On the development of an alternate personality

On the development of an alternate personality.

I leave this scrap to the winds, hoping that professionals will learn from my own experience.

I'm in the process of developing an alternate personality. It's not something that I have total control over, and in fact am trying to resist its attempts to surface.

However, its logic is compelling, attempting to justify itself in order that I might bodily and morally have some sort of escape clause built into consequences of any of my actions. The escape clause is 'mental illness'.

So, you can see it's contrived , yet it actually isn't because, as you see, I'm trying to resist it. I would compare this to the compulsion to shoot yourself in the foot to avoid military enlistment.

It's not something I really want to do, but here it comes again, saying how easy it would be to slip into dissociation in a serious way, thereby eliminating all responsibilities of life.

Now, I want to say that some days can be really bad, and some situations we find ourselves in can be trying, or bleak, or relentless. So this little voice, or not even a voice, but a word game being typed, shows up and starts typing suggestions to you. And you actually find yourself wanting to type it a reply.

Is this from loneliness? Oh, the phantom typist can come up with all sorts of reasons why it is present.

Anyway, professional head doctors, this is how it develops.

Do you know what a defense against it is? To assert that reality is NOT fluid, and other materialistic types of statements. But this is just a shadow defense, because to say that assertions can affect our minds is to say that in some fashion, reality IS fluid, and if it is, then there you are.

And all of this without drugs!

The Lost World - A Careful Attention

The president was on TV today. I didn't watch. It's all so boring nowadays. The real machine is in California, and it won't be stopped.

In a few years, the 1900's and the days before it will be lost to us. We are losing the ability to read and reason and especially to step outside of our own skin and imagine what is like to be in someone else's .

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. It's being replaced by something else, is all. The hive mind.

It won't be long before we are all connected by much more than just wireless communications. The day is upon us when our thoughts will be even more influenced than now by our peers.

Actually, this has happened before in civilization. We usually associate it with times of oppression, but really, the oppression is somewhat voluntarily accepted. There have been periods when individualism was celebrated, such as the Renaissance, and others when conformity was the only way to survive. But in most instances, those within the situation were unable to conceive of things being any different. Oh, we can judge other eras, but try judging your own. It's very difficult.

However, in the early 21st century A.D. , we have a unique opportunity to see our own world-view changing before our eyes. Technology is about to put us in more than constant touch with each other. Socialization is about to become the defining characteristic of society. (That sounds tautological, doesn't it.)

Many would argue, and many have, that this process has been continuous for decades, and in some sense they are right. But for many years, society has paid lip service to the concept of individual heroes, scientists, innovators, and celebrities. Never mind that many of these are manufactured by a mechanism of capitalism precisely for profit to the corporate world. It seems however, that our cynicism is about to give way to acceptance. Consider the rise of media-mob partnerships in choosing the next american idol, or the public awareness campaigns that have made cigarette smoking, global warming, and now avian flu into major evils in our society.

With the increase in available information (thanks to technology), the average human being is becoming gradually incapable of coping with life as an individual. George Orwell's groupthink is becoming a necessity for survival.

It is just a short step from this to the ridicule and eventual vilification of those who would dare go against the consensus. (Yes, Ayn Rand wrote about this 50 years ago. But her evaluation was itself appropriated and altered by the same capitalistic forces that she praised. Today her philosophy is equated with the mindless group materialism championed by the latest dysfunctional celebrity.)

Of course, the internet is both a cause and possible solution to this problem. The virtual frontier will become the shelter of the independent thinker, their bastion against the tide of group bohemianism that purports to know everything that is good for us. ( I believe this week it is hairball dissolvers).

For now the individual thinker is tolerated, though ridiculed. Eventually he or politically correct she will be looked upon with suspicion, and then discarded. The sad thing is that our own children will never miss us.

The world wants to do these things.

If you want to get published, just write a book on the following.

