Never been one to let the carrier drop

One huge problem with being human is that human memory does not gain by being serialized.

So, as most of you know, I’m against spanking children because I’m against A) violence B) pain C) making someone else suffer. However, I had a interesting and disturbing thought this morning. Children need to learn that having violence directed towards them feels awful, so that they’ll understand not to direct violence towards other people. I was worrying, slightly, that only children who have never been spanked (or children without violent siblings) might never develop the degree of empathy to understand what it’s like to be the recipient of violence. This probably isn’t valid – I am curious how many mass shooters weren’t exposed to any violence, and how many were exposed to far too much. I don’t know of any way to get data on this, but it would be interesting to know whether mass shooters tend to come from abusive families, or families that never exposed them to the idea of violence.

One thing I do note is that the world in general seems to do a good job of trying to ratchet up fear and anger. A lot of our current political system seems to be designed to break people into two equal groups and make those groups angry at each other. Long term, it doesn’t seem possible for this to work.

Of course, I do feel a bit like a one-eyed man in the world of the blind. That no one else is even discussing value, only money, for example – that our government doesn’t discuss value on the floor of the senate and house, only money – that they make decisions that destroy value in order to make money, repeatedly, and no one calls them on it. That no one discusses the difference between their conscious experience and what’s actually happening.

One thing I do find encouraging is that I do see a lot of signs that a lot of people, or at least a lot of my friends, recognize that the world’s religions are fundamentally flawed. And just today, I read a article about how India is granting personhood to dolphins. I suspect personhood should be granted to any creature that we can get to prove to us that it is aware of itself. I don’t know exactly how to do this – people claim dogs fail the mirror test, although vision is not their primary sense and they do seem to pass a scent version of the mirror test. I’m pretty clear that dogs are people, and cats, and pigs. I’m not sure about sheep and cows. I know chickens are not people, and things with distributed nervous systems like crabs and lobsters.

Heinlien did a great discussion of personhood in the start of Moon Is A Harsh Mistress when he was talking about Mike the computer who was clearly a person, even though he wasn’t a human. In Heinlien’s theory, it takes a certain number of large associational neural networks, be they artificial or natural. I tend to think he had the right idea, although it’s a very interesting and odd thought that being a person is a emergent property. What’s really odd is that the human mind seems to have sufficient capacity to be several people (something I am more aware of than most people).

So, I have three major financial goals at the moment. I achieved one of them this year (unless my situation changes drastically, I will be able to pay my taxes in full in April, having already paid half of them via estimated payments) and I promised myself that if I did that I would buy a piece of particularly expensive software I particularly covet (Vienna Strings, which is like Ivory for stringed instruments). I am having second thoughts – partially because of guilt over the fact that not all my friends are doing well, although I am helping out several of them, there’s still more who are struggling – and partially because there is repeatedly a little voice that tells me I should really get over my dream of going pro with my music, since I’ve still got so far to go to be there. I haven’t really decided what to do about it..

So, as my two readers know, I am a proponent of the idea of intelligent design, with the designers being *us* – it seems clear to me that since we have the ability to program, including at assembly language levels, that coding up DNA is not beyond us. People tend to counterargue that we can’t edit our own DNA, that our minds have no ability to change our DNA. Well, here’s another study discussing the idea that we can in fact do so..

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/21/study-of-holocaust-survivors-finds-trauma-passed-on-to-childrens-genes

So, I’m of two minds about this.

On one paw, people shouldn’t really do this to each other (reveal information so private). I’m not really happy with the hackers who did this, and I feel like they’re just making the situation worse.

On the other paw, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all didn’t *have* to keep secrets from each other? If we could in fact accept each other the way we are? I mean, I know from personal experience that we can’t.. but wouldn’t learning how to be better than feeling like we have to sneak around behind each other’s backs and use web sites like this one?

I have never used Ashley Madison.. I have a policy against pay dating sites in general and sites that look like they have the potential to add to the collective unhappiness of the world in specific.

I am still against possessive and coercive relationships, and I still am in favor of polysexuality and potentially polyfidelity.

