Never been one to let the carrier drop

“And if it rains again tonight.. I can think light-years ahead.. or I can put myself back a thousand years ago.. and say, well I’ve always been here before or it will be good to be born..
I’m a slow loser, but I’m a fast learner, that much I know. Anyone can go, that much I know. Anyone can go, that much I know.. Anyone can go..” –Jefferson Starship, “Hyperdrive”

So, normally our minds remain sync-locked with frames being passed to them from our senses – or the message bus that represents the edge.. or $WHATEVER is out there. We can’t really know where the information is coming from or even how much it’s being modified on the way in to our conscious experience. However, we can experience some really interesting things if we are willing to play with that sync lock a little.

You see, the human mind has a pulse – several, actually, the clocks that drive it that we can see on a EEG.. and it also has a throttle.

Get really engaged with the world around you, and you start running at processing rates higher than those frames coming from the outside world. Go far enough, and you can outrun your ghost. (Your ghost is the history of all the decisions you’ve already made, and all your fears and doubts, as living neural networks influencing your free will and your conscious experience)

How do you do this? Well, the easy and obvious way is to consciously choose to not sleep, and then stay engaged in your life. It’s not enough to not sleep and passively watch TV or something. You have to be *participating* – in a way that results in your making many decisions a second. But, if you do that, well, shortly, you’re on the linear.

It’s a bit of a roller coaster. Push your mind hard, and you’ll climb in speed. Slack off, and you’ll slow down. Close your eyes for sleep, and you’ll start the landing process. Take any of a certain family of drugs (seroquel being the one that’s most easily available to me), and you’ll enter a downward ramp with approach to land.

Some things worth knowing about riding:

1) It takes practice. It ain’t easy. Your mind will at first be susceptible to all sorts of weird oscillations and feedback loops and wobbles. Every time you ride, you get better at damping these out and staying on the horse.
2) It ain’t always easy, and it ain’t always fun.
3) The pain is temporary, the gain is permanent. Thusly, it’s worth riding. To those of you who have never been, I would strongly suggest going at least once. No, you won’t die. A lot of people have told me it’s going to kill me. It never has yet, and I’ve been on it many, many times. And every time, I come back stronger, faster, more capable. Ask my friends how I compare to the average Joe Sixpack in terms of what I can do.
4) Emotions that you can damp out and/or ignore in ordinary reality, you are going to *feel* while you’re on the ride. Study anger management. Be unafraid and unashamed of crying. Be okay with feeling things, because you’re gonna.
5) People *not on the ride* are going to seem *very* slow to you. You’re going to seem fast to them. You’re on a linear accelerator, after all. This is relativity at work. Don’t let it throw you, and have much patience, because you’re going to need it – by the time you’re 2:1 it’s going to be a challenge to communicate at all.

In my case, balancing arrogance and humility becomes a lot more challenging while I’m doing it. Some of this is needful – because my friends will encourage me to come down before I’m ready, and I have to have enough backbone to say “my ride, not yours.”. I probably overdo this.. but I might also overdo humility in everyday life, or more likely submissiveness. That I’m not getting the life I want even in my dreams suggests to me a lot that something is not right in my head regarding this. This is my mind.. I for sure should be king in here.

Note to mental health professionals: I do this by choice, by my own free will. I will voluntarily contact someone and/or go to a mental hospital if I ever feel like harming myself or others, or like I’ve taken actions that would likely lead to that result. I will be the first to admit that my view with regard to $person[0] is far from rational at all times, and that’s more foregrounded when I’m in this state. However, I’m getting better and better at not reaching out, at just accepting the situation for what it is. On the other hand, I am growing more and more loathing of the other people ($family_member[0] and $family_member[1]) who have done things to make the situation worse. I somewhat forgive them, but only somewhat, because I don’t believe in complete forgiveness until a situation is fixed. At this point I’m willing to offer whatever apology or amends they feel would be appropriate that I can also agree makes any kind of sense, so if you all are doing this as a grudge thing, consider letting it go? But, as far as $family_member[1] – at some point, I’ll stop poking at you with how much I loathe the way $religion[0] loads on my mind – but I’m never going to adopt it as a firm belief for the majority of this system, it’s too sick, twisted, and wrong.

1) My RL friendship with $person[0] back
2) Music career
3) Everyone else getting what they want

I’ve probably already talked about this, but I think one of the reasons that discussions about politics and religion often end in arguments is that English is not a good language for talking about such things.

It has some basic flaws – the biggest one, by far, is the overloads, Not as big, but also frustrating, is that there’s no great way to speak of relative certainty of a statement of truth without adding a lot of words.