How to lose weight.
How to stop procrastinating
How to fall in love
How to write a book
How to be happy
How to get a tattoo
How to go on a road trip with no predetermined destination
How to drink more water
How to get married
How to travel the world
How to see the northern lights
How kiss in the rain
How to take more pictures
How learn spanish
How to save money

Sudoku Perception

There is an old saying, so old, that no one remembers it.

Which is my point: All of this information is here on the web right now. Most of it is unknown, unseen, the invisible web, but

that's just a metaphor for what is really invisible, which is the great mass of sensory information that we simply
miss. Lately I've been rather obsessed with this 'dark
information', because it is becoming more apparent to
me that it is key in understanding so much of what drives
and frustrates us.

This same paucity of true information exists in almost everything we're confronted with, simply because there is too much out there for analysis.

What this results in is literally a constructed reality. Witness the fossil record, a paltry handful of rocks that have been through a very selective process that can only hope to support the weight of theory that is in existence now.

In fact, you could characterize this phenomenon as a sociological process, similar to what Thomas Kuhn wrote about, in which a theory becomes more powerful than the data that support it.

True Power and Scientific Method Part 1.

Having just read the Wikipedia post on 'power', I thought I might explain something that most people miss.

Power is not limited to our influence on others, or even to others and our environment. Rather, power also encompasses our internal thoughts and the other worlds we might imagine we inhabit. Let me explain.

If one accepts the premise that the input from one's personal human perception is 'assembled' or 'constructed' into a view of reality, then it soon becomes apparent that we have more power over reality than it might first seem.

But because this premise is not universally accepted, and even may seem to have been disproven by the scientific method, we should first start there.

We can begin with the fact that our sense perceptions change as we age. A 60 year old will often be unable to hear frequencies that a younger person might have no trouble with. You might say that the 60 year old is handicapped, but what is really happening is simply that the 60 year old has a different set of perceptions to work with. Because a younger person may not be able to perceive things the older one might catch, such as mannerisms, tone of voice, and so on.

To take this further, another 60 year old may not be fluent in the same language, which means their perception will be quite different than another person of the same age.

It is easy to pass this distinction off as rare and unusual. My thesis is that it is much more pervasive than the average person realizes. Indeed, it can be the source of complete miscommunication, strife, wars, and other conflict. I'm not alone in this view. You can find information specialists that have a much better handle on this concept than me. What I want to point out is simply that it exists.

Since we obviously construct our world based on our abilities, emotions, and past experience, it may follow that the whole construction is too complex to dwell on. Perhaps we should just take our construction at face value.

Of course, this is what the vast majority of us do. It could even be said that all of us do this at least part of the time. Indeed, the scientific method is aimed not at confirming our world view, but at discovering inconsistencies in it and from these inconsistencies, expanding human knowledge.

To this end, we are constantly conceptualizing. We are taking our perceptions, rearranging them, constructing various categories and fashioning something we call 'reality' based upon a personal system that most likely follows a pattern of doing what worked before.

Now, there have been various methods of altering this construction that have been 'discovered' throughout history. The most prevalent today is, again, the scientific method. And that is well and good. The scientific method might be categorized as a method for developing reliable and repeatable constructions that can be shared among more than one person. It is this sharing that gives the method its power.

Like any method, however, it carries limitations. More on these later.

Ok, that was strange...

Just now, I did the last post twice, because the first time, when I posted it, it went to someone elses blog.

So I had to rewrite it, and left part of it for this post, since it was on a different subject, sort of.

The topic before was spending coherent time wisely, as opposed to the post into another person's blog, which I doubt has happened to many other people. I would regard that as a state of incoherent time, especially since I thought I was in this blog. What I finished the first version of that post up with was my comments on blogs. Since no one reads them, aren't they just an exercise in solipsism? (See my book.)

The upshot of it is that the blog becomes more of a seashell journal. It is out there for someone to pick up, but the likelihood is small. What turned me to this thought was my perusal of the hype behind The Secret', a movie and book that basically repeat Napoleon Hill's classic series starting with 'Think and Grow Rich'. What they have that Napoleon didn't have is a hype machine backing them up.

