Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I’ve talked about this a bunch of times, but I wanted to dedicate a post to it because (like my discussions of money vs. value) I repeatedly get the feeling that I’m talking about this, but only a few people are understanding what I’m saying. I find that frustrating, because the ideas involved in this are just not that complicated and I’m pretty sure that *our children* understand them – until that functionality is beaten out of them in the process of making them “productive citizens”

Now, a lot of this comes down to what you believe. I believe that western science is measuring something meaningful when they measure what happens inside the human mind. What this tells us is that our mind – the part of us that is, as best we know, having the conscious experience, being the observer, actually on the ride so to speak – is a collection of 100 billion individual nerve cells, or neurons. These cells are each fairly advanced little puppies – they have excite and inhibit inputs, they are electrochemical in nature and are affected by a whole host of neurotransmitters (30?).

One of the things I’ve done to try to demonstrate the amount of computing power involved is just compare neurons to transistors. Your very-high-end computer might have 5 or 6 billion transistors. And, as I’ve talked about, a transistor is a lot less powerful than a neuron – especially in the ways we use them in modern computers, where they always operate in saturated mode and are simple switches. We also tend to be rather wasteful with our silicon in computers, since we use programs to design computer chips that are more oriented in getting results than in using as few transistors as possible.

There are other points I might make too – like, in a CPU in a modern computer, only the transistors involved in, for example, the currently executing instruction are actually part of the circuit being used right now. Our brains are massively parallel, and everything is turned on at least a little.

What does it all add up to? Well, whatever else you would or wouldn’t find, you would find that our minds are a lot more computer than the machine you’re reading this on. They’re a lot of other things too – they are clearly NOT turing machines although they emulate them just fine. However, the point that I keep trying to make is that the computer you’re sitting in front of has no problem generating a credible 3D reality with credible, functional physical laws.. amongst many other things. And it represents a lot less computing power than you do.

So, as a result, I would argue that there’s a lot of things that are unknowable.. and whether or not your conscious experience has much to do with the inputs you’re wired to, whether there actually is a “real world” (also a point that the quantum people debate endlessly), and the like fall under the category of unknowables.

Now, I can’t rewire my conscious experience in any meaningful way that I’ve yet discovered. It occasionally rewires *itself* and I experience brief periods of realities other than the one I have come to think of as the default. I would *like* it if it did more of this, as I definitely enjoy a sense of magic in my life. I also have come to suspect (as in fact I was told a few years ago – but I’ve come to accept the potential truth therein) that the difference between the person in utopia and the person in hell is what software they’re running.

My assumption is that people who really solidly adhere to one religion or other either do so *because* they get this affect out of it (believing in their religion places them in a utopia), or because they’re one of those people who need very strong black-and-white rules to not feel like they’re adrift in what is, in essence, a sea of unknowability.

One problem that I see is that people like me – empathic, aggressively nonviolent, etc – are inherently going to avoid power. I don’t want power over other people, because I don’t want to hurt other people and I’m afraid that I might inadvertently do so especially given how much trouble I have understanding people who are driven by other forces. Who is going to seek power? People who are running very different software from me. In many cases, people who don’t care how much they hurt the people they have power over, or possibly even people who enjoy hurting other people. This is kind of scary but does explain the bizarre brokenness that is Earth.

So, I can’t get in the mind of someone who would enjoy violent acts, in general. I admit I haven’t really tried. I’ve only shot a gun a few times in my life, I’ve avoided first person shooters after they got to a certain level of realism where they were pressing on my empathy, and I don’t try and feed the occasional violent thought that I do have.

But I also get that we are *amazingly* flexible programmable systems. With just a few changes way back there in childhood, I’d likely be sitting with my finger on the button typing the launch codes. If we have any inherent morality or empathy, I don’t see signs of it in the disturbing behaviors of, for example, the ruling class of America – to whom, I am slowly coming to accept, I am a interchangable component to be strip-mined of any useful ideas, turned into a gearwheel and fit into the consumer-producer cycle, and then tossed aside. I’m not what they’re looking for – partially because I don’t think people in general should be having children, partially because I want to disband the economic system as it currently stands in favor of something that sucks less

Am I what *anyone’s* looking for? Well, increasingly I’m what *I’m* looking for. Sadly, the more this is true, the less I’m what anyone else is looking for. However, at least I did get some music recorded last night. I have this theory that the more of these throwaway tracks I write, the better I’m going to be when I sit down to do album work. It’s a strange way to work.. trying to write something every night, with less concern about quality than just about the experience of writing..

So, as so often happens after I’ve had it shut down for a while, I decided to fire up the studio and of course various breakers need reset, equipment doesn’t want to talk to other equipment, etc.. so I do a test track to make sure everything is working. This one is extra 80s movie soundtrack so I thought I’d share it with you all

http://sheer.us/stuff/2015/80sMovieSoundtrack.mp3

So, in Virginia they put me on a gen one psych med that I have to say I’ve been really enjoying. I don’t usually think of psych meds as something one enjoys.. the word ‘endures’ is usually more applicable.. but this one from time to time will make me feel like colors are brighter and sounds are clearer. When they first gave it to me it felt like I was flat out tripping. I have to wonder if it has anything to do with the recent moment of almost-dream-clarity.

I’ve tried with and without and at the moment I definitely prefer with on this one.

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…”)

It was asked, what good things happened for people because of my unscheduled and unplanned foray east.

Well, let’s start with the hitchhikers. One of them said he’d spent the last night under a bridge. I was able to deliver him *to his home*. He was only 89 miles away, but you know, when you’re carrying a duffel, 89 miles is a stupidly long way to go. I think it did a lot for his state of mind that I was also able to deliver him his favorite artist (Conway Twitty) on request, courtesy of the laptop in the back of the van.

The second one I wasn’t able to get to where he was going as it was significantly off my route. But I did get him 300 miles down the road, and we had a good talk. He was rainbow folk, and a former Navy cook.

Let’s also mention the guy in the SUV stuck on I-95 because he was out of gas. He had his whole family in the car. I took him to a gas station where he filled up, and then back to his car. We shared no common language.. well, I know the word ‘Amigo’, which I said when he got in the car, and he smiled and then we used hand signals to agree on finding a gas station, etc. Perhaps the word for friend is really the only word you need in any language?

We can also mention Vinnie, as I think spending some time with me venting about her recent situation was good for her. At least, I hope it was.

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.

I feel the need to say, if you are *seriously* thinking I would sexually assault you, have you ever thought of how much I would pay to *not have* the memory of having done so? Like, if someone were to ask me, “I’ll give you $1 million dollars but you have to have the memory of forcing $person to have sex in a way that hurt her.”.. Okay. Keep inserting larger values for the million. Keep inserting. You’re not going to find a number at which I’d take the deal.

See, to me, *that* is what love is like. You want the person you love to *not be hurt*. This would seem to be kind of basic, love 101, not advanced love, not anything that takes ideas more advanced than you’d expect to find in the mind of the average 10 year old. If the person *must* be hurt, you would want it to *not be your agency* that hurt them, or even your body. I’ve already got the somewhat awful situation of it’s the *idea* of me that’s hurting $person a little bit, because $person thinks I would do something I wouldn’t do. (Or maybe she doesn’t. I could write a whole novel on the subject of that.)

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.