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 January 20 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 January 22 by LastThursday
its it's its it's its it's sigh

[LastThursday]

Growing up I've always felt very self-conscious. I'm not sure when it really started, whether it was when I was a young kid or a teenager. The general sensation I've had most of my adult life is that I'm being watched. I don't mean this is in a tin-foil-hat kind of way, but rather that if I'm somehow not conforming to some social standard or other, then I'll be caught out, and it will be awkward or I'll have to explain myself. It's extremely hard for me to explain without sounding like I'm paranoid (maybe my signature is correct?).

I could provide some examples, but they're so minor it seems ridiculous to go into any depth about them. There are several potential sources for my self-consciousness, they might be:

• Growing up with a very particular mother, and not wanting to do things "out of line"
• Being just more self-aware than the norm, or at least focusing on myself more intensely than is the norm
• Some form of autism, and not quite being able to judge what is acceptable or might be deemed weird, i.e. avoidance of awkwardness
• A form of hyper-vigilance stemming from growing up in a rough neighbourhood and having to always look out for myself
• Not being very good at explaining myself when put on the spot, and avoiding that sort of thing at all costs
• Having some sort of issue with self-worth over the years

There's been pros and cons to this, let's call self-consciousness.

A strong pro is that it has given me the ability to introspect and look at myself from a kind of detached viewpoint. I think this stems from constantly putting myself into someone else's shoes and judging "me" from this external viewpoint. And I very often use it as a way to correct myself when I go wrong: I behave impulsively, or hurt someone else, or I behave out of spite or whatever. Or someone tells me as much. I use to grow myself and I get clarity from intense introspection.

A strong con is that I'm constantly having to course correct my behaviour and appearance, "just in case". It can be mentally tiring, and inauthentic. Sometimes I just want to be an unkempt slob in public and not worry about it. Or, just say what's on my mind without having to curate what comes out of my mouth. At times my mask slipped and it's got me into trouble, but compared to the times that hasn't happened it's insignificant, mostly it ends up being a neutral reaction from others, or better no reaction at all.

And, the one thing that has changed in my later years, is that I've realised that most of the time people don't give a damn about what I'm doing. I've let myself off the hook a lot more. I see others doing and saying things completely unconsciously, where I would definitely need to check: "is that ok to say? is that okay to do?". 

There's still plenty of work for me to do to be completely comfortable with being "myself", but at least I'm aware, I'll get there.

[LastThursday]

It's not my style to comment on my own posts. But when I posted the following:

"Things could be even weirder. My first order distinctions may be totally incomprehensible to another person's first order distinctions. What you call colour, I may not even recognise as part of my experience. It's totally possible that if you suddenly become me, you wouldn't be able to understand my first order distinctions at all."

This made sense of something else I've pondered. Why am I me? I mean why are things experienced just from this POV and why can't I seemingly escape it? In short, why can't I choose to inhabit someone else's reality, why do I not spontaneously flip into being someone else, someplace else?

It could be because of the above self-quote. That what you experience in consciousness is fundamentally incompatible with my experience. In other words even if both my reality and your reality are happening simultaneously, I don't have access direct to your reality because I don't understand it. I'm in my own universe with its own flavour, you in yours. To begin to understand your universe I would have to be continuously exposed to it, so that your experience becomes comprehensible to my consciousness.

To use a radio analogy, we are on different frequencies. The world's radio is coursing through you right now, but you're totally unaware of it, because you don't have the consciousness to decipher the electromagnetic waves of those radio stations. You need a radio to convert those waves to something your consciousness understands. And so it is with people. 

So there is Consciousness (big C), which is a spectrum of all consciousnesses, yours and mine (a collective consciousness if you will). But we're permanently tuned into only one station, ours. 

There is a type of conversion that is going on however. We call it the real world, it's a shared space we're we can "see" each other, where each sub-Consciousness can have access to others' albeit in a limited capacity. 

The question naturally arises: can we change the channel at will? Any person's consciousness is simply an ongoing state of Consciousness we don't understand or "lock on" to, it is still happening along with your own consciousness, just like all radio stations are playing simultaneously. In reality there is only one Consciousness, which hives itself off into many parts. There are in fact no walls between all the consciousnesses, it's just that we've become habituated to our own niche. It may well be that people naturally have varying degrees of looseness in their experience of other's consciousnesses. Maybe drugs or practice or magick or meditation can loosen the narrow tuning we have. Maybe telepathy is nothing more than this unrestricted tuning, it's a feature of there being only one Consciousness.

However, even if we can de-tune away from our own consciousness, we'd have to re-learn someone else's consciousness, just like learning a foreign language. There's a common sensation that other people's experience are broadly similar to our own, your red is like my red - I think everyone's consciousness is wildly different, my red is totally unknown to you.