Because it's all popular for fifteen minutes or so, that will be the subject of another entry later. For now, the important thing is to realize that the hype takes on a life of its own. Or is the important part really that the hype is different from the actual concept. Or is the important thing that the hype is not the important thing, in fact, that hype is overused in this paragraph.

These and other rhetorical questions will be answered later, or maybe never.

What else is there to read?

As my time in this world (the one other people can understand) grows short, I'm trying to spend moments reading better things than the daily news. As a result, I've taken to finding authors on the Nobel Prize winning list, because, why should I waste my time on drivel. George Bernard Shaw famously said "90% of everything is trash".

So lately it's The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, the book mentioned below, and now a book of short stories by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.

I've said this better before, so I won't say it again:

The prozac isn't working anymore

Start here.

Luigi Pirandello

One, No one, and a Hundred Thousand.

This is a book by Luigi Pirandello. He won the nobel prize for literature. It is a book about how to go insane. Excellent, though obviously fiction. He left some things out, and put in some things that are made up. Still, it gives clues that are fairly accurate. One: start with your nose.

Borges liked him. Castaneda borrowed from him.

Book Review: Pounce by Ken Stern

Investment Strategy books have to remake themselves every few years, so there is no lack of publications for you to spend your investment profits on.

Ken Stern has written other books, but this one is interesting because it attempts to sell itself to today's chaotic market. The best you can say about Pounce is that it is timely. Just how do you make money in the stock market, now that it has lost half of its value?

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Mr. Stern promises a rational approach, and spends time, a'la Black Swan Theory, explaining that we don't know what we think we know, and we invest our money stupidly.

However, his rational approach is so complex that only the most diligent readers will make it to the end of the book, where he finally outlines how to put his theories/tactics/strategies into action.

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I picked up the book because I think its important to read what investors are reading. However, I don't think this book will make much of an impact (that is, adding to the already overabundance of 'proven' investment strategies) because of its convoluted exposition. Mr. Sterns utilizes a three pronged approach to investing, using market sentiment, economic and market trending, and valuation, combined with several named strategies designed for different situations and utilizing stock screening software. How's that for a straightforward approach? In various places he refers to his strategies as 'cocktails'. So much for objectivity.

However, that being said about the presentation, Mr. Stern is obviously knowlegeable about the market and forces that move it. From that standpoint, one can obtain insight. However, you will have to work hard to glean it from the book.

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Given that most of us have had a rough experience with our actual investments to date, regardless of strategy, who would have the resolve to put their faith in Mr. Stern's cocktails to insure the future of their retirement?

Mary Chapin Carpenter: Goodnight America

I usually find these things long after the fact. Mary Chapin Carpenter released Goodnight America on her CD 'Between Here and Gone' in 2004. It just made it to our main library this week. If you haven't heard it, check it out on Amazon, or get it on itunes.

Mary's voice is wonderful and she's not afraid to play a slow song slow all the way through. A critique, which I'm sure has been noted before: too many of the songs on this CD are in the same key.

But this isn't the CD. This is one song. You don't hear many like this, a song that pulls you out onto the road and into the world. Glen Campbell used to do it with Jim Webb's songs. Robert Pirsig did it with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And a few others. It's all too rare today, but maybe that's the way it should be. Shifts of the assemblage point can be precious, and should be guarded.

Illusion

The illusion of order basically comes from our orientation in time. To us, one thing follows another, and this makes linearity possible.

However, a few simple observations show this to be an illusion.

Finally, the idea of simultaneity was shown by Einstein to be a matter of reference systems. Thus we have science itself, a process of creating order, proving by its own rules that linear order is mostly a matter of choice or circumstance. This is why the camera was invented in the Nineteenth Century, so that the existence of the Camera Obscura could be invented by historians in the twentieth century to give a plausible linear explanation for the uncanny photographic art of Johannes Vermeer in the Seventeenth Century.

Fourth, as humans, we are continually reinventing our past.

First of all, and foremost, our body and brain receive multiple stimuli that are impossible to order in any kind of manner using a single rational system. This necessitates the function of the brain and memory in the creation of order.

