia?

We've had critical mass marketing of groceries, tires, computers, eyeglasses, and we're rapidly entering critical mass marketing of ideas, where just finding yourself in the Book of Sand is an infinite task.

Insanity and Energy Perception

I've been re-reading that scorn of new age tripe, The Celestine Prophecy, and tried to stop before it got really crazy. At the time it came out, the author James Redfield really hit a nerve.

But at least toward the beginning, he said two things that made me think. The first was about our perception of beauty. Now, I'm not going to sit here and say that beauty is universal, so understand, all this is totally personal but nevertheless true for me, my opinion.

And what I'll say about it is , yes, seeing something beautiful is energizing, whether it strikes me as a beautiful scene, painting, woman, or piece of mathematics.

So rather than dwell on what the nature of beauty is (aesthetics) I want to think about why beauty has this energizing effect on me (and apparently on Redfield.)

Working from specific examples, a beautiful scene, for example, can evoke memory or associations with pleasurable memories, as well as pleasurable expectations. A beautiful woman can evoke expectations of physical pleasure. A painting, for me, can evoke pleasure in appreciating the competence of the artist, the use of color and form, or wit. In fact, laughter is a particularly energizing activity on its own. What is happening here, and does it really have to do with some sort of floating energy field, or what? Just why do we say it energizes, anyway?

Without researching it, I would surmise that aesthetic pleasure releases chemicals into our brains that stimulate us much as a hot fire would stimulate a kettle of water to boil. We feel this in a physiological sense, and relate it to what we've learned about energy in physics.

What bothers me, and what I would like to understand further, is why there is such a popular crazy sect out there that insists that seeing energy is similar to seeing an electric or magnetic field. This seems to me to be unrelated to seeing beauty. I can perceive beauty, basically conceptualize it and then I can understand as above the energizing effect it might have.

That is totally different to what the new agers call seeing energy, seeing we are all connected. Unless.

Unless they are talking about a conceptual leap, similar to the conceptual (you might say automatic or subconscious) leap that we make when we affirm something or someone is beautiful. To my mind, this feels like direct perception, but there is a mental process that takes place in between. That's what I call conceptualization.

Like any human act, conceptualization can be practiced and developed until it's practically automatic. If the new agers are talking about this and call it perceiving energy, then I wish they would discuss it that way, rather than as a directly visual perception.

Castaneda, a true master of prose and sorcerer of words, alluded to the indirectness of this in some of his books. His shaman, Don Juan called this 'seeing' a certain way of holding the eyes.

On the other hand, Carlos goes off and starts seeing fibers of light everywhere. This is certainly dramatic, but is totally different (and more incredible) than simply perceiving/conceptualizing/being energized.

I'd like to get some straight talk on it, but so far haven't found any resources, except for self-promoters selling mystical books and CDs.


s

Quantum Behavior in the real world

It happens in photosynthesis.

And, it appears Roger Penrose predicted it before I did, of the human brain. That's why he gets the big bucks.

That being said, I stand by my conviction, made in ignorance of his comments, that our minds are capable of quantum entanglement and that the brain has the capability of viewing through time similar to the way a wormhole would go through time.

However, the new work leads me to a more precise general description of what is going on.

All the successful work with quantum entanglement including the study of photosynthesis points to the wave nature of the photon and other particles as where the real magic happens.

This shouldn't be any surprise, if we realize that almost all of our advances in science have been dependent on wave mechanics.

More importantly, as humans, we are intimately connected with the physical world through wave information. There's no question that this has a direct bearing on our own interactions and also our social interactions. It's not hard to posit that complex wave activity is at the heart of most, if not all, of our macroscopic world. That we have been ignorant of this up until now is largely because our attention and most of our success in technology has been through the exploitation of the particle nature of mechanics and through digital information processing.

Personally, I can point to quite a few examples of wave mechanics and its significance to human perception: Holography creates three dimensional perception through wave mechanics. Another: A few years ago, the DX7 was a new form of music synthesizer that worked through wave modulation algorithms. It created fairly realistic sounds that were very difficult for non-engineers come up with. (Later, digital sampling came into prominence, and wave modulation synthesis took a back seat.)

It seems also that, tied to the whole process of entanglement, what we call chaos but what I would call fractal complexity is at work. Given that most of nature is fractal in composition, it seems to me that here is the real bridge between the quantum and the macroscopic world.

What is surprising is that we can get a handle on this level of complexity at all, but that's probably because of our success with scaling up complexity through computer reiteration.

Up until now, humans have been wave pattern perceivers. Now we are at the beginning of being wave pattern scientists. The pathway will be through set theory and number theory. In my opinion.

the third of may

The essence of automatic writing is not to think about it too much, to get lost in making the interesting curves of cursive writing.
Here, we see a rehearsal of interpretive dance, as members of the Peoria Ballet reenact Goya's painting, The Third of May.

The new reading underground

This generation doesn't read books. you hear it all the time. and its a load. Or at least a misload . Because this generation reads. A load. Just not of books.

I think all of that will be changing soon. What we're not at all prepared for is what a book will be in the very near future. Oh, I imagine microsoft and apple think they're prepared for it. But I'm talking about the authors and the publishers. And to a large extent, the rest of us.

