Never been one to let the carrier drop

I feel so old, and tired. I’ve recorded a track a day, and I’m not sure if any of them are good enough to pass off to Tory. I feel enslaved, like I have no choice but to work for another 30 years at a job i’m increasingly tired of, and I feel sometimes like i’m trapped in a world of idiots.. things could be so much better..

aand yet, I should have more gratitude for what i’ve got, because I do have a lot. A lot of friends, a job I don’t hate, the freedom to explore musically with some amazingly powerful tools.. and the hope that humanity will get it’s collective shit together. Looking at ffacebook, it’s clear everyone cares about something, at least.

it’s so strange.. in another age i might have been sage or luminary, but here and now, i’m nothing very special.

i haven’t been persuing self-growth as aggressively lately, and I think that may be part of why I feel old, and tired. Or maybe it’s trying to keep up with a puppy with the strength of ten puppies.

So, more and more I am liking the idea of a bucketed currency.

One of the big reasons why is that politicians (especially right wingers, but politicians in general) like to talk about how they ‘can’t afford to do things’. One big reason for this is that our current rather broken, not to mention stupid economic system doesn’t actually keep track of the resources we have at all. Therefore, when we, for example, say that we “can’t afford” national healthcare, the truth is, we don’t even know how much it would cost! Everything gets squashed into a floating point value we call “money”, and the “money” to real resource conversion is arbitrary and generally driven by things like scarcity. It’s not a value that indicates the real value of the resource, or else fracking would never have gotten off the ground. (Any 3 year old can tell you water is more valuable than any petrochemical).

I know that it would be a major endeavor to create a bucketed currency system. I’m talking about having separate buckets to track skilled man hours in every major skill, every type of metal, energy, transit cost, etc. I’m talking about tracking a hundred thousand buckets on every product. This is something that is well within the technology we use today, but it’s a rather radical shift from the “We turn everything into one price and call it money” system that we currently use.

However, the only way you know if you can afford national healthcare, for example, is if you know how many man-hours you have of people skilled in the medical arts, and about how many people are going to need those skills. This is again kindergarden stuff, but it’s not something that seems to be widely acknowledged.

“But, with a bucketed currency system, how would we know what people could afford?”. That’s a very good question, and not one I have a great answer for yet. However, well written software could at the very least ensure that everyone had a place to live and food to eat. Yes, I’m talking about communism. I think communism could have worked if they’d had better tools to use when they were creating it.

Of course, then the next question is, why would *I* want this? I’m in the top 2% of my industry, skill wise, and I get paid very well because of it. On the other paw, I feel awful every time another friend tells me about being evicted, or about struggling to pay their medical bills. As near as I can tell, almost everyone out there is hurting. Even the 1% – at the point at which they become the 1%, they no longer have any idea who they can trust – who is really their friend, and who is just out for their money. You will note that I will not sign up to *BE* the 1%. I’m fairly sure if it was a goal of mine, I could do it. It’s not. But while I see us having made amazing strides in technology, I see a world where a whole lot of people are stressed, scared, and unhappy, be they at the bottom of the ladder or the top. And I’d really, really like us to find ways to fix that. I think that a ‘everybody eats’ policy would go a long way towards that, and I think that it’s very doable.

So, for those of you who remember Tory from, among other things, Mischief Committee, we have been getting together and doing some tracking.

Here, for your listening pleasure:

track one
track two

In other news, I upgraded the virtual host that serves qm, so we again have disk space (yay!) and memory (double yay!). We actually have a fair amount of spare capacity on that machine now, which is a very nice feeling. QM and Brigandine both got upgraded to all-SSD operation, we got more disk for storing backups, and in general things were improved all around.

Luna continues to drive me nuts, she’s quite a furry little ball of energy. But, I love her.

And I continue to work on myself, as always.

Today was my birthday, and 44 people commented on my wall.. plus got to have sushi crack with Bruce. I have to remind myself to look at the good stuff sometimes.. and there certainly is a lot of good stuff…

So, despite my best intentions to stay as far away from the news as possible (on the theory that there’s very little I can do to improve the situation, and that generally the news is going to bring me down) I have lately been somewhat more immersed than usual in recent happenings.

One of the problems with the Baltemore riots is that I can so clearly see both sides. I don’t really blame the police – in fact, I feel sorry for the police. I blame the system that put them in this situation. The system that over and over protected cops who had clearly done wrong, and worse yet, the system that loves to punish, that thinks the best thing we can do to a criminal is lock them in a cold, scary box for years.

