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.