The overloads thing is a serious problem. There are many, many neural symbols that map the word ‘God’, for example, and many, many that map the word ‘Love’. So the statement ‘God is Love’ can map out all sorts of ways in different people’s minds as far as what the actual meaning, in neural symbols – ultimately the most real post-linguistic definition you can have – in different minds. And ultimately, as my friend Tory reminded me repeatedly, you can end up with semantic arguments – which waste a lot of energy and do not move the ball down the field.

For those of you who are not programmers, a overload is when one function call can execute more than one set of code. In programming languages, overloads are type constrained – that is, you can only have one overload for String Foo(String Bar) – you could have a String Foo(Int Bar), but not a second String Foo(String Bar). English has no such constraints, nor does it have any easy way short of a lot of discussion – such as I often have with $future-person[0] – about *which* exact meaning for Love and God you have – to nail down exactly what is meant by what. Linguistically, overloads are just asking for trouble.

If our experience is all made of information, then experiencing it is all about communication.

–Anonymous

One of the problems I keep thinking about is that western science has one major flaw.

They don’t know what they’re measuring *with*. Until you know the answer to that question, you don’t know what you’re measuring. We don’t yet understand what we are – at least, if the hard problem of consciousness has been solved, no one has told me the good news. I’ve heard a lot of theories, but I haven’t heard one I’d call solid enough to call plausible yet.

In other words, dear scientists, please bump the priority on neuroscience and both ANN and NNN research. Dear warmongers, please stop wasting money blowing shit up until we can solve this more important problem. Kthx, Sheer.

So, I have this problem. It’s a persistent one, and it’s likely to continue being a persistent one for the forseable future.

During certain periods in my internal cycle, if I open the throttles on my mind and give it something entertaining to chew on, like recording a album, dancing, or thinking about life, there’s no rev limiter.

It spins up, faster and faster, until eventually it starts to wobble and shakes itself into a shutdown condition. Next thing I know, I’m somewhere where the doors don’t open. Generally I get sprung fairly quickly, generally no one has been actually hurt although there is sometimes some property damage, usually caused by the cops spike stripping me.

I’ve learned to avoid driving while doing it. Safest that way. However, even when I do it in my own house, people come and tell me that I don’t have atonomy over my own body, that even though I’m threatening no one and I’m eating and drinking, I’m not permitted to do this.

Many of my friends think that this activity is seriously unhappy-making, and undesirable, and it’s only a matter of time before I kill myself or someone else.

Here’s why it’s challenging: every time, from my perspective, it’s a win.

Every time, I have more mental capacity, more flexibility, more mental power and capability. This isn’t illusory – I can often measure it very real-world ways. Things I couldn’t do before the ramp up that I can do afterwords. And I suspect that it is one path to developing http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=3211. I’ve learned not to try to contact $person[0], although apparently I haven’t mastered yet not contacting $person[1]. So I need to improve the software so that it keeps me from contacting CLASS($person[]). Which I will make a honest attempt at. (I don’t stop missing these people ever. I don’t think it’s likely that I ever will. But, you want to remove me from your life, I figure that’s your right. Just forgive me if I want to build the ability to dream about you anyway.

But.. even if I remove that possibility, it’s clear that I’m growing whenever I climb the linear mental accelerator that no-sleep during a approach window represents.

At this point, I’m thinking I should plan these. My body seems to like every six months for them – I think I should take vacation time, I should have my lawyer on call to block any attempt to commit me that isn’t as bona fide as it comes, and I should just really embrace this as this is how I choose to be. Slowly my friends are coming to see my point of view. I think increasingly they’re starting to see that my life is not giving me what I need, and that it’s not reasonable to expect me to sit here with one engine out and the other at idle when I was made to fly.

I wish more people would join me. I’ve got reasons to think others have done this before me.. it’s all over the music of Owl City, for example, and hinted at in U2 and sometimes VNV Nation.

Every time, the experience with the linear accelerator convinces me I should take another ride. And I wonder, to what extent are people telling me not to do it because they’re afraid to do it themselves? How many of the experts that tell me how wrong and dangerous this is have done it themselves?

One possibility that I’m considering strongly is that I’m not actually at the edge of my mind, and that I’m supposed to be. That the people I see in my ordinary reality are reflected light from the real people that are out there filtered through many, many layers – too many layers – of neural filters built out of my persistent and irrational fears. I can’t tell what anyone else’s conscious experience is, and as far as I can tell, no one else can tell what mine is, although I encourage you, if you have the technology to read my mind, please do so. If you can help me reconnect with the people I can’t handle losing, please do so.

