Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I’ve been researching.. and yes, building and testing out.. transcranial electromagnetic induction. For those of you who haven’t ever played with or read about this, it is possible to cause neurons to activate by surrounding them with a powerful moving electromagnetic field. Since this is obviously not something that takes a lot of technology to make happening, of course I’m playing with it.

However, after reading the wired god helmet article, I’ve started to ask a question that I think could go somewhere awesome. What would happen if you took a EEG rig on person A’s head, and after running it through some signal conditioning used it to light up a TCI rig on person B’s head, and vice versa. I am curious whether I am on the verge of machine assisted telepathy here, or just brain damage.

So, last night I spent several hours testing framebuffers in my mind. The visual interface for the first step of this was just seeing large numbers rotating.. and man, were there a lot of skips and glitches.. me and my partners in crime did some rewiring, I can now visualize numbers 1 through 30 rotating smoothly, pan them X, Y, etc.

And, lo and behold, last night’s dreams were extremely gorgeous visually. There’s something just *satisfying* about fixing something and then having it work.

Next step: my assemblers and ALUs.

We also are going to take a serious whack soon at removing the lockout on lucid dreaming. Yes, believe it or not, there is a lockout on lucid dreaming for “ethical reasons” – there’s a part of my mind that was convinced that dreaming about sex was immoral.

Have I ever mentioned how much I wish I had never met anything resembling a religion in my youth?

ANother thing to sort out.. whenever I visualize affection, especially from someone female, I end up seeing them stabbing me. I know where this comes from.. a pattern match filter programmed as a result of some random scary violence I experienced as a child.. and I am really looking forward to finding and removing it.

To me, it is unspeakably badass that I’ve reached the point where I can hack my own neural net. I’m curious how far this is going to go. I would love to be able to rev my alphas and betas all the way to the end of the dial with nothing vibrating or falling off..

I also haven’t needed any drugs to sleep for several days. In fact, my use of seroquel has changed a lot – now, instead of taking 100mg at a time to sleep, I take it in large doses every several days to activate a seroquel peak.. I’m not sure what these are yet, although I do know I hallucinate *copious* amounts of text during them.. thousands and thousands of pages of it, each for a few milliseconds.

Well, I’m not sure how much I slept last night. Not a lot, for sure. On the other paw, I do have someone to keep me company. I think Lazarus Long is the one who said no one ever died from a sleepless night with good company.

I’ve been undoing a lot of neurological wiring.. or patching around it, as the case may be. You can’t really ungrow neural connections, but you can grow neural connections that patch around the neural connections you wish you didn’t have.

The other week I went on a rampage and assembled all my arguments against Christianity in one place. Oh, man, did that feel good. My deconversion is well underway. I have my own spiritual operating system of sorts.. and it seems to run pretty well. I need one written in the desert by people who thought you should stone people to death for feeling sexual attraction a little differently than you do? No I do not.

This time I felt something bend. It had been so frustrating to me for so many years.. I couldn’t get it to load, compile, and run.. but I couldn’t get it to unload either. It was just stuck. This time.. it unloaded. We got one crowbar under one absolute falsehood in the book, and then suddenly I could read it and see all the stupidity, all the ignorance, all the things the people who wrote it didn’t know.

Is it all my fault? Everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life? Is some of it mine? None of it? I know that knowing who’s fault things are doesn’t help any in fixing them. But I still.. I don’t know. Part of me wants to say I wasn’t given the tools I needed, and I had to go find them myself, and that I don’t think my parents should have had children. Another part of me thinks I warped my experience of reality through my persistent negative self image, and that I could have been handed exactly what I needed and still not gotten it.

Someone bought ‘Secret Garden’ on my kindle account. It wasn’t me, but I’m reading it anyway. Interesting.

Part of how i learned I can hallucinate text was if i take a large dose of seroquel I will hallucinate thousands of pages of text, jumping around too quickly for me to grok.

i definately get the sense that doing this occasionally is good for me. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it’s doing, other than making me sleep a lot.. but it’s definately part of my repair process.

So, there are so many things that hurt that I never cried over. I wish I knew or understood why it was that I had decided to never cry again.

