Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I have yet another disproof of Christianity. (I know, I know, I should really let go of this obsession – but a figure driven by Christianity still gatekeeps my dreams – a copy of my mother as she was when I was young – and I really have to get it and her entirely out of my mind, and I feel like coming up with arguments against it helps this process)

This one’s really simple, and is based on my experiences with $_PERSON.

If God loves us, Hell would also be a good place.

Love does not want the beloved to be unhappy if the beloved wants nothing to do with the one who loves. Love wants the beloved to be happy and healthy and have everything they want and need. Anything lesser is a misunderstanding of love. Part of what’s so upsetting about $_PERSON not wanting to talk to me is she might not be okay and I would never know and there would never be anything I could do to improve the situation. I cannot *fathom* a God of love choosing for someone to suffer because they didn’t want to be near said God. I also cannot fathom said God deleting such people, as some have suggested – the idea of $_PERSON ceasing to exist is inherently extremely painful.

To me, this is a obvious doomsday knell for Christianity. The one Christian I presented this too suggested God is goodness and that there can be no goodness without God. This shows a inadequate understanding of the data universe.

Good feelings, in us, come from good experiences. Love is inherently in our hardware so even if we are banished to another realm we are still going to love, and we are still going to try to give each other good experiences. Good experiences are *data*, and *God can’t make data become unavailable from the universe*. My example was God could decide to banish the number 2, but if a computer runs for($i=0;$i<10;$i++) $i is still going to contain 2 right after it contains 1. It's possible God could actively, via hostility, constantly erase such things from our memories, but there is no possible way you're going to claim that Loki-God is a God of Love.

In Anathem, Neil Stephenson speaks of a very important idea – he speaks of it as the Hylaean Theoretical World, or the HTW, and it’s where all the perfect abstract concepts live that we iterate through when we use our imaginations. It contains, for example, every possible set that can exist. Now, you can imagine a computer that has a portion that can work on countable infinities mated to a classical computer, and you can imagine that you could use such a computer to, for example, find and iterate through every data element that would be every possible hug from a particular person, for example. Of course, in the real world, we find these data members using much more clumsy but intuitive means, like hugging people, but the point is that the *experience* of a hug is a data experience to us – it’s a bunch of information being streamed to our brain from our body. And that dataset will be in hell – in fact if there are multiple Gods or multiple universes that data is in potentia available to all of them, because the HTW is *bigger than God*. It’s a different type of entity than God could ever be – and it’s certainly not all good. Those same datasets have every way you could ever be tortured, for example. But the point is, it’s not something God can make “go away” because it’s not a concrete manifestation. Just as God can’t change pi no matter how hard he tries, he can’t make any place lack goodness. So that argument also does not hold water.

So, one of the things I struggle with is the challenges surrounding sexual relationships. I think I’ve talked before about how I think a big part of this is that the memetics surrounding sexual relationships on earth are really not too good – we’re wired to fall in love more than once but we’re encouraged by the powers that be to mate for life, assured by various religions that non-monogamy is a sin (God forgot he wired us to fall in love more than once – or this is part of his grand plan for torturing us for being imperfect – a even bigger and more successful part of that plan is to ensure that sometimes we fall in love with people who don’t love us..)

Now, I don’t want to come off like a incel at all, but one of the things that I find frustrating is that feeling sexual attraction for people is very likely to end in disaster. Not only are the odds fairly low that you will be attracted to the same people who are attracted to you, but also if you do have a friendship that includes sexual overtones when the sexual portion of it is over you probably will never get to talk to the person again. I still miss Phoebe enormously, 15 years later, and Vinnie – although I will acknowledge that I screwed that one up in just about every way there was to screw it up.

Which is perhaps part of the problem.. sexual friendships bring out much more intense emotions than other friendships and so as a result things get a lot more extreme in general. I do think it’s true that we say and do things in sexual friendships that we would never do in others. And of course you have possessiveness and jealousy, both of which are *encouraged* in our current world memetics and turned up to 11 whenever possible in our world’s fiction.

Of course, another problem with all of the above is that if you’re going to try to follow the dictates of religion and mate for life, you have to find the right person – on the first try – while you’re very young and inexperienced – with all of the challenges that apply above. And you might end up with someone who physically or emotionally abuses you, because our memetics have set up situations that leave people in states where they do that, and then you should continue to live with the person no matter what because divorce is immoral. Yes, I have periods of really loathing earth’s memetics.

