Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

@MuadDib it reminds me of a time when I nearly knocked myself out messing about making chlorine gas. Never smell the chemicals. I didn't even know friction drilling was a thing, tungsten carbide is the biz.

[LastThursday]

A bit of wordplay for the day.

I fancied I might travel through my mind to an ocean of sand and blinding light. Night fell and I was coolly touched, the breeze whispered and all was peace and calm. Fatigue overcame me and darkness enveloped my being, my mind drifted here and there sweetly untethered. What unease then when in that night blackened desert an even darker form manifested. I reached within for a mote of recognition but there was none, my only defence was to call out to the form. "Ho! What goes there?". All was silence for a while. And then it spoke without mouth or voice: "I've come to take you away." Terror overwhelmed my mind and I scrambled to escape. But it was no good, the form morphed and seeped into my every pore until I became it.

I woke and the sand and light was blinding.

[LastThursday]

A little thought experiment on death.

Say you had a close family member who had been diagnosed with an incurable disease. He has been given anywhere up to a few weeks to live. You visit them and they seem as well as they can be given the circumstances. You leave and a week passes and you've received no update on them, no information at all. Are they dead or alive?

Like Schrödinger's cat, since the family member is not a quantum object, then they are not in a physical superposition of states: they must be either dead or alive. Note that the same ambiguity exists as for the famous thought experiment. The ambiguity is existential. The resolution to it is easy enough nowadays, you can contact them, or at least contact someone who can physically check in on them. In other words, information resolves the ambiguity. Could there be a different resolution?

What is death but a permanent cessation of information about a person? The only way you can ever know that a person "lives" is to receive some information from that person, either remotely or face to face or from a third party. Whatever information you do receive triggers the "is living" signal. Note that to truly know if someone lives, we must keep receiving information to that effect. Whenever the information flow stops, then we are immediately back in the ambiguous position and have to guess if they still live. We must "fill in" information and using heuristics like "they're young", "they're healthy" and so on to do so. I'd say in general we heavily bias in the direction of "living", we treat each other as if we're nearly immortal.

But we could bias hard the other way, and assume that as soon as we lose sight of someone's presence (information) they are dead - this is just as logical. Although, the most logical position to hold is that there is a 50% chance that the person is dead, at all times. This would hold for everyone you knew. This is just a probabilistic view and would seem somewhat natural.

Information is king however. We can have a more dynamic view of aliveness and death. We can solely base things on what our senses are telling us directly. When we are not currently experiencing a person, instead of pretending, we can just accept that they are dead. When we re-experience a person (in the right way) we can say that they are alive.

Expanding this idea more broadly to inanimate things, things are constantly popping into and popping out of our experience. We can instead take a stance that all that exists is only that we have direct experience of. When it goes out of our direct experience it stops existing. Only then is there no ambiguity to be had.

In a strong sense we are (mostly unconsciously) playing the game of probability using prior knowledge to bolster our assumptions. We pretend that things don't suddenly stop existing, that fit and healthy people don't suddenly die when they leave our front door. That if we chose to we can call that friend at any time. Occasionally, we're wrong and the person or place or thing doesn't ever come back into our experience, and we should grieve. But we should acknowledge that there is this constant and dynamic interplay between existing and not existing, alive and dead - and maybe that makes grief easier.

[LastThursday]

Some morning thoughts on giving up work.

I periodically get into a state where my tolerance for corporate work becomes low, and I get all sorts of negative thoughts and feelings arise. Despite having worked nearly all my adult life I've never really been well suited to working for someone else, it's always felt like putting a hand into the wrong glove.

The list of things that bug me about work is long, but includes the long and rigid hours, having to kow tow to someone else's arbitrary whims, being in a collective of people you don't necessarily gel with, not being recognised for the effort you put in and the general drama of office politics. The general sensation I have is that if I were to drop working tomorrow, I wouldn't miss any of it whatsoever.