I don’t think I can adequately explain how dumb this is. Yes, take someone who’s probably already mentally ill, and give them a real legitimate reason to hate the rest of us. Then when you let him out, I’m sure he’ll be a much better citizen. Even scarier, add a profit motive to imprisoning people (I foolishly watched Cash For Kids, and now there’s a part of me that wants to rip apart the entire criminal justice system brick by brick).

Increasingly I wonder if we as a species have decided that we deserve to be in hell, and have decided to try and build it. Things like the drug war – yes, let’s criminalize wanting to feel good! That makes a lot of sense! Let’s give every cop a reason to suspect every citizen, and vice versa. Let’s lie to the population, even though we know we’re going to get caught lying to them, to make absolutely sure that the citizens don’t trust the government – and let’s make it neon sign clear that the government does not trust the citizens.

I would love a exit strategy from Earth. There are a lot of wonderful things.. like puppies and kittens and sex and love and music.. but the place has gotten so scary. There are so many rules, so many forms to fill out, and it seems like it gets more complicated every day. And, there are so many people who are either impressively stupid or impressively underinformed. When people talk about what the government can afford to do, they measure in the totally broken resource allocation system we call “money” instead of in real tangible resources like man hours, kilowatt hours, and metals and food. Our resource allocation system manages to mask the fact that we have the resources to feed, clothe, and house everyone, especially when you take into account the wonders we can do using automation.

But, instead.. how am I not supposed to be afraid of the police when I see them on the news killing innocent people, and a cop doesn’t even lose his right to carry if he shoots a innocent civilian – often, he gets a paid vacation! How am I not supposed to be afraid of a government that thinks it needs to *UPGRADE* it’s ICBMs? That thought that fission weapons weren’t enough, we need *fusion* weapons. That appears to have no concept in what a sensible government would be doing to prepare for the future – instead of pouring money into space, and energy research, and automation of food production, and desalinization – is convinced the winning strategy is to maintain the biggest army in the world so it can fight for the last drop of oil (and, increasingly I suspect, the last drop of water).

Our government does a *grave* disservice to our guardians. They are supposed to be *OUR* guardians, and we are supposed to live in *our* town, on *our* planet. We are supposed to feel pride when we see them standing in the street, knowing they keep *our* laws and *our* systems working. But instead – the government makes so many laws, and so many of them are boneheaded, that I can’t honestly tell you if I committed a crime today or not. I don’t *think* I did.. but with hundreds of thousands of pages of rules, who can tell?

Have the people who write our laws never heard of KISS? Or, as I mentioned above, are they actively *trying* to build hell? That’s not even getting into the mess that is relationships in the modern world, or family in the modern world. Why is everything so broken?

Part of what I don’t understand is how the cops don’t understand humanity at last has a central nervous system that they don’t and can’t control. If they kill innocents, word is going to get out, because we have the internet and everyone is carrying a video camera. The only way the current situation can end is either de-escalation or civil war. De-escalation is going to have to involve freeing a lot of prisoners, as well, and figuring out how we’re going to afford to build real mental hospitals that actually fix people to run all of them through. Not to mention, it’s going to take the government getting down on it’s knees to the citizens and saying “We’re sorry.”

I could gesture you to all sorts of forms of brokenness.. from the idea that it’s okay to force children into a “learn what we tell you to” system and then *grade them* and tell most of them they’re not good enough – to the idea that there’s a God of Entrapment, who’s just setting you up to be tortured for all eternity if you do things that feel good. (I’m looking at you, Mormons and certain brands of Christians!). The idea that we’re all so awful that anyone would have to “die for our sins” – that’s a incredibly unhealthy, not to mention insane, thing to believe.

But I don’t *want* to see a civil war between the cops and the citizens.. there are moments when I’m so angry that I can understand why people would take up arms against the government, but most of the time I remember that 9 out of every 10 cops I have met have been good, hardworking people trying to hold it together, and that someone doesn’t stop being human, with feelings and needs, when they put on a uniform and strap on a gun.

And the truth of the matter is, I *want* *GOOD* guardians. I want to be able to say with pride “I don’t need a gun, because these people carry them and they do a good job of keeping the peace”. I want to feel like it’s not true that jails are meant to punish, and run for profit. I want to feel like it’s not true that the only way you have a chance to not go to jail if you are mentally ill is if you have a good job and a lot of money for lawyers.