I also of course wish we could work out the whole ‘sharing’ thing. You would think, given how good falling in love feels, that we would want to encourage people to do it repeatedly, that if we in fact did love the people we are connected with we would want them to be happy. Part of the problem here, discussed many times by many different people, is the fear of abandonment – and the fact that Earth makes being abandoned quite dangerous at times, with worries about things like eating and living indoors. But beyond that I think that a very big part of what ails us is the elders feeling the need to know *which* humans are the parents of which child, and our idea that each individual should be responsible for caring for all the children that share their genetics. (In fact it would be *much* smarter for the entire tribe to be responsible for children – and then we could also stop having teen pregnencies ruin lives. But this would take away the fun of those who delight in punishing and love to sneer at the lack of morality of the teens that react to things *they are deeply evolved to feel*)

I do think a big part of the problem is also all the religious nuts who can’t accept that there are all kinds of signs that we are evolved and almost none that we are designed, and therefore want to blame us for things that evolution has done instead of trying to work out a memetic system that aligns with our evolution. I am sure you have all seen me talk about this many times before and I am sure I will talk about it many times again.

Anyway, I really hate the whole ‘if you are attracted to someone they may also never talk to you again’ bit, and I will be the first to admit that I have (partially due to mental illness) impressively screwed up communications with one particular $_PERSON on the subject. But I also think there’s got to be some middle ground and better communication methodologies that could be taught such that we had a lot less #metoo incidents and at the same time did not have no good way to say what we’re thinking and feeling without breaking any friendship or communication we have with people.

In short, the human memetics surrounding sex are a mess. I think pretty much everyone knows it. No, I don’t know how to write the perfect memetics surrounding the topic either. I suppose we’ll all just continue to muddle through, often with broken hearts and/or holes in our lives.

http://sheer.us/stuff/2020/SheerCoversIndigoGirls-DeadMansHill.mp3

(Toto : I’ll be over you)
(todo: record cover and place link here)

Some people live their dreams
Some people close their eyes
Some people’s destiny
Passes by

There are no guarantees
There are no alibis
That’s how our love must be
Don’t ask why

[Pre-Chorus 1]
It takes some time
God knows how long
I know that I can forget you

[Chorus 1]
As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
As soon as forever is through
I’ll be over you

[Verse 2]
Remembering times gone by
Promises we once made
What are the reasons why
Nothing stays the same

[Pre-Chorus 2]
There were the nights
Holding you close
Someday I’ll try to forget them

[Chorus 2]
As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
As soon as forever is through
I’ll be over you

[Guitar Solo]

[Chorus 3 with repeats]
As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
(Anticipating)
Someday I’ll be over you

As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
(Anticipating)
Someday I’ll be over you
As soon as my heart
(As soon as my heart stops breakin’)
(Anticipating)

Only one musical post in all of 2018. Going to have to do better in 2019. I tracked ten different songs that I didn’t think were good enough to release in 2018, and I’ve tracked three so far in 2019. I’m not sure if I need to turn down the lint level, or if I’m just working towards another plateu. On the other paw, it’s not like I get emails clamoring for more of my music or anything 😉

One thing I’ve really been feeling is the sense of missing people. I miss Phoebe, I miss $PERSON, I don’t really ever seem to get over the people I’ve lost. I miss my uncle joe.. I’ve even reached the point of missing my dad, who is still in my life. (I have set up a camping trip with him – I’m not so stupid as to not fix the ones that can be fixed).

One of the things with Phoebe is remembering and regretting all the stupid things I said, especially during our break-up. I know that I participated in breaking that friendship too badly to be repaired and I wish that I had a time machine so I could do things somewhat differently.

Ah well, we go on. What other choice do we have?

I think part of what bothers me about missing $_PERSON at this point is that it’s been so long since I had any kind of contact that I have *no* idea who she is. At some point your copies of copies of memories have no real reliability to them at all, and generation loss has pretty much etched that one away to where it’s nothing but a guess. That combined with the sense that the things that pushed her away were not really me – I mean, they certainly weren’t who I would choose to be and they all occurred in extreme mental states.

Recently I spent some time talking to a facebook friend who seemed to have been experiencing a extreme mental state of her own. A number of my friends criticized me for this, or at least expressed doubt that this was a wise use of my time, but I am fairly sure that what I was doing fit nicely inside my philosophy of ‘be excellent to each other’, and that if more people behaved the way I do, the world would be a better place.

and I have to admit as I research neural networks, my half – and often scarred memories – combined with blackouts – of the periods where I wasn’t myself are telling. I’m fairly certain what I was experiencing was islanding – very large collections of subnets, large enough to be able to respond to stimuli but not large enough to sustain consciousness. This brings up the interesting question of, in DID, are the alters conscious? I’ve always assumed that they are, but then I’ve been doing kitteny neocortex research that is making me question that assumption.