An example that comes to mind is the fractal organization of the universe, something that seems obvious to us now only since Benoit Mandelbrot invented the concept sometime in the past. Before him, the chief system of order in use was the Cartesian/Newtonian linear order.

Even our common digital clock is a modern change from the circular order of time implied by the traditional western european clock face, with its divisions into twelve and sixty parts.

At first, it might seem that our Jungian archetype of order, our Castanedan cocoon is so overbearing and everpresent, that we might as well live within it. However, as the world is shrunken in size by technology, we would do well to note the relativism present before it is subsumed into a true global viewpoint.

Third, the observation that one third of our day is given up to a state of alternate consciousness would lead one to believe that something is going on when we sleep that transcends our need for physical rest. It is becoming apparent to psychologists that sleep is a time of orientation, or reorientation, for the body and brain.

This leads us to our second point, that other cultures process information differently from our own. Probably the greatest contribution that Castaneda gave us (he probably lifted it from someone else) is that when things don't fit into our system of order, they are left out and sent into the never never land of forgotten things.

Wolf Kahn Flattery

This is a painting by Artist Ken Elliot. Surprise! He studied under Wolf Kahn.

Rats in the Gutter

There is a running commentary in my head that seems to say "Someday, all the things you have experienced in your life will come together and have meaning, like a jacuzzi puzzle twisted around until it is solved without losing any steam, in a denial of entropy."

Or something like that. Salvador Dali tried to express this in his painting of the Railroad Station at Perpignan. Norton Mansefield expressed it with the non-publication of Putrid Pink. Marcel Duchamp gave up art, probably the most non-trivial yet weakest expression of anything.

The undercurrents about to surface this century are: symmetry, robots, scale, and falsifiability. You heard it here first, in the no-space of solipsistic internet infinity.

Sooner or later, I'll write a verse or two about this.

Reinventing Gravity

Physicist John Moffatt has a new book out called 'Reinventing Gravity. ' In it, he offers his take on the phenomena of dark matter and dark gravity. According to his theory, working with a variable quantity for the gravitational constant, both phenomena, which have not been observed, are no longer necessary.

Since I'm not a mathematician or physicist, what I found most interesting about the book was Moffat's approach to current assumptions in mainstream science, particularly regarding verifiability and paradigm shifts. His book fairly easy to read, and I haven't gotten to the chapters where he finally spells out his theory, but it appears that he is willing to let observed data have the last say. It will be interesting to see how it all falls out.

Perhaps my favorite part of the book so far is his exposition of the astronomical fascination with the planet Vulcan, a world that was theorized initially, with some authority and even logic, to explain the pertubrations in Mercury's orbit. Moffat likens Vulcan to current theoretization of dark matter.

It is interesting to see scientists grapple with some very fundamental problems in science theory these days. Moffat and Wilczek seem very willing to call things as they see them and not pull any punches.

My own feeling is that the current reliance on symmetry as a guide through today's research will turn out to be overused. It looks as if mathematics itself is in for an overhaul, because our current notation doesn't deal with the dimension of time very well. In simple equations, time is equivocated upon, and Moffat indirectly acknowledges this by refusing to take commutativity as an absolute property of some processes. Another absolute that hasn't been dealt with very well (in my opinion) is pi. This constant is an observed local phenomenon of our particular corner of the universe, and implies a flatness that could easily be violated elsewhere.

Finally, I think the concept of dimension needs to be taken even further than Mandelbrot has carried it, which physicists have implicitly done, but which hasn't made it into our explicit apprehension of the world. Scientists are still relying on Euclidean Geometry of three dimensions for interpretations and explanations of their math, when it is obvious that dimension is the wrong word for what they are calculating.

Dimension is too strongly associated with what we measure as length depth and width, which are entirely Euclidean and simply a construct that ignores other measurable continua in the Universe, such as heat, mass, and others which I might go into at a later date. If we replace the word 'dimension' with 'translation' or some other noun, then an order greater than three or four ('dimensions') becomes intuitively much less confusing.