Somehow I thought I’d have more to say about this

Sandra And Woo: Grown Up

I just finished bingereading Sandra and Woo.. it was over way too soon..

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CloudCuckooLander

I had a really amusing one tonight.

What would happen, resource wise, if we all just stopped keeping track entirely? Our money has “In God We Trust” printed on it but if we really did, we wouldn’t need money.. we’d all just do our bits, expecting the system as a whole to work because we were doing our part of it. We’ve assumed that the result if we did this (didn’t keep track) would be a economic meltdown but that may be based on the theory that there’s one objective reality.. if there’s a whole entwined set of them, maybe our failure to keep track wouldn’t break anything at all. (I can just see me trying to sell this experiment to Congress now. “Hey guys! I’d like to test the fabric of reality by turning off money…”)

So, over the last week I’ve been using my neuro-hacking abilities along with whatever assistance I may be getting from whatever spiritual entities you might or might not want to believe in to work on dreams. I’ve had numerous extremely vivid nightmares and.. for the first time.. last night what was almost certainly a initiating sequence for a lucid dream with dream control. It didn’t, you know, totally *work* – but I have to say I’m impressed with the lack of subtlety. It was not one of those situations where you wonder if you’re dreaming. There was music, and a sequence that reminded me of the C-64 game Master of the lamps that I *think* was supposed to assemble into a flying scene for transportation from where I was to where I wanted to be. This was initiation for video-game-era quality dreaming.. the visual quality was reality grade, as was the sound quality.

So, it didn’t work.. I very much tried to do something inside it and very much failed.. but it felt like it *almost* worked.. like you could feel stray signals leaking away into bits of neural net that were miswired, but if I were trying to, say, fix a analog audio device and I got results this good, I’d know I was almost done. I am very hopeful, since among other things in order to not be having one of my standard I-can’t-breathe nightmares I have to assume the neurological wiring for keeping me breathing while I’m sleeping is almost fixed! Another hint for this is that I several times in the last week have awoken *feeling rested*! Since in previous years the usual experience was to wake feeling more tired than when I went to bed, this is significantly awesome.

I don’t get the feeling that my entire mind is repaired just yet.. I still very much feel the divisions during the day, especially when I toggle between modes to program vs to do social interaction.. but at least *some* of the wiring required to have the kind of dreams you’d want to have is apparently active.

There’s this odd thing I’ve experienced, way back in my youth, where I would occasionally lie about progress in personal development and it would become the truth. Now, these days, I try to avoid lying at all, but I’m kind of curious about whether I should be trying to do this.. it’s not so much lying, as it is in the words of 12-step “Acting as if”. Kind of a hopeful jump-start. I do think that repeatedly saying “I can’t” is damaging.. as Wang Chung says, the words we use are strong, they make reality.. and I know I don’t want to be believing I can’t.

So, I think part of what I’m forever confused about, is how anyone could think that I would enjoy sexual assault, that I could ever get what I want and need from it? It just sounds inherently.. well, kind of awful.. to me. Like, awful for both participants, not just for one of them. I may have mental issues but I don’t think I can ever see them pushing me that far into the dark.

So, yes, those of you who are afraid of me, I think you have in fact failed the minimum safety check for mental health. I think you’re a danger to yourself. You’re imagining someone as willing to hurt you in a way that said person is not, and I kind of think that imagination hurts you. And, I mean this really and sincerely, good luck with that. The imaginary monsters under our beds are in a lot of ways the most powerful monsters there are.

I don’t think there’s *anyone* inside me who’s a potential rapist. It is weird to even try to figure out, though, what the aspects of personalities you can’t get access to might be.. I think mostly the people inside me who aren’t me are mostly very afraid.. I have some really odd things going on inside my head.

I have a deep seated fear of being on the recieiving end of anal sex, which might say that my shattering is the result of sexual abuse, but that seems unlikely to me.. it seems more likely that it’s just the result of how all the various things overlay. I am really terrified of breaking glass. For some strange reason I feel like I could tell almost any secret to this one person.. and I’m really, really wrong because she doesn’t even want me to write her at all. However, at this point I’m inclined to just post my secrets to the world.. One Republic seems to have the right idea for me..