One of the things I’ve realized is that there’s no way we currently know to know whether a neural network is having a conscious experience or not. A NN will learn, and respond to stimuli based on what it’s learned, whether or not the ‘magic’ of consciousness is there or not. At this point I tend to agree with the person who theorized that consciousness is what information feels like when it’s been processed, but I think that’s only true in a very specific context which likely has to do with the way temporal memory works. However, in building my unsupervised learning system for the kittens, I found myself implementing something very similar to short term memory because in order to do unsupervised learning in the model I’m currently using, you have to let LTP create the bindings first, *then* learn the lesson. You also have to keep track of previous lessons so you can unlearn them if they turned out to be wrong. (At least, to solve my particular problem that I’m working on at the moment you do).

I haven’t really come up with any new years resolutions – I have a vague sense that I’d like to exercise more, vape less, eat less, write more music, and generally try not to break anything critical about my life.

So, my first post of 2017 will be a bit of neoclassical – this actually started as a completely improvisational attempt to express my sadness, pain, fear, and other negative emotions surrounding a situation in my life. Whatever else you can or can’t say about it, I think some of my emotions when I played it come out nicely in the recording. Happier stuff in the pipeline, folks, including a cover of Angel From Montgomery that cooks pretty well, but for today, this is what we’ve got.

Vicky2.

So, it’s basically hopeless to think I could remember who would be responsible besides me in any case. Human memory isn’t written to the way computer memory is, and it’s not.. reliable in the same kinds of ways. So I might remember violence and hate and anger, but it’s impossible to know whether that’s real or not – especially since I’m looking at it from the other side of a closed-head injury. Look, the car I was in didn’t have a airbag. I don’t know how much damage was done to my mind, but I know it was enough that I couldn’t stick out my tongue straight and I was mildly aphasic for weeks afterwords. So talking about remembering who to be angry at is really, really silly. Because I *don’t* know what of my memories are real.

As far as $person[0], I remember you asking me who I wanted on my island. Apparently at this late date we can really safely say the answer is you. I remember you wanted to be CEO of pepsi, and you were a fan of Perot, and left post-it notes all over the house encouraging your parents to vote. I remember we went to many dances together, and we danced, and it was fun and wonderful. I remember you had a duck named comet who helped with the mayor of occaquan’s campaign. I remember six little ducklings growing up in my bathtub. These memories feel real. But unless I can convince you to compare notes with me about which of my memories are real and which aren’t, I’m never going to know.

So, you should probably read these in reverse chronological order, meaning you should read them from oldest to newest. See that category marked $person, over there on the right? Yah, click that. 😉

That said, I have a knack for saying exactly the wrong thing to you. For example, when I said something about what are you going to do about having a child, what I meant is, how are you going to handle it if one of your children has a mental illness (which does, believe me, happen) if you can’t handle one of your friends having one.

And the bit about me not even owning a gun.. what I meant to say was “I would never ever use force on you”. I don’t know how that got so tripped up coming out of my fingers.

Remember, I’m afraid of you being afraid of me, and that’s a nasty, nasty, nasty feedback loop. And I can’t just not care about you – I can’t remove you from my history, or from people I care about, or make how I feel about you have unhappened.

I’m in love with you. That’s a fact. It doesn’t have to be a major detriment on your life. I’ve got people in my life who are in love with me who I’m not in love with. It doesn’t keep us from being friends. However, me being in love with you does, often, make me say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time when you’re concerned.
Please remember that the part of me that needs to understand what happened is *still a young teen*. Never aged. Time stopped for him. Think of him as a process sitting at a breakpoint.

You remember what that was like? Now throw in DID, mania, and the whole box of cookies I’m trying to keep juggled, including adulting, a day job, a music career, and helping my friends not go under.. I actually think I’m doing quite well, but I’m sure Clint will inform me about how well I’m not doing. But sometimes the amazing thing about the dancing bear is not how well it dances but that it dances at all.

So, when the protective order runs out, I’m going to do my best to *not* run over there and try to convince you to talk to me again. Instead, I’m going to ask ALL my friends for help, and use the gentlest, most careful way I can think of, because at this point, I’m convinced, yes, you’re scared out of your mind too. I don’t know if this is because I’m not seeing the real $person but rather reflected light from you inside the warped and twisted reality engine that is my mind outside my CE, and on the edge you’re just fine, or if this is really how you feel. But I’m gonna keep playing it like it’s real until it’s either utterly clear it’s not or something changes.