 

Edited January 31 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I feel like writing; something.

How does materialism fit in with idealism?

At first sight it would seem that the two are at opposites to each other. Materialism posits a world out there of spiritless hard tangible stuff. It's the default mode for most us, I mean it's very difficult to get away from the often harsh reality of the material world. But maybe it's also blatantly obvious that the world has its own rules and ways of being and most of it has nothing to do with you or how you choose to see it. For example no matter how hard I try I cannot turn a house brick into a brick of gold, that's materialism's ultimate triumph: the world is rulebound and transformation only happens very specifically, and there is no room for anything else not even a god. Materialism's other triumph is that we all share in it, the brick I hold in my hand is experienced by anyone who cares to look at it.

What about idealism?

On the face of it subjective idealism seems alien to most. When it says that the world is encompassed only as subjective sensations and perceptions, this seems absurd at first. What about that experience we all share in called "the world"? How is it I can say that only my first-hand experience of that world is prime and that the ideas of materialism are secondary, it seems to be untrue; what about when someone else's report of their experience, tallies with mine?

After a while of stewing in idealism however it starts to make much more sense. I really can't escape myself, in the sense that the experiences I seem to have appear to be unique to me. Even if the world is a shared experience I still have my own special viewpoint and everything is funnelled through that nexus. That realisation makes it difficult to explain anything at all without reference to that special viewpoint. In other words it is exactly as idealism says: subjective experience is prime. 

One subtlety of idealism is that it really is about unity. Since subjective experience is everything, it implies that "subjective experience" is in fact a monolithic thing. It lumps all the phenomena of perception together and says that those things are the only things in the world. But in that respect it is no different from materialism which posits a "world out there", in fact a monolith of a world out there with its types of matter and light and rules of interaction.

The thing with all being just subjective experience is that there is a kind of passive flattening happening. Stuff is just "experienced". However much this lines up with what reality might be - that reality is just a screen to which is projected experiences for us to perceive - there is that nagging materialist doubt: but what about the stuff behind the scenes that isn't experienced but still seems to affect what is experienced? How is it the world seems to be composed of stuff that doesn't care about our experience of it? Why does the world appear to carry on even if we're not looking?

I'd say that problem is acute for idealism. Yes, we can have experience of going on holiday to a foreign country, but idealism would say that when we return home in some real sense that foreign country ceases to exist: because we stop experiencing it in the now. Idealism says nothing about the consistency and permanency of the world, it doesn't even acknowledge a world as such, just an ever unfolding ongoing subjective experience. If you were to blink and suddenly find yourself in Italy (say), idealism wouldn't care, materialism would care very much.

A middle ground.

We can de-compose our subjective experience into nuggets called qualia.  These are the units of perception so to speak, there are qualia for sight and qualia for sound, qualia for touch and so on. The fact that bits of our experience can be put in categories at all is interesting in itself. There's a real sense in which the perceptions of sight are somehow all linked together, there is a kinship between red and green, light and dark that persists all over our visual field and temporally. I would say all those gross qualia with which we're familiar seem obvious to us and that they are our lived in subjective experience.

The idea of qualia can be extended to include more subtle experiences. There are qualia for "things" in the world. For example there would be a quale for chairs and people and bridges. Isn't it the case that when we see the car we own there is an instant recognition of it, we don't need to mentally calculate to experience it, it is very much like hearing a sound or smelling a rose, it is "just there". That's interesting because a car is a composite thing. It can be decomposed by our subjective eye into other parts such as wheels and metal and leather - all themselves qualia. 

But aren't qualia both gross and subtle just appearances to be passively recognised? Aren't they fundamentally ethereal and substanceless (in direct opposition to materialism), coming and going at their own whim? The quale of our car may appear to us once a day, but that appearance and disappearance seem nearly out of our control: we would have to stand in front of it indefinitely to constantly experience the quale. There's very much a staccato constantly disconnected sense to idealism.

Could it be that qualia are actually deeper than they seem, in function? Maybe qualia conspire with each other to keep the world in check. Whereas materialism says that matter and light rules the world, and gives it substance and permanence, maybe qualia does the same for subjective idealism. Rather than being a passive function of awareness, qualia have a life of their own. Their comings and goings already give motion and time to the world, aliveness, but if they were to interact with each other they would also give it that missing ingredient: structure.

What is this structure of qualia? Primarily it is a network of interrelatedness. Just as the quale of a car is composed of other qualia, the car is also connected to the other qualia in its environment, qualia are never solitary. A large part of our subjective experience is composed of interlocking contrasts; red is not blue, loud is not soft, fast is not slow. This interlocking network of qualia gives it a structure, not just the gross qualia of vision and sound and touch, but the more subtle qualia of objects, ideas and a sense of self. 