I have not worked before for extended periods either when I have been laid off or when I've had the money to keep me going without work. On two ocassions I've had enough money to stop for six months or more. On another I couldn't find another job. I know full well that stopping my regular income is like jumping off a cliff: at some point you know you'll hit the bottom. But it is ultimately liberating, my time becomes mine again, and I don't have to tolerate that laundry list of dislikes I have about work.

However, only once did I use those "free" periods to do anything productive with and that was when I went travelling. I'd had some money I'd saved up after a lucrative contracting job in London. At that time I really was in a mental state where I needed to just be somewhere else and be someone else. I was quite driven to shake my life up. Long term it didn't really change much of the make up of my life, but it did give me what I wanted at the time.

And that word "productive" comes up often whenever I talk to anyone else about stopping work. The sentiment goes something like: "What productive thing are you going to do when you're not working?". To which my general reaction is "productive?". You see the framing is all wrong. The whole problem I have about working in general is the expectation that I should be producing something. That is at the centre of all that is wrong with the whole idea of employment. Essentially, I'm not a machine and I've never really wanted to express myself that way. The huge irony is that I spend all my days interacting with and thinking like a machine, since I work in information technology. But, there's a big difference in trying to (creatively) bend a machine to your will, and being treated like a machine yourself.

I know myself well enough and unless I have something to focus my attention on, I will effectively languish. I've kept up wage slavery because it's the path of least resistance. To a degree is forces me not to languish, because it requires my attention and I get recompensed well for it, but I don't like it.

Recently, I have effectively switched jobs despite still working for the same people. Whereas before I was working mostly by myself and catering to an external client, and was fairly autonomous; now I'm part of a team and learning the ropes again and answerable to others. In some ways taking a new job would be easier as the expectation on me would be less and I could be cut some slack to not know what I was doing. But I don't get that pleasure, I'm expected to "hit the ground running" but also be answerable to others who are effectively more senior by virtue of their knowledge: they wrote most of the software I'm working on.

I think I need to quit, and to do it soon. But I also never want to work in the corporate world again. And I have no plan to keep me from languishing if I do so. But I do have a large cushion this time, so I can fall further off the cliff before I hit the bottom. It might be time.

[LastThursday]

My Default Mode.

Do you have a default mode of interaction? You might call call this personality, but I'm referring to the more specific way in which you communicate. For example you might be amiable or sullen, combative or laid-back. One trait I see among many men is being jocular; outside of the purpose of being jocular (to de-escalate tension) it is a way of interacting. One trait I see among women is laughing or giggling very regularly or another is apologising.

I suspect that most of us are not aware that we even have preferred ways of interacting with others. Seemingly, we just "talk". But like a fish not knowing it's in water it's quite hard to step out of ourselves and examine how we are when we communicate with others. We might want to do this for several reasons, the most important of which is to improve our communication and ultimately improve our relationships.

Let's give it a shot myself, warts and all:

First the stuff I actively want to portray when communicating:

For a long time I've wanted to appear laid-back to others. I think my natural temperament is calm and unassuming, so it is an extension of that. But also I've worked out that people liked me for being laid-back. In general that means I want to also appear to be in control and not easily flustered. I'm not a natural leader (in that I don't take to it willingly), but if the situation requires it then I can be; so I at least want to set up this expectation. I also abhor confrontation and conflict (I've had too much of it in my life), and having a laid-back style communicates this fact, it helps kept conflict to a minimum.

Secondly, I want to appear intelligent. This is an odd one. On the face of it people don't generally like know-it-alls or are suspicious of people more intelligent than them. I think it's a natural reaction to the unknown: how can you comprehend someone motives when they comprehend more than you do? For me it's ended up being a balance, appear intelligent enough for my needs, but not so much it puts people off. I don't always discern the right balance. IRL I'm dumb myself down greatly and how I write on here is not who I am when talking to others, at all. Question is, why do I want to portray this? I think it largely comes from my parents, especially for my mother who often used the "I'm not stupid" line as a defence and my father who is a know-it-all at times - it's my reaction to both those. But also it is a way to bolster myself up against others, and project "I am worthy" vibes or even more accurately "Don't mess with me or I'll embarrass you by making you look stupid" vibes. But I also want to be taken seriously when I have something to contribute and I think it helps if it's coming from a place of intelligence. Most people find it ok, some disklike me instantly on sight for it.