I *know* we have it within us to make earth far more utopian than dystopian. I have seen the work of our hands and the work of our minds. But we need to throw out religion, and we need to throw out money in favor of a better and more functional resource allocation system, and we need to start making this a place that we would *want* to come to. We need to start remembering that everyone here is, at least in some sense, our friend and fellow traveler.

I have often been tempted to write Speedycop (a police officer who drives at Lemons) a letter asking what he thinks about all this. I am convinced, perhaps without rational reason, that he is a good guardian. Most of my logic here is that he has demonstrated excellent craftsmanship and a great sense of humor, and it’s hard for me to believe that he could be such a good person on the track and be a bad person on his day job. I just don’t see him shooting innocents or beating them. I wonder, do the bad cops scare the good cops? I also suspect that maybe the cops protect their own because they *know* the criminal justice system is fucked and as a result sending people to jail breaks them worse. I have to wonder why, in that case, they arrest anyone – the Milgram effect maybe?

I’m going to leave you all with a sketch of a track I’m working on.. ultimately I hope to make this a song about the cold war, and about the prisoner’s dilemma and two tribes meeting in a forest, as more of a rock song, but this is more a orchestral, movie soundtrack kind of cut. And I’d like to dedicate it to the idea that maybe we could stop making Earth hell-like.

Two Sides

I have once again put 127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com in /etc/hosts.

I do this every time facebook makes me more sad than happy. It’s been happening more and more frequently. I even found myself posting “what I mostly wish about social media is that it would go away”. The thing is, I’m not antisocial. I had a great time at corifornia, and hanging out with Sarah and Alex, and expect to have a good time at CABI’s pig party. What I apparently am is anti-social-media.

Maybe it’s all the religious posts, when religion is something I’m busy uninstalling. Maybe it’s the pro spanking your children posts, when I still can’t visualize someone hugging me without seeing them physically attack me. Maybe it’s all the republican posts, or the posts criticizing people for celebrating their love, or the “here’s how awful people are being” posts about AIDs and gay people. (I’d call that a religious post, or perhaps a ignorant post)

It’s harder and harder not to comment, not to raise to their bait. And I’ve lost too many friends already. How many are too many? Apparently one is too many. (Actually, in point of fact I think I’ve lost three that are still living). I want social media to go away, I want the news to go away, and then I’d like to take a crack at money. Once that’s gone, I think I’d like pair bonding as a way of life to go away, and then I think I would take a shot at religion. Human misery, suffering in general, yes, there’s a lot of things I’d like to go away.

Where’s my love train riding from coast to coast? McDonalds is selling love, but where is my random hug from a stranger? I have a few friends who have been sending me a lot of positive things lately and I really appriciate that, but I wish the number was much larger.

I was pleased at the amount of positive content that was in the most recent set of superbowl ads. I don’t think corporate america is going nearly positive enough, but at least they are heading in a positive direction.

As far as whatever happened to break my neural net.. I don’t want revenge. I just want it to stop being broken.

So, it’s fairly clear to me that in the conventional sense, blame is pointless. Knowing who is responsible for the damage to my neural network won’t fix it. On the other paw, because a neural network stores data associated with other data, knowing who was responsible does help me figure out where exactly to look for the damage.

One of the more frustrating realities I live with is that I can’t imagine someone (Vicky is a favorite for this but I can demonstrate it with almost anyone) hugging me without seeing them physically attack me. I don’t have control over my own imagination where it comes to visual rendering. This is creepy as anything, especially when they start using knives or other weapons. I struggle over and over to complete the exercise.. I also generally can not remember the experience of having received affection from someone. I assume that these are related and the result of some profoundly weird neural wiring.

My mother facebook-posted something about how blaming other people was bad. Now, insofar as I’m responsible for all my neural wiring from the edge on in, and I shouldn’t have been subscribing to datastreams coming at me that involved violence or coercion, I get that it is at least somewhat my fault that I’ve had a set of experiences that have damaged me. On the other paw, I started out my ride on Earth close to tabla rasa – I didn’t have anything to work with, no context to use for knowing I should have been filtering out – or fighting against – some of the experiences I was having.

And, of course, I don’t really know if my family really did something bad to me or not. Because, as aforementioned, I could have very well created traumatic experiences out of whole cloth, simply via poor choices for mental configuration, about the only variable I can speak of with any certainty at all (and even that I can’t speak of with a great deal) is me.