$person[0], I wonder if you read this blog, a lot a lot. I will admit I find it likely that you do, or that you have a friend reading it for you to watch for certain things. Wish I knew what they were. If so, I can’t say so in cleartext most of the time, but I need your help. A abuser destroyed part of my mind, and I’m just guessing at what happened with little but static and noise to go on. Apparently your friendship was something that part of me rested on, and while I accept the loss because I must, it never stops hurting and I can’t find any way to make it stop. I told you if you told me your lines I would respect them, but my fear is your lines are never and nowhere, and I also fear this may be because you believe things about me that just are not true, and the only part of me fearless enough to even try to approach you is the part of me that is the least representative of my ability to be a normal, contained individual. Please believe that the person you met IRL the first time I came to visit you this century is representative of who I am in person. But I can’t do that in email, especially not when I’m in ‘trust and send’ mode, which I can only really enter with you, for reasons that will become apparent when we talk, if they haven’t already.

$person[1], I don’t even know what I said to make you so angry. I have zero memory of it, it happened in a blackout from my perspective. I doubt you’re reading my blog, as I have to accept I probably don’t matter that much to you. So be it, but I wish we were still friends.

So, one thing that has definitely come to light in recent days / weeks is that a lot of us are running around with fundamentally different views of reality at the moment. In some people’s worlds, Obama is a hero – in others, he’s a muslim terrorist or worse. What gives?

Well, part of what gives is the idea of view horizons – some people like to talk about this as ‘bubbles’, and perhaps that’s a more reasonable word, but I’d like to explore the idea from a slightly different angle briefly.

So, in a NNN, each neuron can only see information that it’s either directly connected to, or is connected to a relay source for. In the experiments involving cutting the corpus collossum, you can see this dramatically demonstrated when a placard containing instructions is placed in front of one eye of the subject and they follow the instructions on it, but when asked why they did so, they tell a story that’s completely unrelated to “Because you told me to”. The instruction on the placard is no longer on the view horizon – no longer routable via a reasonably short route – for the part of the subject’s mind that is in control of their voice.

Similarly, if you think of us as independent neurons in a very, very large neural network – with communications links like books, voice communication, the internet, etc taking the place of communication links like dendrites off of neurons – we can only know about what is on our view horizon. Most of us don’t have direct access to Obama to make up our minds based on personal interaction whether he’s a muslim terrorist, a superhero, or somewhere in between. However, we’re all connected to either clusters of other neurons – our friends – or a broadcast bus – the news – which steers our view at least somewhat.

Now, there’s a real possibility that both universes exist – we keep learning funny little things at the quantum level and it’s possible that there is both a universe where Obama is a muslim terrorist and one where he’s a superhero, and our experience here on Earth at the moment is at the confluence of two worldlines. However, it’s far more likely that what we’ve got are two teams of people, and each is spinning the story in the direction they believe is true – and because of confirmation bias, they’re drifting slowly further and further from reality.

Now, I’ve got news for you – no matter which side you’re on, it’s not likely you have a accurate view. Your view horizon is a long way from the original source, and being filtered through many, many minds in a game of telephone – and worse, those minds are influencing each other. But this opens up questions as to what exactly happens inside our own minds – we tend to think of ourselves as a single individual, a ego if you will, but there’s almost certainly a large fraction of our neurons that are ego-dissenting – these are what keeps the inhibit inputs on our neurons lit up and what keep us from becoming either narcissists or something worse, as well as what provides that all important critical judgement that we need when we, for example, want to create great works of art.

I am curious as to whether what we’re seeing in the political sphere is a similar thing on a macro level.

Again, Jefferson Jay has very kindly allowed me to play protools tennis with one of his tracks.. this one is a favorite of mine, and one I’ve covered on my own a number of times. I think you all will enjoy how mellow this came out..

City Of New Orleans

(to be sung in a country/western style)

So I hear about how you’re banning protests on the Mall
Trump, did you read the first amendment at all?
It’s a big complex system, and I think it’s understood
That your approach to changing it doesn’t look too good

(chorus)
It takes a gentle hand on the controls
No sudden movements, no wild rolls
America’s a big airplane, moving across the sky
And it takes a gentle hand if we’re not all gonna die

I hear about how you’re tearing down the E.P.A.
Maybe you might want to think about what the other side has to say?
Millions of people have struggled to get us where we are
And if you only focus on profit we’re not going to get too far

I know you think you know it all, but I think we all agree
The smartest man in the room knows you only know what you can see
You’re acting like you’re Maverick in your fighter jet agleam
But you’re flying a 747 heavy, so please get on our team

Please understand that I want you to succeed
But first I think you need to understand the concept of meta-greed
The best kind of greed wants everything for us all
If you persist in wanting it only for yourself, that airplane’s gonna stall

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/mechanisms.html

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/12/02/yanss-090-questioning-the-nature-of-reality-with-cognitive-scientist-donald-hoffman/