Stuff I end up projecting even though I don't want to:

With people I don't know well, there's always a level of fear or awkwardness I feel. I think it ultimately stems from my mother, she was also quite apprehensive about others and would get easily flustered if she was out of her comfort zone. I seem to have ingrained that sensation of recoil when I don't feel in control around others or I fear not being able to handle a social situation. This has hugely improved since I was a kid however, and calling it masking or just sheer exposure and experience I'm a lot less awkward and anxious than I used to be. But it does fly in the face of me wanting to appear laid-back. Occasionally, if I'm tired or not on-the-ball, my mask drops and I become awkward: I forget people's names, my mind goes blank, or I say weird things - but I've realised on the whole people don't care, so I've stopped caring. Whether it's autism or not, it doesn't matter much. 

I'm more of a listener than a talker. I'm a lot more aware of this nowadays and but this tends to me my default mode in groups, especially if I'm not much interested in the current topic. I have always preferred one-to-one conversation because of this, but this is rarer in my life. But even one-to-one it's work for me to keep talking about nothing in particular, but I somehow manage it. I'm fundamentally an introvert, with some occasional  learned extroversion when it suits me. I do try and pipe up a lot more in groups nowadays if I become conscious of it, but I don't crack jokes lol.

Snarkiness and bitchiness. I always feel that there is this little devil in me who just wants to be bitchy. In this respect my mother and father were polar opposites, by mother always poking holes about other people, by dad always super respectful (sometimes too much). Maybe some of it has rubbed off on to me. My default reaction when I see bad behaviour in others or when they upset me in some way is to be snarky to put them in their place. It is not in general that I want to put others down, I don't, in fact the opposite. But luckily I seem to be very aware of this inner bitchiness and I mostly keep it on a leash - but one area I need to be very conscious of it is when writing emails (or on this forum!).

Sarcasm. I learned sarcasm not off my parents (they wouldn't know if they fell over it (lol)), but off my first girlfriend's father who had a flair for it, a big bald man with ginger hair and a beer gut. His forte was sexual innuendo, which I do enjoy, but within my circle of friends goes down like a lead balloon - they're so straight laced. My mother was a bit of a piss-taker, but that was more in a slapstick sense than actual sarcasm. I don't enjoy toilet humour however, far too unsophisticated. I would say that it is also very much a cultural trait for us Brits, and it doesn't come off that well when talking to other cultures.  I used to be a lot more unconsciously sarcastic when I was younger. Again, I may employ sarcasm in a snarky way to keep people in their place, but I enjoy it occasionally just to be cheeky and make others laugh.

Seriousness. Another odd one for me. I have a strong streak of seriousness in my character which I get from my father (he takes himself seriously), but unlike him I don't take myself seriously (in order to seem important). I'm mostly a lot more serious in one-to-one conversations and a lot more jovial and light-hearted in groups. I don't know which is the real me, probably a bit of both.

Aloofness, arrogance, disinterest. I think I've been accused of all those over time. Despite not being that kind of person at all or even wanting to be, some people get those vibes from me. I think it's the blend of unconscious seriousness, pushing my intelligence and not talking in groups that does it or at least that's my interpretation as to why. 

Not being taken seriously. This is something that's grates on me and has done for a long time. This can take the form of my views not being considered or just rejected out of hand, or, people not even feigning some sort of interest in what I have to say, or worse just being ignored completely. Perhaps it's the combination on not talking up in groups, or my not having strong opinions on things or my dislike of forcing my ideas on others. I feel like I have a lot of experience of "life in general", but I'm not worth listening to - or at least that's my impression, there could well be other reasons why this happens which I'm totally unconscious of currently - more awareness is needed there on my part to get to the bottom of it.