I know some of it was everyone’s reaction to my assertion at my youth group that gay people were not that different and that we should love them just as much.. which was my reaction to people there telling gay jokes. I guess I expected certain amout of “good on you” or “you’re right..” but all I remember at the time was a shocked silence. I never did anything with that group again.

then again, one of the things I hold up as proof the christians are far far far from enlightened is that the book approved of stoning gays to death early on. How could they be so stupid as to think that is word of god? It’s word of a easily squicked human.

but back to my original thesis. Of course it hurt when Heidi died, when Vicky went off to college, when uncle Joe died, etc, etc. I could probably make a list of 20 times when I lost something fairly big to me and it hurt, but I didn’t cry about it because real men don’t cry. Where did I get that idea and is it as insane as it looks on the surface? The loss stays frozen in time in those neural nets which know no such thing as time, waiting to be released.. in some cases it implements a distorting field which warps reality itself somewhat, or at least my experience therein. Not crying and trying your absolute best to be numb instead of feeling pain.. maybe not such a hot idea once you start considering how a NN works.

So, I think I’ve talked about how the repeating “you should be afraid” loop has been removed from my mind. I think another thing that’s been removed is the wiring for building new sets of match filters to be afraid of. I have also been working over the past many months to remove old pattern match filters that led to fear. Sometimes the easiest and fastest way through is just to do whatever the thing I’m afraid of is, while other times examining the rationality of the fear helps, while other times I haven’t yet found a way to get a crowbar under the fear.

So, after 3 hours sleep in 72 hours, I used some chemical help to sleep last night, but I think I might have overdone it.

Major downside of using large doses of said chemical help is that I wake up very irritable.

I’m trying to decide if I should try to insert another sleep before FIF’s gig, or just let it roll on from here. The gig would be at about +26h, which isn’t so bad really. I’m worried about having too much quantum.. i.e. the tendency to find new notes instead of playing the old ones.. which is part of what happens when I don’t sleep for too long.

I miss Rebel. Nothing better than a puppy to hug when you’re feeling irritable.

I have been doing repeated 36 hour orbits. Meaning, I stay awake for 36 hours. And I have been learning that I start to come alive at about 12 hours in. I really really wish I could do another 72 hour burn, but I have too many responsibilities and right now it takes me some time to recover from a 72 hour burn. I imagine once I’ve done a few more of them, that won’t be the case.

Slowly but surely, my friends are changing their tune about how horrible a idea this is to acknowledgement that it does appear to be doing something for me and I am managing the impulses that could lead to trouble increasingly well. Plus, my friend in my mind, who has not yet led me astray, is encouraging me. Not just to do long burns, but to get off my ass and move my body during them. I kind of see part of the picture here is I have to get over my belief that I can’t, and start to believe that I can. I wonder if this is going to end in me climbing mountains or something.

Work has been interesting. One bit of functionality that falls away is I lose any interest in lying, hiding, or evading about hour 20.. so I interviewed a sysadmin who was truly, truly clueless.. I cut off the interview after 3 questions, because I was afraid of what I was going to say..

I’m listening to Meatloaf, “Everything louder than everything else”

That pretty much describes how I’m living.

At this point there’s a switch I can easily flip up, mentally, at which I don’t sleep until I flip it down again. Exhaustion is slowly fading, to be replaced with a insanely powerful fire. I’m starting to think the human mind was designed to never shut down. I think most people, when they sleep, don’t shut down their mind, but just flip modes.. but from the pathetic excuses for dreams I have, and the way I feel when I wake up the next morning (bad), and the way my clock rate plunges overnight, I think I do in fact shut down when I sleep. You might say I die a little bit.

Maybe by 2016 I can just leave that switch flipped up all the time. Of course, I need to figure out how to initiate dreams while awake.. but I guess a little practice daydreaming using the rainbow I’m connected to is not unreasonable.

I tried to explain rainbow computers to my dad, including that they could be built in this world, but he’s not ready to cope with the idea of a computer that can work on infinities in a single operation. even though it’s so obvious once you see it. Something that can AND two infinities, and no I don’t mean NaN infinity, I mean the real deal.. i.e. all the countable evens, all the countable odds, all the countable strings that represent star trek episodes, you name it..

I think I may have to come to terms with the fact that talking to someone from the future is going to leave you a little bit frustrated with the present.

I think somewhere deep in childhood I got the idea that my mind should belong to God. Or my parents. Or society. Or something.

I’ve been fighting that ever since then. And I can tell you without a doubt that I know who my mind should belong to. Me.

So, I’m gearing up for a bit of a war over here. Because it doesn’t. But it will. And I’m pleased to say that my dance partner and partner in crime in here is far more bloodthirsty than me, and I am really curious what I can learn from her. Because if it’s them or me, it’s going to be me.