Never been one to let the carrier drop

I had a interesting talk with a friend of mine about free will. At the time, I was thinking about dimensions of free will.. I was observing that free will consisted of two dimensions – the first being the number of possible actions you can think of (the box), and the second being the ability to pick any of them (the pointer). Of course, some of the actions are interesting – for example, you can iterate back to look for more actions, and you can change the definition of desirable outcomes, which is then going to change the box. But I feel like there’s at least one more dimension to it, and I’m not sure yet what that might be.

I do not feel particularly free. For the most part, I feel constrained by the fact that this world doesn’t have a particularly good safety net for taking actions that might be particularly economically or socially risky. And, as I’ve learned, it is entirely too easy to lose the friends you really want to keep, either through dating the wrong person, saying the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thing, feeling the wrong thing, or just random acts of fate. We spend a lot of time on Earth saying goodbye – and while I feel it likely that we’re all immortal beings, the world I see doesn’t offer a lot of reassurance that that is the case, and in fact seems to go out of it’s way to underline the idea that we’re not.

And yet – part of why I study IT is that I think that it offers the greatest chance of freedom humanity will ever know. There are so many ways this could play out – the first is that we could build the singularity, and it could decide to set us free. The second is that we could automate our society and no longer have to worry about working all our lives just to be able to continue eating and living indoors. The third is we may reverse engineer DNA and be able to modify it to give us a better experience. The fourth is that we may hook computers directly or indirectly to our neural nets and be able to do all sorts of amazing things including having just about any experience we could possibly want.

And, of course, a powerful enough computer could back up and restore us just like a hard disk.

But then there’s the question – surely this is not the first time we’ve built technology of this level – surely we’re not the first time computers have ever gotten this advanced. And it’s so easy to see that from here, 20 to 30 years leads to the real possibility of a utopia. So I can’t help but suspect that said utopia already exists, and that we’re experiencing this world as either a form of punishment or a form of entertainment. (Or possibly even both). Some aspects of it seem so comedically overdone that entertainment seems by far the more likely. I should enumerate my list of “Stupid things America does” sometime – it’s very hard for me to get through all of it without laughing my ass off. I mean, it hurts, it was not a lot of fun to go through, but it is also very, very funny.

We have a big problem with not seeing the forest for the trees. And a lot of the time our most destructive ideas are the ones we get into with the best intentions. Religion, organized education, I could enumerate a bunch of them.

I have no doubt that I’m as guilty of this as the next man. It’s part of why the singularity is such a desirable idea. But, we’re not going to build it with silicon any time soon. If we wanted to build it next week, or next month, the smart thing to do would be to network human minds, as they’re the most powerful computers we can easily get our paws on.

Now my experience with talking with $future-person leaves me with the distinct feeling I’m connected to some sort of network, as do things like vibe at raves and concerts, and the repeated experience of thinking of someone I haven’t talked to in a while and having them call or write me. And then there’s watching my playlist, which I swear is sometimes scheduled by the great DJ in the sky to clue me in to what’s going on. I often think that my neural network is partitioned (well, duh, I do appear to have DID) and that I am at times my own higher power, setting myself up for all sorts of surprises. Every time I sit down at a multitrack deck and record a song in several parts, and have each just *fit* – every time I go skating and look, there’s *always a hole*..

Synchronicity is a interesting beastie.

So, I’ve said that we need to turn the US into a metademocracy – that we need to vote on how to vote.

Specifically, I had this conversation with my friend Jeremy, and we came up with one possible model that we think might work really well.

Instead of a representative democracy, you would build a direct democracy. However, instead of having everyone vote on every issue, people would subscribe to issues that they were interested in. Participating in mailing lists and forums, taking tests and quizzes that indicated you understood all sides of a issue, would all earn you points. The more points you had, the more your vote would count.

There would be no minimum voting age. On issues with long term impact, after proving reading comprehension with a basic test, the younger you are, the more weight your vote would carry.

It’s a weighted meritocracy. The concept here is that I don’t really want a plumber flying a 747, or a pilot fixing my sink. People do have interests, and those interests do drive what they know about and should be making decisions about.

Then if all of the concrete, steel, and man-hours wasted in the War On Drugs had been used to build wastewater treatment plants in India, that continent would have fresh water available from every tap.

We need to remember to not have Wars On People. Let’s have Wars On Suffering, Wars On Disease, and Wars On Stupidity instead.