Because the so-called book, biblio, reading object is going to grow anew out of this neural network we call the internet. It will be completely different, and will probably mirror our perception of reality closer than a string of paragraphs and chapters.

However, we have to be careful here. Mankind has certainly had the opportunity to add illustrations to books since the beginning of writing, and many times did. But there is something about the 'story' that pushed media other than the words into the margins.

Most likely it is because reading/word processing is an abstract activity that until now we have been accustomed to doing in isolation. But 50 years of computing have begun to change that. With a two and a half generations raised on visual media, we have adults living now who are ready to rewrite the book, so to speak, on books.

My guess is that we will see hybrids similar to illustrated books, and comics and things in between. But somewhere along the line, the mass market will ferret out humankind's new preference for narrative content. The experimentation taking place now has been going on for some time. I think we're beginning to tire of reality clips and mindless humor-attempting confabulations across different sources.

What I haven't seen yet, except in a recent re-enactment of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" on Twitter, is real time drama (think live broadcast internet plays), perhaps because no one has thought of it before (I doubt that.)

We shall see.

Three Upcoming Memes

First of all, wiki(s). We'll see a slight upsurge in wikis as people figure out that wiki(s) can do something regular file management can't do: tag.

But then they'll flounder, as people realize that wiki(s) aren't any better than classic tree directories.

Replacing these will be shiftable hierarchies, with the most important five or so items/folders/projects taking the main space and shifting as the need arises, eventually going back down into the pile. Software that exploits this will be developed. Apples i-line of products will accelerate this.

Another meme I think you're going to see surface and hang around for a long time I like to call "Questions we forgot to ask." Here's one for the dating-relationship set: What do birth control pills do to libido?

Here's another one for the family health arena: Have studies on vaccinations and the recent increase in autism explored the possibility that fatal childhood diseases are filters for people genetically predisposed to autism? It's a logical question that begs to be asked, even as we see other illnesses on the rise such as allergies, attention deficit syndrome, and any other malady you want to blame vaccinations on, but in reverse.

And to round this set of memes up to three, there is this one: the singularity has already happened. Move over, Ray.

Me Too, Me Neither -I PAD notes

As you know, I tend to be non-conformist. It's not intentional, just more interesting. But, golly, I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of the Ipad. I don't own one, but do have a slate, and I love it.
So when I see a slate that potentially could be as big as the ipod and iphone (don't own either-non-conformist),the insights it spawns in others just amazes me.

One easy way to look at it is this: Apple has simply created another device, like the Wii. Something new and different. Not a replacement for anything, another product.

Like all new products, it has the potential to push out other products. Has Apple pushed out Pc's? Or Blackberries? Hardly.

Now we get to the really interesting part. Apple has, in the past, pushed ON other products. In other words, because of Apple, other gadget makers, including those of Pc's, are going to be making their products better: easier to use, more innovative, cheaper.

How, is wait and see. And that's what's confusing the gadget pundits. You can't predict the market, because the driver, the economic raison d'être is the user, hundreds of millions of them. We're in for a ride on this one .

Scaling is Everything

In as many days, there will be times and times again. This is something I've seen in my visions.

As usual, the world doesn't seem to worried, but I think we all need to be on alert. Just in case.

Next door to this posting is one on the Plank Scale in Wikipedia.

It's becoming obvious to me that scaling is much more fundamental to human perception than we credit to it. For example, the artwork on the left, so similar to "nude descending a staircase" is titled "sad young man on a train".

This forces us to change our perception of the scale of the picture. This is something we do everyday in perceiving things, and a source of many optical illusions and visual errors.

As long as humans perceive, scale will be important, not just visually but also conceptually. A common metaphor is 'stepping back for a larger view' , 'looking at the big picture', but we are talking about a mental ability to take a whole as a concept.

Most of human conflict and disagreement can be tracked to differences in metaphors, and scaling is one of the basic metaphorical tools that we use.

Something similar can be observed here (I apologize for the ad at the beginning of this video.) In this long film of scale change, we can see that our mental concept of a clay bowl breaks down into abstraction at extreme scales. We watch the video hoping to see something 'interesting' or 'understandable', but even visually, the zoomed-in bowl bears only a random resemblance to anything we would normally call 'clay'.

In other words, it's impossible to make a prediction of the final image based upon the initial overview of the bowl. Is it any wonder, then, that our prediction of the structure of electrons and protons and neutrons is also impossible to predict? We could start at a different point on the clay bowl and come upon a different set of zoomed frames. The same might be said in the zooming out process.

Visual characteristics at one scale make no predictions as to visual characteristics at another scale. And this is exactly what happens in physics during the transition from human scale to the quantum scale.

The Antidote

What happens when everything changes?

Don't be pretentious about it, it's happened before. The assemblage point moves and then all the facets in all the mirror-jewels of perception are rearranged.

This happened frequently in younger days, but now when it happens, the shift is quite noticeable.

Long ago it became obvious to me that Castaneda was actually saying something, but using his own brand of magic sorcery to turn it into something creative.