FWIW, I won’t call you, but you are free to call me. I want you to call me. And I won’t talk about anything a coworker at a place of business wouldn’t talk about, at least until we’ve negotiated a lowering of DEFCON level and figured out what if anything can be salvaged of our friendship. If that helps any. At the very least, it would mean a lot to me if we could get to strangers at DEFCON 5 and me knowing what you saw happen at the party where what I saw happen was a system crash and a suicide by drowning of *me* and a running away from my parents but still being captured and hurt and hurt and hurt.

So, here we are again. Me writing you. Except not as email, because your request that I not do so was starting to come with handcuffs. So I’ll do it here.

Look, despite some of the insane emails that I’ve sent you in years past, I don’t expect you’ll be my lover. I am, however, hoping you can find time to be my friend, at least enough time to help me put together my memories of what happened at your party enough that they make some kind of sense.

I’m *begging* you for help. My mind is badly damaged. I don’t even know if it is a closed head injury from a rear end impact in a car with no airbags at 60 mph (I was stopped, he wasn’t) or if it’s psychological damage from some sort of abuse (memories suggest there was a lot of that, but memories are unreliable), or if it was the experience of being cut off from my support network by Kayti (my experience with Kayti HURT a lot), or it’s just that it wasn’t rated for the number of cycles per second I’ve asked of it repeatedly. (I’ve pushed the limits. A lot.)

In the real, in the now, it works very well most of the time. See my linkedin recommendations. I’m really good at what I do, and I do a lot of things. In mania, I have a lot less control, but since you’ve asked that I not contact you, that’s the only time that I even think about it. Except as a backgrounded task, I’m thinking about it all the time, and it’s hurting all the time. We could really both save ourselves a lot of trouble by just having a conversation while I’m not manic. PLEASE consider this. I know there’s sort of a “Sheer is a horrible monster / Sheer is a rapist / We Hate Sheer” club out there. But I haven’t in fact raped anybody, unless you know something I don’t, and I never would have kicked my sister in the stomach – the threat was just the only way to stop her from *constantly* physically attacking me. Or so my memory (admittedly a fragmented view) tells the tale. And I do in fact try my hardest to be the very best person I can be, every day. As far as your “Don’t talk to me”, it is *really* hard keeping track of reality during periods of mania when you have DID. I invite you to try and do better than me, except that I don’t, because no one should have to go through the experience of *needing* DID, and I think I must.

But I’m begging you. Consider that you might not have the whole story, especially about things you’ve been told by my sister. Consider that if you heard my side of it you might feel differently. And consider that I have no reasonable way of assembling my memories of the night I first went dead inside at all without you.

Please, if I ever meant anything at all to you, please help.

Also.. Our friendship was for a time the best thing in my life. Maybe I remember it as better than it was. But I kind of doubt it. I’d really like it back. Enough to jump through basically any hoop.

There’s a letter on the desktop that I dug out of a drawer
The last truce we ever came to
In our adolescent war
And I start to feel the fever
From the warm air through the screen
You come regular like seasons
Shadowing my dreams
And the Mississippi’s mighty
But it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across
With five steps down
And I guess that’s how you started
Like a pinprick to my heart
But at this point you rush right through me
And I start to drown
And there’s not enough room
In this world for my pain
Signals cross and love gets lost
And time passed makes it plain
Of all my demon spirits
I need you the most
I’m in love with your ghost
I’m in love with your ghost
Dark and dangerous like a secret (don’t tell a soul)
That gets whispered in a hush
When I wake the things I dreamed about you (don’t tell a soul)
Last night make me blush
And you kiss me like a lover
Then you sting me like a viper
I go follow to the river
Play your memory like a piper
And I feel it like a sickness
How this love is killing me
I’d walk into the fingers
Of your fire willingly
And dance the edge of sanity
I’ve never been this close
In love with your ghost, ooh
Ooh
Unknowing captor
You never know how much you
Pierce my spirit
But I can’t touch you
Can you hear it
A cry to be free
Oh I’m forever under lock and key
As you pass through me
Now I see your face before me
I would launch a thousand ships
To bring your heart back to my island
As the sand beneath me slips
As I burn up in your presence
And I know now how it feels
To be weakened like Achilles
With you always at my heels
This bitter pill I swallow
Is the silence that I keep
It poisons me I can’t swim free
The river is too deep
Though I’m baptized by your touch
I am no worse than most
In love with your ghost (in love with your ghost)
You are shadowing my dreams
(In love with your ghost)
(In love with your ghost)