Brilliant idiots
So, I can’t help but feel like humans are brilliant idiots. We’re especially good at things that require incremental improvement on a concept – I gesture you to computers in 1950 and computers now as a example – or cars, for that matter.
We’re not good at being happy. We’re really good at finding ways to NOT be happy. Epicly good at it at times. We also are not good at knowing when it’s time to put down the wrench and walk away. I mean, I give you, the species bright enough to come to understand nuclear physics – and stupid enough to make a hydrogen bomb and mount it on a rocket with target seeking capabilities.
I am smart enough to not mention the wingdinger of a idea for a tool for terrorism I came up with tonight, other than to say I would never, ever build one, and I would never, ever tell any member of my government about it. It’s stupidly obvious to me, and I only hope that’s because I’m brighter than the average bear, because I do not want to live in the world where they exist.
Then again, I’ve had a number of ideas for weapons, and most of them have never come to exist in this world. So either I’m smarter than average, there’s something basically flawed about my understanding of science (I kind of doubt this), or most people don’t want to make the world a worse place (I like this one) and the average murderous psychopath is also none too bright.
Then again, the possibility that Trump might some day have the nuclear launch codes is enough to make me want to go hide under something.
One thing that amazes me is that people who are not deeply happy, fulfilled, and capable have children. Accidents I can understand – but why would you deliberately drag someone else here to enjoy the suffering? Seriously, I think we should follow two paths
1) Try to make everyone here’s life awesome. At the point at which we’re achieving this, we can breed like rabbits
2) Try for voluntary extinction. Not by mass suicide, but simply by 95% of us not having children until we get to the point where we’ve got this suffering thing under control.
Now, I don’t always think this way, but there are times.. there’s something wrong with my mind, and it’s probably easily fixable, but not by our current medical technology. For those of you who don’t know, I fired my medications expert in August and for the most part I do not use psych meds any more – I use occasional small doses of seroquel when I feel like my clock speed is pushing out into the outer envelope. Now, I’m sure those of you reading about me talking to people I can’t see will want to draw a conclusion about how this is the lack of pysch meds, but this hasn’t had any effect I can see either way on my ability to talk to $future-person. What I do note – with a fair amount of anger – is that this December did not involve any trips to the psych hospital, or even any serious excursions into insanity-land. So the psych meds were either making things worse (likely) or just not helping (possible)
If I go insane again, I intend to hunt down Dr Amen and see how his process goes, because it is at least based on the type of science I can understand and get behind. As far as I can tell most shrinks prescribe based on the process of look up the class of disease, and then throw a dart at the list of medications that might help it. If the first one doesn’t help, try the second one, and so on.
So, my best guess is my neural net seeks a type of homeostasis – there’s a part of it that has a opinion about how I should feel and has control over the various glands that make me have emotions, and a part that has a opinion about how I should think, and has control over the various glands that affect that, and if I introduce outside factors like psych meds, eventually these systems integrate those into their math and still try to seek the same levels.
At this point, I’m concentrating on reaching those systems. I’ve got a whole host of helpful tools at my disposal – all of which $future-person helped me build, including a dashboard of the state of my mind that appears on what I refer to as my ‘third eye’ – i.e. the left-hand visualization space that my mind generates corrisponding to my left eye. (The fourth eye would be the virtual visualization eye that corrisponds to my right literal eye, and so forth. $future-person has tried to get me to expand these through a series of exercises, and it’s worked somewhat but not a lot – at some future date I might write a article about that process)
These are mostly gauges – how irrational the current fear is, current clock speed, neural activity levels, that sort of thing. Clock speed is definitely a way useful gauge, since with it I don’t need a EEG to know when I’m approaching the red.
Anyway, I fired my psych provider because I asked him a technical question about neural architecture and he didn’t know the answer, and instead of just saying “I don’t know”, he proceeded to lecture me about how there were more important things to talk about because I had experienced one of those intermittent faults I mentioned a few weeks before. Not helpful, and it was suddenly clear to me this person had no idea how to help me but wasn’t capable of saying so. So I did us both a favor.
I also can’t shake the feeling that my recently fired mental health provider is less happy than I am. This does not give me good feelings about his ability to solve my problems.
I think we *could* have a good mental health system. It’s kind of insane that we don’t put as much energy into researching neuroscience as quantum physics since the question of what we’re measuring with is as least as important as what we’re measuring. But one problem with capitalism is that any health system imbued with it is going to be far more interested in treating you than curing you. And I have a feeling that real trillion-dollar mental health, in a world with computers and good IO between them and the mind, would be a world of cures, not a world of treatments.
My problem is undoubtedly made more complex by the fact that I don’t want to just be uniformly happy. I can already have that if I want it, in several different ways. I want to have a complex emotional life. I just don’t want to become decoherent while I’m doing it.
One interesting thing to me is that one of the only times I don’t talk to $future-person regularly is when I’m decoherent. Instead, I invariably – and this is impressively dumb given the situation – try to search out present-day-$person, who doesn’t want to talk to me. And yet, I don’t think it’s so much that I’m confused and think present-day-$person is $future-person, as that I think it’s 1993 except that I’m suddenly empowered to actually say what I think and feel instead of being totally closed off in a little tiny shell with a free will box that has like three options at any given time.