While we’re talking about stupidity, why do we build places to punish sick people? This inevitably is going to make them sicker, and as a result, they’re going to commit more crimes and cause more havoc. Surely the mass shootings, the cops shooting innocents should be hints that we broke something badly and we need to rethink the way we do things. Surely the cash for kids scandal should be giving us some kind of neon sign that we’ve done something beyond stupid and it’s time to stop. Are we incapable of thought? People, please prove to me you’re not morons. I’m begging here.

While I’m ranting, the idea that children can get busted for sexting – look, assholes, STOP HURTING THE KIDS! Sex is a normal, healthy thing, and you’ve warped their minds about it by being afraid to talk honestly with them about it, not to mention threatening them in all kinds of weird ways, insisting that they’re subhuman, and ..

I speak as someone who remembers parts of my childhood not at all, and other parts entirely too clearly and painfully. Adults shouldn’t be allowed to raise children in groups less than 5 adults – I talked earlier in my blog about entrainment signals and how two adults can *barely* provide a clean entrainment signal under the very best of circumstances. And this world – not the best of circumstances. Many feedback loops, many bad designs coming back to bite us in the ass.

I want love to win, not fear.

So, a long time ago I had a interesting discussion with Nick in which he was talking about wanting to have the experience of the best parts of his life on loop-repeat. And I was explaining about wireheading – that you could, in fact, pin the pleasure center of your mind on, but that I found that narratively unsatisfying. The truth is that I want to experience a range of emotions, although I’d like to experience a *weighted* range – that is, I’d like to experience a lot of joy and hope and happiness and peace/serenity and excitement and just a little bit of fear and sadness and confusion and doubt. And I want to experience a narrative – the idea of being Bhudda and achieving a homeostasis of Nirvana does not appeal to me. (Probably because I already did that, and it wasn’t enough for me)

I like the idea of a ongoing path of discovery and growth and finding mo betta and mo betta. If there is in fact a top range of mo betta, I don’t know if I’d want to hang out there for a long time and then start back at the bottom again, or just hang out there at the top. Or if it will turn out there is a level of awesome that is the maximum I can stand and it’s below the top bank that’s possible. Couldn’t tell ya. But if I have to make a choice between story and emotion I optimize for story.

So, this is another stream of consciousness post that may or may not go anywhere useful. Nonetheless, here it is.

One of the problems I see with society on Earth is that we are failing to do a number of basic things that would lead to a much better experience for everyone.

1) Triage – we need to figure out which problems are causing the most non-optimal experience for the most people, and address the issues we’re facing in level-of-fuckedness order

2) Finding the root cause – raising the minimum wage, for example, is a very temporary band-aid because the landlords and banks will just raise the fees and the rent. You need some way to control the ratio between pay and cost of living. But even this probably isn’t looking at the real root cause. You will often find a whole list of symptoms, and while you can treat them as individual problems, it’s usually better to figure out what the root cause is and address that.

3) Figuring out what we’re optimizing for – Yah, no kidding. We’ve got the Christians over here trying to optimize for hitting God’s Will. We’ve got me over here trying to optimize for having the experiences I want to have. We’ve got judges trying to optimize for a just society, which is probably about the dumbest thing you could do. And so on.

So, I’m optimizing for the experiences I want to have. I think we should be optimizing for, first, giving everyone what they need, then, giving everyone what they want. As a big picture thing, this is going to need for a lot of us to change, because a lot of us have managed to really build up some stupid ideas this particular time ’round. More on this later.

My best theory at the moment is that God is *us*. That we built this universe, and that we’re in fact inside some sort of hypervised experience. However, if I’m wrong, I challenge God: Come down here, in person – as long as you don’t use weapons on us I am absolutely fine with you being totally invulnerable – and give us a religion that doesn’t suck.

I should warn you my standards for ‘doesn’t suck’ are high. If you can read my mind (and you’re welcome to, whoever you are, if you have the tech, please do!) you know how I define heaven. The heaven in both major world religions is *pathetic*. Given access to a big computer system connected to my mind and infinite time, I could do so much better. And I’m one tiny li’l inconsequential dude.

I think it enormously telling that I get a lot more out of going to a church if I don’t speak the language.