I wish less people were having children. Until we understand the set of circumstances which led to my mind doing whatever it did or is doing, should we really be bringing more people here? Something is badly wrong here – and I don’t think I’m the only one having a disturbingly suboptimal experience.

One of the reasons I am convinced I am not seeing reality, or not seeing all of it, is the signficant absence of a genre of fiction in both video and text. It would not be difficult to create a number of storylines not currently evident in the world I look out on, including stories where only good things happened, stories where neither side was evil or bad, stories where the experience was polymorphic, etc. And yet I do not see fiction of that type. I think Avatar would have been a great movie if they had cut the war scenes and instead continued examining the experiences the protaganist was having in his Avatar, even though there would have been no inherent conflict. But it seems like all plots on Earth revolve around the idea of conflict.

I am strongly considering the possibility that my mind is filtering out all possibilities that don’t involve fear and pain, and acting as a resonant filter on the possibilities that do. I am not sure why it is doing this, and it’s really a rather scary possibility – on the other hand, it seems to also not be dragging me through *too much* fear and pain, which I appriciate.

I very much get the feeling, especially in what I experience while I am dreaming, that there are a number of forces in play in my mind. One subset clearly wants me to experience all sorts of awesome. Another subset clearly wants me to experience pain, suffering, fear, anger, guilt, and shame. Another subset is less clear on what it is trying to drag me towards, but it seems to involve challenges.

So, I thought it might be worth going over a few of the discoveries and postulates and thought patterns and what not that have led me to where I currently am, for those of you who haven’t been reading this and talking to me for years. For those of you who have, you may want to skip over this post, as there’s probably not going to be a lot new here.

As many of you know, about five years I set my mind world-readable. I invited anyone with the ability to read everything there is to read. Shortly thereafter I began having regular discussions with people I can’t see. Somewhat to my surprise, these people were *not* pushing me in the direction of mainstream religions all around the world, but instead wanted to offer me a introduction to how understanding the science of Earth could open the possibility of a amazing experience for me.

One of the first topics for discussion was the idea that our entire experience *is* information. While the universe may consist of mass and energy, our experience of it consists entirely of information. Everything we see, taste, touch, smell, hear, or otherwise experience (and there are senses beyond those 5 – both the network I am talking to my friends over, and a lot of less obvious ones like sensing acceleration, or sensing the position of your limbs) is information. If you’re a bytehead, you can look at it all as enormous numbers.. any experience you have, or want to have, can be found out there in raw infinity. Just like you can start at one and keep counting and eventually come to the number or pattern of bits that represents a MP3 of a song – or any digital encoding you care to name.. if you start searching infinity, you can find a set of information that represents a hug from a friend. Or even a infinite set that represents all hugs from friends.

So, most of us like to insist that this data is coming from a single monolithic reality – what we like to call “the real world”. Well, at least two separate things cast serious aspersions of doubt upon this idea. The first is in quantum mechanics, and I encourage anyone who hasn’t already done so to watch this video. The second is in neuroscience, or more correctly, in a understanding of what we are, from our best guesses and observations.

Now, as I’ve mentioned to many of my friends, various experiments I performed – some while I was actively trying to die, and others that just happened when I was a bit on the wild side, suggest strongly that we are hypervised. Dying before the owner or controller of the hypervisor wants you to is not really a option. However, that’s a subject for another series of posts. However, it’s worth mentioning that if we are hypervised, it is very likely by someone who wants us to be able to make meaningful experiments and observations, and so there is very likely virtualization that lets us accurately see, if only in a lies-to-children version, directly into the appliance that makes us what we are – the human mind.

And this is where the second argument against me experiencing “the real world” comes from. Our minds, scientists tell us, consist of 10^11 neurons. That’s well beyond what a high end desktop computer has for transistors – several orders of magnitude. And, those of you who play games like World of Warcraft can tell us, desktop computers can do a suprisingly good job of creating a convincing 3D experience of reality. Our minds, several orders of magnitude more powerful, can easily make up our experience of reality out of whole cloth, and in fact there is somewhat a case for them doing this at least somewhat while we are dreaming.

In addition, a neuron is not a transistor. It is a far more powerful device – comparisons can be drawn both to a op amp and a microcontroller. Also in addition, our minds use a far more efficient architecture than a modern computer – while most of the transistors in a modern computer only do one thing, during one active pathway, and the rest of the time are dead weight – neurons are often involved in many many different subnets and used for many many operations at once. In addition, while a modern computer has several bottlenecks that limit the flow of information, our minds allow parallel traffic between almost everything and almost everything else.