Overall, I'm not someone who is or wants to be "in your face", and I'm especially not "self important". I'm not a huge chit-chatter (except on alcohol for some reason). I'm not particularly serious or at least it's not my intention. I especially abhor moralising in both myself and others.

Edited September 6, 2024 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I'm a closet perfectionist - I confess. If asked most of my acquaintences would say I was not, and may even say that I'm the opposite: anything goes. I suspect we all have an inner rocky core surrounded by a soft atmosphere of maturity and sensible experience. I've worked hard to be an anti-perfectionist. But I still feel that twinge of pain when I lose, when things don't go my way, and when reality doesn't match idealistic expectation.

There are many things I want to be perfect at, I want to play the piano like an angel, I want to use perfect words to gain admiration, to be the best in my field of technology, to be unified, whole, unbroken and a perfect example to others. I'm none of those things.

A few years ago I watched a program about the concept of Wabi-Sabi and it clicked that my self-enforced anti-perfectionism was just this. Wikipedia says it's: "a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection". It started of as a way to ameliorate the pain of imperfection and being less than, somehow I would just pretend that the pain didn't matter. In the end it became the counterweight to my perfectionism, and it's given me a kind of freedom of expression and abandonment that I wouldn't have otherwise experienced. But the soft blanket of Wabi-Sabi still hasn't seeped deeply into my rocky core, that would be the ultimate perfection.

Still. There are moments of unforced perfection. Those moments when someone allowed me to kiss them sweetly, when I played Bach without a hitch, when I didn't worry about myself, when the rain fell but the sun shone. I savour those moments. I'll continue to balance myself on the tightrope between perfection and imperfection and hope I don't fall.

Edited December 8, 2024 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I've come to realise that even when I'm dreaming (asleep) I'm still me. It is the same me as from waking life in the dream. This is curious as my dreamscapes are not a carbon copy of waking life. What I dream doesn't match, but who I am when I dream does. There is a strong sense of continuity there from sleeping to waking. Whenever I awake however, at some point it's like a switch is thrown and waking life comes flooding in: all the concerns minor and major and I realise I'm back "here". So in that sense some part of me is lost or inactive when I'm dreaming. But I'm still often embodied in dreams, albeit occasionally with another person's body (or anatomy!). 

That isn't to say that my dreams are not sensible, in that they mimic waking life, populated with characters and places and generally not fantastical in appearance, just fantastical situationally: walking in railway tunnels or hovering or hanging off a balcony ledge or exploring brooding rooms.

I often wish I could switch off that part of me that switches on when I wake up. I do remember being a child and feeling much more like I do in my dreams; there isn't a running commentary and anxiety about every little thing, I just was, and integrated into my surroundings, rather than being a separate thing that doesn't quite fit, or at least has to work at fitting into my existence.

It's that integrated seamlessness that I experience in dreams that I want permanently when I'm awake. A kind of non-fragmented unity, a sense that I belong in waking life and everything "just works". There are of course moments when this does happen, in social situations, or when drunk, or walking or driving, where time and inhibition disappear and I become one with my environment, but even then there is still contrivance and effort involved.

Being that I at some time transitioned from being permanently in a dreamlike reality when I was a child, to the state I experience now, I wonder what it was that triggered the change? Did I really "wake up" when I hit puberty, or did I just become fractured and divorced from the comfort of "the waking dream"? I have successively woken up more times since then, and into my current state, each time having more clarity and seeing further. But, each time I somehow got pushed farther away from whatever it was I am actually supposed to be. Now I can't get back there easily, I have to sleep and go into another world entirely. 

So it looks like I will have to keep awakening just so that I can live a dream. What a merry-go-round.

 

[LastThursday]

Killing time, slowly and quickly. Floating above and on. Seeing everything, and nothing. Living with purpose and aimlessly. 

