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.

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.

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.

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.

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?