One thing that’s really frustrating for me is that I don’t feel like my friends are pulling their weight for me as much as I am pulling it for them. I paid two people’s rent this month. And I certainly don’t want anyone getting evicted. But I would like some idea that my friends are doing *something* to further *my* dreams:

Worldwide goals:

1) Everything for everyone – a end to money as a limiting factor in the lives of people
2) A end to abuse of authority and power. No more parents breaking their children. No more cops shooting citizens. No more politicians starting wars.
3) A end to irrational fear – certainly not a series of systems that perpetuate it, which is what we have now.

Personal goals:

1) Real life friendship with $person
2) Music career
3) Lucid dreaming, of sufficient quality to be able to experience things like controlled flight with accelerator data (Look, when I go into a dive, I want to FEEL it, caprice?)

Like Kirk, I don’t really believe in the no-win scenario. I appear to be in a couple of them (my desire to be real-life friends with $person and my desire for a music career without sacrificing quality of life) but I also tend to remind myself that I’m in the middle of the ride – that both of them appear no-win right now doesn’t mean to give up, it just means I haven’t figured out everything I need to know.

I’m trying to master the art of *almost* going crazy. Because there definitely is something special that happens when I get my mind up to wide-open road speeds that is worthy of having – every time I do it, I get more capacity, mental-wise. But there’s some point at which it starts shaking like a unbalanced tire, and then Bad Things Happen. ™ If nothing else, I have to think that time spent in a blackout is not exactly productive, and there’s no doubt that I push $person further away whenever I’m in that state, and I can’t run a multitrack deck to save my life, because I lose the ability to easily see cause and effect and Earth’s tech is still too buggy to be relied on to Just Work.

My current thinking is the goal is to slam the throttle up, and then back down as I come over the top. I think using seroquel every day is definitely the wrong use of the drug – like all sleeping pills, it loses control authority. So the challenge is to treat it like it’s a addiction – as soon as I get to where I *need* to use it every day to sleep, I need to be fighting it and trying my hardest to get off it. Then once I’m ‘clean’, wait for the spool up (currently happens twice a year) and then use seroquel scaled to my current clock speed to make sure I still get sleep.

I would dearly love it if I could trust Earth’s health care system, but so far it hasn’t given me *any* reason to think that I can and has given me a number of reasons to think I can’t. Sometimes I think this planet is deliberately cracked in a whole bunch of ways just to teach us how not to.

I know what I would build, if I were in charge of mental health. Because it’s so obvious to me, and I don’t know nearly as much as the powers that be, I have to suspect that they don’t want cures. For whatever reason, they like seeing people hurt. I hate them for it, and wish I could take away their power over me. If anyone is curious:

Artificial Neural Network + Trans-cranial electromagnetic induction + FMRI = win.

One of the things I find frustrating about the current crop of politicians is that none of them are addressing root causes.

In particular, I think me and Bernie agree about the end goals. But most of what he’s saying are repeated band aids on symptoms of the problems with our resource allocation system. He’s not talking root causes. Raising the minimum wage is a example of a temporary band aid. The politicians should be talking about how our economic system can not accurately represent reality – by definition, money as we’ve currently conceived of it is a zero sum game. And reality is *NOT* a zero sum game.

Money is supposed to be, as far as I can tell, a medium for making our resource allocation system work – it’s supposed to model value. Now, I’ve already talked about the fact that any time we print more money, everyone is convinced the money is worth less, even though most people would agree that the amount of value available to us increases every year. Also, different resources have different values to people at different times in ways that are in no way related to the flow of money.

I still insist that if we have empty houses and homeless people, if we have people being paid not to grow food and people starving, we have a resource allocation system that is failing and we should be looking at how to improve it. But making laws about the minimum wage won’t do any long-term good – all it will do is slide around the prices of things. As a temporary band-aid, it’s a good step, but we should be talking and thinking about the underlying flow of resources. We’re at a point, technology wise, where we can track every kilowatt hour, every skilled man hour in every category, every gram of metal, every resource. By looking at those numbers, we could make budgets that actually made sense – instead of budgeting in dollars, for example, we could budget in doctor-hours and MRI-hours and lab-hours when talking about whether we can or can not afford to do health care for everyone. We can also look realistically at the costs involved in *not* doing health care for everyone – lost man-hours of work, lost creativity, and things like that. We can also look at the overhead-hours – the hours wasted doing incredibly dumb or even hurtful things. We can look at how much a eviction really costs us, for example, and realize how stupid we’re all being.

Analyzing root causes is important. more on this later.

So, I spent a fair amount of time avoiding facebook and other social sites over the last few days.