It's funny really. The body lives with purpose and forces that upon our other self. This other self works completely differently, it's not innately anything and so is constructed out of nothing, like a sand castle. Try as it might this other self cannot overcome the body, it needs sleep, it needs food, it gets ill, it gets old and fragile, it needs warmth, it needs to be used, it gets tired, it needs to reproduce. The other self is in complete thrall to body. The other self, can be so blind that it doesn't know why it feels bad, but the body always knows. The other self tries to subdue and control and modify the body to its own ends, and those ends of other selves. It's mostly in vain. Should the sand castle be kicked over and exposed for what it is? This self says no, it has an iron grip on its own existence. Instead it likes to get lost in itself and weave ever more complex threads into its fabric just so that it can justify itself: but it's always just a butler, a gardener, a major domo to the body's whims. When the body dies, all those machinations were for naught.

[LastThursday]

Majorly procrastinating today. I have zero interest in doing work. Just want to listen to music, potter around, walk, talk. Anyway, occasional poetry, ha! Inspiration from on old cassette tape I found:

Barely a woman, 
I fell in love,
With a man from heaven,
He spoke sweetly,
Said he would meet me,
Said he would call me,
Sometime, somewhere.

Barely a woman,
I fell in love,
I couldn't care even,
Called him weekly,
Said he would court me,
Said he would marry me,
Someplace, somewhen.

Hope, hope, hope.

Barely a woman,
I fell in love,
Said I would leave him!
Why wouldn't he meet me?
Said he's just friendly,
Said he'd married already,
Yesterday, yesterday.
 

 

[LastThursday]

I seem to have entered another "chatty" phase in my never ending journal. Anyway.

When my mum passed away - now four years, yikes - I took the stuff that had some sort of sentimental value or attachment from my childhood home. I knew at the time that whatever I didn't take would be lost forever. Whilst clearing her place, there were one or two things that I expected to see, which were missing.  Maybe my mum gave them to my sister years earlier.  Mostly it was jewellery, and especially my gold baby bracelet inscribed with my name. I also did manage to displace my first school satchel and first school books in the clear out, and so lost them forever, which makes me kind of sad.

She had a bunch of photos (2000 odd), which I wanted to share with my family, so I began the never ending process of scanning them and uploading them on Google Photos to share. It did strike me as a bit odd at the time that I was saving something tangible and long lasting, by "saving" them in an intangible ephemeral way - and which would succumb to time first? the digital or the analogue.

As well as sharing and archiving for posterity, it was a kind of personal archaeology. I was able to connect back to the events and people that had made me who I am now, and got reminded of who I used to be. That youthful me is still inside me, both in a sense of being a kind of separate entity, but also how he still influences the me now. I'm a chimera of the old and the new. Surrounding myself with those memories makes that younger me "come back" to an extent and I also see a number of similarities in circumstances between my teenaged self and myself nearly forty years later. I do wonder what my dad and sister experience when looking at those same photos. Most of it feels like a very familiar but now foreign land, both in memory and in culture and in my identity.

There were also books and magazines. These also make me remember what I was into when I was a kid. The usual boy stuff I suppose, dinosaurs and planets, ancient history, computers, maths and adventure books; the famous five, and sci-fi, the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Br'er Rabbit and Rupert the Bear. I scan through them occasionally to get glimpse of my old self again, and compare how different I am now to him. But some of those same interests never really waned.

I also found a load of cassette tapes which have been gathering dust the past four years (and probably decades more than that!). I had to buy a new cassette recorder to play them - I had an old cassette Walkman, but it was inconvenient to use. On them were a mix of music mostly recorded from radio, which my sister had done in the early nineties. And I also found a copy of a tape that I'd remembered but had been lost, it made me kind of laugh to play it, it's so ridiculous: Klaus Wunderlich on his organ - look it up.

There were plenty of computer tapes too. I still have a working computer that I could load them on to, but not an appropriate cable, and I don't like to fire it up too often now for fear of something unfixable breaking on it. I use an emulator on my PC instead. But what to do about scanning the tapes so I could play them on the emulator instead? I wrote a program on the PC to convert the sound waves on the cassette into digital bits and bytes, it mostly works ok - how does linear regression and standard deviation sound, maths, I love it. I was reminded of what I was doing probably forty years ago now. In one of the files I found a diary I'd kept for about two weeks, with very quick and short entries: Fri, went swimming at school, Mon, met up with John - that sort of thing. I worked out I would have written that in January 1984, blimey. My grammar and syntax were so different then, very "London" - I'm so much posher now, lmao.