The assemblage point. There's not really another word or term to describe this view from the cocoon that makes up our world. And if you don't buy the concept of the cocoon in the first place, then you really won't get it.

Much more relaxing to say 'no, I'm not biased, I don't really have a point of view, blah blah blah.'
You liar.

Maybe another useful way to look at the bubble of perception is to relate it to a directory tree without an index. Once you get inside any directory, its contents become your world, because this is all you can see. Perception is like that. Borges' labyrinths. A sudoku process.

Anything can be found in Anything

Humans are so good at finding things.
I think we could all be as happy as kings.

Some words of explanation

For example, six years ago, or maybe it was seven, a whole shipload of people died in a series of hospital accidents. It was in the news, some of them had been pulled off of respirators by mistake, others were given blood thinners when they should have had thrombin applied to their wounds, still others were just left in the back corners of emergency rooms. It was quite a sensation.j

But the problem is, none of it made any sense. Not only did all the accidents seem unrelated, but they happened all over the country on the same day, in some cases down to the same fifteen minutes. That was just too much, and like other things that don't make any sense, people forgot about it.

Only I didn't forget about it, because my mother was one of the ones that died. She'd gone in for a stomach ache, and after she almost bled to death, a lung collapsed, and then her emphysema did the rest. Our family went to a lawyer, but we just didn't have the heart to pursue a long expensive legal battle.

I was the only one in my family who knew what had really happened. I still have a picture of her that I took at the funeral home, clearly showing her right hand. It's been itching under my skin for seven years and I just finally had to talk about it. Only I can't talk to a shrink, and if I talk to the wrong people, it would be pretty bad. So I've decided to tell the whole world about it, and probably then I can forget about it. Every last bit of it.

And just who is Norton Mansfield?

Why do you insist that you're a paranoid, the doctor asked me. Just because you don't use quotation marks?

Quotes would mark me as 20th Century, doctor, I said. Isn't that proof enough? But you don't want proof, do you. No matter what I might say, you're going to have me uncommited.

It's just that you couldn't be a paranoid and also have the mindset that you do. I'm convinced that it's all a facade, a misdirection of sorts. What bothers me, is I can't figure out a reason for it.

Have you ever read Heinlein? I asked. He was good at putting a finger on it. Never live in a country that requires ID cards, he wrote. So I do the next best thing, I have so many passwords and personalities that they'll never find me. And even when they do, they'll just think I'm a fictional character, not realizing that the character has to have an author.

That may be, said the doctor, but I still insist that you're faking. Right down to the absence of quotation marks.

It was enough. My time was up anyway, so I shook his hand and found my way out, all the time thinking that he probably wasn't one of them.

I know what you're thinking, that this is another one of those novels about a nutcase who thinks there are all sorts of folks out to get him and then sooner or later it turns out he's right. Well, if I wanted to make a buck or two, that might work. The old formulas are pretty reliable. But what if I don't want to make a buck or two? What if I just want this out there and what if I told you that's the best place to hide, in the bowels of a fictional disaster, a novel without a plot and certainly no characters that you would ever want to identify with?

You see, that doctor, the one I just left, shaking his head, he's right where I need for all of you to be. To him, I'm just barely between existing and not existing. In fact, ten minutes from now, he'll probably forget all about me, because he can't pigeonhole me into either a crazy or a normal.

But there's no time for that now, I have to make a plane.

Update: Still Living below the radar

The Hive Mind hasn't found me yet. I hope they never do. They would kill me if they did.

I'm sending this to you as a story because they DON'T READ. The Hive has no need for stories, they thrive instead on the multiple realities of all their members.

An Isolated like myself wouldn't stand a chance, but so far I don't think they're looking for us.

Virginia, I know this sounds like Paranoia, I KNOW you don't need to hear it, but be very careful what you say and who you say it to, especially in Airports and taxis. I went and saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie and all I could think about it was poor George C. Scott and what he had to put up with to make "They Might Be Giants". THAT is what we're up against. But none of the Hive has ever seen that movie...

Now the Hive is opening up legal marijuana use and you know what THAT means. Those of us who don't need it will begin to stand out, because WE'VE known for years how to induce the mind into going other places than the Hive. I'm thinking maybe I can hide behind this ridiculous paranoic facade for another few months before I'll have to go up against the Cuckoo's Nest machine, you know, the one that Big Chief Bromden told Ken Kesey about and that he wrote about. Last month they gave me an Asian surprise when I found out my new password was identical to the name of their first leader. Was it autosuggestion? Certainly it couldn't have been coincidence.

When someone gets inside your head the first time, it can be terrifying. But now I just change all my background profiles and move on.

So, my dear, consider this the first installment in a novel that probably won't find a publisher until mabye twenty years from now. By the way, there's a storehouse of bad novels in my attic, the hidden one that is behind the little doorway in my old upstairs bedroom. Look behind the water heater. Be careful not to fall through the rafters. In particular, check out 'the Coming Self-Destruction of the United States of America.' It was published under a pseudonym, and the author was recently swept up into the Hive.

Take care, and keep me in plain sight. That's the best way for me to survive.

Norton