There is also a kind of stickiness to qualia, they have a pace to their comings and goings, everything is not happening at once. This stickiness is the ultimate cause of structure, for if it takes times for one quale to affect another to affect another, then structure can be maintained over time - all that's needed is a loop of interaction. This is what makes the world permanent. Even if we don't experience being in Italy right here an right now, it continues to exist precisely because there is this near infinite network of qualia communicating with each other in time, and it's this which scaffolds reality. Not all qualia are so obvious. Some are exceptionally subtle and nuanced, and barely in awareness, they are like near invisible strings holding reality together. In some sense we're aware of the universe all at once, and that is what keeps it around.

[LastThursday]

Some thoughts on drinking coffee.

I've been accused of not drinking enough fluids during the day. This is both true and untrue. I'm a great believer in paying attention to what the body  actually wants. Although, I do think people have different relationships to their bodies with varying degrees of bodily awareness. There is a strong fad the last decade or so to drink copies amounts of fluid in the day, I mean litres of the stuff per day. Before this fad people would drink normal amounts, which again varies from person to person. I suspect the underlying cause is bottled water companies pushing their wares. I think what my body needs in fluid may be below average or that I get plenty of fluid from the food I eat, but also I live in a cool country.

Another fad is the meteoric rise of the chain coffee shops, especially Starbucks and the like. Cafes and coffee shops have always been around since the stuff was discovered. The first coffee shop in the UK was opened in 1652 (https://oldspikeroastery.com/blogs/blog/history-of-london-coffee-houses), so it's definitely nothing new here. What is new, is the sheer number and the culture around coffee drinking.

I like the flavour of coffee, but I am very particular about what I like (just like with everything else!). Through experimentation I've plumped for latte and so that is my default choice. Results from different chains vary, Nero being top for flavour and strength. I like a robust flavour and good strength. Unfortunately, I don't tolerate caffeine well and so always have decaf, which again unfortunately is generally not as strongly flavoured as the caff version. None of the major chain coffee shops do decent decaf latte. The strength can also vary between take away and non-take away drinks - which is annoying, take away drinks generally being weaker.

Another annoyance is temperature, with often scalding temperatures being served. I suspect this just varies per shop and barista even. I've learned to wait eight minutes with my take out from Nero (as hot as the Sun and the same amount of time it takes light to reach us from the Sun (nerd)).

The last annoyance is just the sheer cost of the stuff, often being over £3 here, for what is essentially a cup of hot milk with a dash of coffee. And yet coffee shops all over are well patronised and even in my medium sized town. It seems incomprehensible, but then again I will regularly buy the stuff too. For me I just drink it on my lunch time walks, even though ridiculously I could just as well make the same thing at home for pennies rather than pounds. Why are the coffee shops so popular? Because they provide something that was sorely missing in our culture, a neutral place (indoors) were people can just hang out, and quite often meet up. Before the rise of coffee shops, in this country the pub served a similar purpose, and it still does in the evenings after coffee shops close. 

At home I have my beloved Bieletti moka pot, which makes decent coffee, just put in the ground powder, water and away you go. I gave up on instant many years ago. Although when I was a teenager instant was the goto, with the moka pot only coming out rarely, pre-ground coffee was a lot harder to get hold of back in the day. Some of my friends only have instant, which I drink sparingly, and begrudgingly (although I don't show it). I do also have a plunger affair for when I can't be asked to clean the moka pot which permanently sits on my stove top, it doesn't quite match the flavour of the moka pot though. My Nan always had Camp Coffee, which is a liquid coffee flavouring made from Chicory, I loved the stuff, I think it's still available in my local supermarket, I should try it again for posterity some time.

Failing making coffee due to laziness and quickness, I will have tea, which is nowhere near as enjoyable as a decent coffee, but it serves a purpose. Some days I find myself drinking copious amounts of tea, but really it's just punctuation throughout my work day more than a desire for fluid.

Ok, lunch time it is, time to walk the streets in search of expensive scalding coffee.

[LastThursday]

When you've been around for a while, you realise that many things have come and gone, some bad, some good. When you're very young things can impress themselves on your psyche more than any other time in your life. My Dad took up learning guitar again in his seventies, he was in a band in his teenage years with my uncle, and he always had a guitar around when I was small which he would play occasionally. He would sing as well.

Sadly my dad had a stroke recently and it really hampered his ability to play guitar, which is sad, I have encouraged him to persevere and suggested it might even help him regain his manual dexterity, but I can see the resignation in his face.

But both my sister and I used to enjoy his impromptu guitar sessions, and sometimes I wish I could get that version of my dad back and re-experience that just for ten minutes. Sometimes the small joys stick with you the most.

Here's some of what he used to play, as far as my memory takes me (and I can find on the internet). I should ask him next time I see him if I'm right.