I don't know why I'm so intrigued by this sort of personal archaeology. It's perhaps because soon after I went to university, there was an abrupt disconnection from my childhood, and despite just still being a teenager at 19, I very quickly became an adult and closer to the current version of me. I wasn't aware enough at the time what had happened, and was just happy to be someone new. Now all this time later I can reconnect and patch over that abruptness in my life. It's an ongoing process, so I can become whole again.

Edited Monday at 12:31 PM by LastThursday
Grammar, and perfectionism.

[LastThursday]

What is an object or a thing?

I often come back and think about this problem. Why's it a problem? Because objects and things are not static, they break, deteriorate, slowly change over time, lose bits, get bets added on, change form and on and on. If you identify an object as such and such a thing, then if it changes over time does it continue being that such and such a thing?

This paradox is exemplified by the Ship of Theseus, whereby a ship has all its parts exchanged over time, until none of the original ship remains: is it still the same ship? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus.

I was always confused by this paradox, because it attacks the idea of object permanence in the world. It's clear that if you wait long enough (and that can be a very long time), that nearly all objects will change in some way. How is it then, that we can confidently identify things in the world and give them lasting names? How do things persist in the world? Why is it when I wake up in the morning, I identify it as the same place as when I went to sleep the night before?

A partial answer came to me recently, and it was blindingly obvious. Objects don't exist "out there" in the material world, they are simply conventions, ideals and simplifications we use to navigate the world. The Ship of Theseus never objectively exists, but wholly subjectively exists. That's why it can have its parts replaced and still be called the same thing. If a person loses their leg in an accident, they are still a person. The persistance in the world seems to be wholly in our subjective experience or more accurately a choice is made about the permanence of a thing, whether that be consciously (as in naming something) or unconsciously (as in the idea of a chair).

I say partial answer because we can all agree that even if everything in the world changes, your sofa is still your sofa and seems to continue being so over time - it never seems to suddenly disappear one day and reappear the next. And giving your sofa a different name or calling it a chair, seems not to make much difference to its existence: i.e. it appears to objectively exist "out there". But we can continue the thought experiment.

Say your friends play a trick on you one day, and when you're out, they replace your sofa with an identical looking one (bear with me). You return and none the wiser you assume it's the same sofa. It's the Ship of Theseus again, the whole sofa has been replaced, and yet you think it's still the same sofa. How does that happen? Because the existence of the sofa is wholly subjective. Maybe after a while you realise something's up, the sofa seems fresher and more plump, and then you realise it's not your sofa! How does a sofa suddenly change like that? Because it's all in the mind.

We largely recognise the permanence of things not in isolation but in relation to all the other things around it. When we go out we know it's our neighbourhood because the buildings, roads and other things form a net of interrelationships with each other. There's a kind of snap-to-fit to recognising things in the world. Our sofa continues being our sofa because we have a platonic form or subjective template of our sofa, and when we receive stimuli in just the right configuration it snaps-to-fit to that form.

When we navigate around the world we walk through that net of interrelationships, snapping-to-fit as we go. We see our friend "Victoria" and recognise her as such, because all the stimuli are close enough to her platonic form that it's good enough - and she's also in the right place at the right time (i.e. in relation to everything else around you). She may be having an off day or wearing new clothes, but it's still her isn't it? Maybe she has a twin?

Yet, it's not a complete answer, because somehow even if we're existing in a platonic snap-to-fit world, stuff just keeps on coming back, and not only that that set of interrelationships between things in our environment seems to be quite stable. There seems to be this conspiracy in our subjective experience to create a stable world seemingly separate from it. Why?

 

Edited Wednesday at 11:30 PM by LastThursday
its it's its it's its it's sigh