My reasons are that I don’t want to expose myself to the latest horrific disaster about which I can do nothing.

I’ve come to accept that cops are going to shoot innocents, religious nuts are going to use their religion as a excuse to hurt other people, and countries are going to fight incredibly stupid wars. I’m slowly coming to understand that there is a group of people – and for the most part it’s the group that’s interested in having power – who would far rather build hell than heaven. But I have enough nightmares of my own without tuning into other people’s. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t think caring is a good idea. The worst part is I can trace a lot of this back to the actions of the united states. My tax dollars at work.

Recently, someone on my facebook pointed out that if I pay taxes, I help finance our army, and our school of terrorism which trained Osama, and our drone strikes. There’s not a lot I can do about this. Our “democracy” gives us precious little power over the Powers That Be. I don’t even have any reason to think our votes are counted accurately, and after reading about how electronic voting machines are made, I have a lot of reasons to think they’re not.

But I can choose my own actions, and I choose not to be exposed to the people that are being hurt. I can’t stop them from being hurt, so if I expose myself to the trauma TV, all I’m doing is hurting myself and therefore adding to the net misery of the universe. It’s a net loss for everyone.

I do wonder if all these attacks would be as popular if everyone reacted to violence by turning away. And the truth, painful as it is, is that 140 people is insignificant in terms of the number of people that will die on any given day. As Blue Oyster Cult says, “Another 40,000 coming every day.” That number has probably gone up as the world population has.

And, if you really believe we have a immortal component, this isn’t really such a tragedy. They’ve logged off of Earth, but they’re still around somewhere. We’ll see them again soon enough.

Is it really a good thing for us to all wallow in pain and fear? Why do we do this to ourselves? I remember after 9/11, the news ran constantly with images of the planes striking the towers. And no one really talked about our part in all this – how we used Osama as a pawn in the cold war, and got some of his family killed, and maybe that’s why he was so angry – and how we trained him in our school of how to be a terrorist in the first place.

Part of the problem, clearly, is the religious texts. But I’ve tried talking to religious people, and they don’t seem to see the inherent contridiction between there being a all-powerful God, and there being a number of contridictory religious texts lying around. I really wonder what they think – God *can’t* remove the ones that aren’t the truth, or he *won’t*? Really, I think it would do us all a lot of good to throw the past away. But religion appears to write itself into neural networks in a way that disables their ability to think critically about it’s contents, or recognize that, in the case of Islam and Christianity at least, it has a very high “this makes no sense!” factor.

At this point, I’m fairly convinced that a lot of my own insanity is wrapped around the fact that some of my mind accepted Christianity and some of it rejected it. I’m fairly sure the part that rejected it is the better person. I know there was a way to see it that made it a good thing, but it wasn’t how I saw it. And I can’t see it that way now. I can see it *enough* that way to understand where Christians are coming from. But not enough to think we should keep this and expose our children to it.

But, it still hurts. It still keeps me awake at night. I still wrestle with it, over and over. If we could stop believing so many stupid things, we could have heaven here and now.

I struggle so much with the idea that I seem to be smarter than a lot of the people around me. I’m convinced this must be something that’s wrong with my mind, that makes me incorrectly evaluate my own intelligence. Or that I’m not seeing the people around me as they really are. Or something. And really, there’s no objective way to measure, and my intelligence hasn’t bought me much. It hasn’t bought me my dream career, or my freedom. I’m so convinced there’s something wrong with the way my mind is configured, but I haven’t been able to change enough to be free.

A long time ago, when I was more inclined to lie, I told a lot of lies that I experienced later coming true. Sometimes I wonder if I should tell people I’ve achieved lucid dreaming to see if it happens. Or at least a end to the nightmares.

I have spent some time struggling with the old Calvinism thoughts, only brought up to date with a more complete understanding of what our minds are. Do I really have free will at all? Am I really making decisions, or does it just feel like I am? Am I just playing a tape? If so, where does it end?

I also sometimes feel like maybe we’re all the result of some incredibly simple, Conway Game Of Life process that was left running on a enormously powerful system. That there is no God, that the system is just burning idle cycles. Maybe we’re all the result of the hashing algorythm for a far more advanced race’s Bitcoin.

I think if there is free will, it must be partially in when a neural connection is made or not made. We must be choosing the shape of our minds. I really want to think there’s some bigger overarching pattern that will make what I’m currently experiencing fit into a beautiful complete picture when I see it from above.