 

[LastThursday]

More metaphysical wrangling.

I can't let go of trying to understand consciousness and its relationship to matter. I find myself thinking that there must be an answer to the riddle of that relationship. Does matter cause consciousness or does consciousness cause matter?

I feel that the answer lies in a combination of both ideas. When you have correlation between two things you can always ask: does A cause B or does B cause A; but the third case is to ask is both A and B caused by C? In so doing you explain the correlation because both A and B are products of C or have cause C in common. There is a fourth case which gets close to logical self referencing is that: A and B cause each other. 

Taking the third case into consideration, then you might posit that God causes both material matter and consciousness, and that is why they seem closely linked to each other. You might also posit that some other unseen mechanism gives rise to both matter and consciousness, and maybe they are cousins of each other.

The fourth case is interesting. There are actually instances of this in science, for example electromagnetic radiation (clue's in the name), where there are both electric and magnetic field components in relation to each other making up light. You might say that the reason light propagates at all is that the two fields are causing each other to oscillate, and that oscillation must occupy space and cause a sense of motion; A causes B causes A causes B and so on.

Another case were this sort of thing happens is with gravity. John Archibald Wheeler's quote summarises well: ""Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve". Again causation is happening in both direction, between gravity and matter.

I quite like the idea of this reciprocal relationship between consciousness and matter. It's not that either one is responsible for "producing" the other, but they are both in symbiotic relationship. In essence both are two parts of one thing, like having a head and a tails on a coin. You could argue that on the face of it consciousness and matter are completely orthogonal to each each other: the sensations and perceptions of qualia actually have nothing to do with matter itself, because matter is insensible to our perceptions of it, it carries on regardless of whether we "look" or not. And that the machinations and rules of matter interaction have no reason to produce subjective qualia, because it can well carry on without them (Occam's Razor). 

But it's blindingly self evident that however divorced matter is from the subjective experience, it definitely lives in the realm of subjective experience; a subjective experience we cannot ever escape from. However, it seems quite evident that people's subjective experiences can leave them albeit for short periods like during sleep or being knocked unconscious, and those moments are highly correlated with what's going on in the world of matter: I take a blow to the head and my conscious experience momentarily disappears.

We should be careful though with saying that matter affects consciousness, because it's really an argument about consistency: we know we've slept because it was dark before lost consciousness and light when we regained it, even if the intervening loss of subjective experience wasn't actually experienced. Likewise when observing others doing things like sleeping, we can never know what another person's subjective experience is, even if we wire up electrodes to their brains and ask them about it afterwards, we can only ever got a proxy view of it.

So what about it then? Is consciousness in a reciprocal relationship with matter and what is the makeup of that relationship?  To examine we can give up on the notion of the contents of consciousness (qualia etc.) is separate from the mechanism of consciousness. It's not that consciousness "gives rise" to subjective experience, no. The content of consciousness is in fact consciousness itself, without content there would not be consciousness. I mean content in a very broad sense here, for you could have consciousness devoid of all qualia except maybe one quale (that being the sense of existence or being itself). Imagine taking away each subjective perception one by one, and still being left with a sense of there being "something", but I would still call that content.

That way of seeing consciousness helps, because material matter also lives within the content of consciousness. Consciousness is not just base perceptions built up like bricks into a house of reality. Not really, consciousness is at all levels, both at seemingly simplistic atoms of perception like the smell of a rose, but also the sense of your friend Tom or the sight of Mount Fuji. If you get under the skin of consciousness there aren't levels or a hierarchy of phenomena at all, it all just happens in real time. The world of matter is happening in real time "within" consciousness, it is wholeheartedly the content of consciousness, and by extension is also consciousness itself (by the reasoning above).

It looks like then that consciousness is matter and matter is consciousness. How then does something like a blow to the head or taking a drug like LSD cause our subjective experience of consciousness to change drastically? How does the normal experience of matter reassert itself afterwards? 

The content of consciousness obviously has a huge amount of structure and permanency to it, it's not just a random assortment of disassociated perceptions, there is a strong coherence and consistency to it. I believe that these traits are not inherent to consciousness or its contents, just that consciousness has chosen it so to speak, it's a kind of habit that the content of consciousness behaves in this way. Materialism is just the name we give this habit of consciousness, but materialism isn't the only mode of its being, and drugs offer us alternatives.

It seems like materialism is real and constant, but actually this is just a very strongly ingrained habit of consciousness. Consciousness has infinite abilities to be in any mode it likes and infinite awareness and scope inside those modes, it can very easily maintain the entire cosmos without effort: it could very easily forget all that and do something else instead. In some way it has given itself escape routes precisely through those drugs and that very matter it imagines consistently and by dreaming during sleep. But consciousness is not primary, because consciousness is itself its own content and not outside of it.