So, even if there is a “real world”, you will never ever know if you are seeing it. There’s no way to know. No way to know what the many many layers of neural network between your senses (‘the edge’, if you will) and your conscious experience (what I call “the ride”) are doing to the data streams. It’s unlikely that there *is* a single real world – there are very likely a number of entwined realities – and even if there was, you could never really know what it contained.

Now, why does all this matter? I mean, it’s a fun discussion for philosophers, but what impact does it have on people like you and me? Well, several different ones. The first one is, it becomes clear that the best way to experience a utopia (heaven, for you religios types) is to configure your neural network correctly. IN fact one of the first things I was taught once I started talking with people I can’t see is that the people in heaven and the people in hell inhabit the same physical space – the difference is in what’s happening in their minds. And in fact, as I’ve started studying both pushing my neural network with various exercises and deliberately and directly rewiring it I have seen a dramatic difference in my life in a number of ways. My dreams are getting better, I’ve experienced emotional states higher than drugs ever got me to, and I’ve experienced a general shifting more towards the experiences I would like to have of my emotional states.

One of the things I was astonished to discover, although in retrospect it is rather obvious, is that what you believe affects what you experience. I had thought our beliefs were built out of our experiences, but in fact it is a two-way street. Your beliefs control the neural wiring that filters out the data coming from whatever is out there (and unlike some of my friends I do not believe I am the whole universe, so clearly there is something and someones out there). We have far more data coming at us, all the time, than we can handle, so our beliefs form filters to help reduce the data stream to something we can handle. In addition our beliefs can directly translate one chunk of data to another, acting more like a CODEC layer than a filter, or amplify certian barely-present signals like a resonant filter will.

Another thing that I was astonished to discover is that my beliefs were all wrong for having a good experience. I suppose this isn’t that suprising.. I mean, you don’t end up being suicidal at age 10 from having good neural wiring. At this point I have no way of knowing how many of the negative and disturbing experiences I have had throughout my life were the results of my beliefs.. i.e. my neural wiring.. but I do know I have memories that I am fairly certain never happened. I still have to figure out what to do with them insofar as they are things I experienced and at times took damage from – at times tried to repress the emotions generated by, etc.

However, constantly being aware of the fact that my conscious experience is happening in my mind rather than in the “real world” is extrordinarily helpful. Among other things, it makes sense of some otherwise very nearly incomprehensible things that I experienced happening. One frustration I deal with is, rather like my discussions of money vs. value, I see a world out my eyes and wander around in a world where people are not discussing these things and don’t seem to realize they exist or that they are important. It seems to me that studying how neural networks behave, especially surrounding the questions of perception and generated reality, would be one of the most important branches of science. It seems to barely get a footnote, even though *all other scientific discoveries are having their results colored by the fact that the scientists themselves are neural networks and can not possibly get away from the fact that the experiments they are doing are, if not happening in their minds, at least having the results interpreted by their minds”

Anyway, I think that’s a good overview of where I’m at and how I got here. A few other things I’d like to mention in passing before closing this up. First of all, one of my major tasks to accomplish in order to reach my #1 goal is to remove all the inhibit wiring in my mind that is preventing me from being able to do lucid dreaming and dream control. There’s a particular set of experiences I want to have that I don’t seem likely to have on Earth, and beyond that, this gives me the holodeck. Who wouldn’t want the holodeck, especially knowing that it’s something they already own the hardware for and all they have to do is develop the software for it? I can’t fathom why everyone on earth who doesn’t already have it isn’t searching for the holodeck.

A second thing I’d like to mention is that because I can’t really know what’s outside my CE, I can’t really know what certain religions actually look like. From where I sit, most religions are bad things. They are collections of information that seem very unlikely to describe the actual higher powers that there are, seem very likely to obscure those higher powers through a series of very bad ideas, and through said bad ideas make direct communication with a higher power very difficult. They look to be self-replicating information – viruses – that in a number of ways disempower us and burn computing capacity we could better be using elsewhere. For a long time, I was very angry at Christianity for lodging in my mind and refusing to either compile and run or unload and get out of my way. At this point, with the help of my friends, I have been able to dislodge it and begin the process of deconverting. Anyone who can offer any support in the process of deconverting, especially places where the bible makes claims that are clearly absolutely false, please pass your strength along.