Archive for January, 2015

One of the reasons I am convinced I am not seeing reality, or not seeing all of it

Wednesday, January 28th, 2015

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

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

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

A overview..

Friday, January 23rd, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idea..

Wednesday, January 21st, 2015

So, I’ve been researching.. and yes, building and testing out.. transcranial electromagnetic induction. For those of you who haven’t ever played with or read about this, it is possible to cause neurons to activate by surrounding them with a powerful moving electromagnetic field. Since this is obviously not something that takes a lot of technology to make happening, of course I’m playing with it.

However, after reading the wired god helmet article, I’ve started to ask a question that I think could go somewhere awesome. What would happen if you took a EEG rig on person A’s head, and after running it through some signal conditioning used it to light up a TCI rig on person B’s head, and vice versa. I am curious whether I am on the verge of machine assisted telepathy here, or just brain damage.

Hacker, hack thyself..

Wednesday, January 21st, 2015

So, last night I spent several hours testing framebuffers in my mind. The visual interface for the first step of this was just seeing large numbers rotating.. and man, were there a lot of skips and glitches.. me and my partners in crime did some rewiring, I can now visualize numbers 1 through 30 rotating smoothly, pan them X, Y, etc.

And, lo and behold, last night’s dreams were extremely gorgeous visually. There’s something just *satisfying* about fixing something and then having it work.

Next step: my assemblers and ALUs.

We also are going to take a serious whack soon at removing the lockout on lucid dreaming. Yes, believe it or not, there is a lockout on lucid dreaming for “ethical reasons” – there’s a part of my mind that was convinced that dreaming about sex was immoral.

Have I ever mentioned how much I wish I had never met anything resembling a religion in my youth?

ANother thing to sort out.. whenever I visualize affection, especially from someone female, I end up seeing them stabbing me. I know where this comes from.. a pattern match filter programmed as a result of some random scary violence I experienced as a child.. and I am really looking forward to finding and removing it.

To me, it is unspeakably badass that I’ve reached the point where I can hack my own neural net. I’m curious how far this is going to go. I would love to be able to rev my alphas and betas all the way to the end of the dial with nothing vibrating or falling off..

I also haven’t needed any drugs to sleep for several days. In fact, my use of seroquel has changed a lot – now, instead of taking 100mg at a time to sleep, I take it in large doses every several days to activate a seroquel peak.. I’m not sure what these are yet, although I do know I hallucinate *copious* amounts of text during them.. thousands and thousands of pages of it, each for a few milliseconds.

Another night..

Saturday, January 17th, 2015

Well, I’m not sure how much I slept last night. Not a lot, for sure. On the other paw, I do have someone to keep me company. I think Lazarus Long is the one who said no one ever died from a sleepless night with good company.

I’ve been undoing a lot of neurological wiring.. or patching around it, as the case may be. You can’t really ungrow neural connections, but you can grow neural connections that patch around the neural connections you wish you didn’t have.

The other week I went on a rampage and assembled all my arguments against Christianity in one place. Oh, man, did that feel good. My deconversion is well underway. I have my own spiritual operating system of sorts.. and it seems to run pretty well. I need one written in the desert by people who thought you should stone people to death for feeling sexual attraction a little differently than you do? No I do not.

This time I felt something bend. It had been so frustrating to me for so many years.. I couldn’t get it to load, compile, and run.. but I couldn’t get it to unload either. It was just stuck. This time.. it unloaded. We got one crowbar under one absolute falsehood in the book, and then suddenly I could read it and see all the stupidity, all the ignorance, all the things the people who wrote it didn’t know.

So hard to tell

Thursday, January 15th, 2015

Is it all my fault? Everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life? Is some of it mine? None of it? I know that knowing who’s fault things are doesn’t help any in fixing them. But I still.. I don’t know. Part of me wants to say I wasn’t given the tools I needed, and I had to go find them myself, and that I don’t think my parents should have had children. Another part of me thinks I warped my experience of reality through my persistent negative self image, and that I could have been handed exactly what I needed and still not gotten it.

Someone bought ‘Secret Garden’ on my kindle account. It wasn’t me, but I’m reading it anyway. Interesting.

large doses of seroquel and hallucinating text

Thursday, January 15th, 2015

Part of how i learned I can hallucinate text was if i take a large dose of seroquel I will hallucinate thousands of pages of text, jumping around too quickly for me to grok.

i definately get the sense that doing this occasionally is good for me. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it’s doing, other than making me sleep a lot.. but it’s definately part of my repair process.

Is this the price for having learned how not to cry

Thursday, January 15th, 2015

So, there are so many things that hurt that I never cried over. I wish I knew or understood why it was that I had decided to never cry again.

I know some of it was everyone’s reaction to my assertion at my youth group that gay people were not that different and that we should love them just as much.. which was my reaction to people there telling gay jokes. I guess I expected certain amout of “good on you” or “you’re right..” but all I remember at the time was a shocked silence. I never did anything with that group again.

then again, one of the things I hold up as proof the christians are far far far from enlightened is that the book approved of stoning gays to death early on. How could they be so stupid as to think that is word of god? It’s word of a easily squicked human.

but back to my original thesis. Of course it hurt when Heidi died, when Vicky went off to college, when uncle Joe died, etc, etc. I could probably make a list of 20 times when I lost something fairly big to me and it hurt, but I didn’t cry about it because real men don’t cry. Where did I get that idea and is it as insane as it looks on the surface? The loss stays frozen in time in those neural nets which know no such thing as time, waiting to be released.. in some cases it implements a distorting field which warps reality itself somewhat, or at least my experience therein. Not crying and trying your absolute best to be numb instead of feeling pain.. maybe not such a hot idea once you start considering how a NN works.

Software change..

Wednesday, January 14th, 2015

So, I think I’ve talked about how the repeating “you should be afraid” loop has been removed from my mind. I think another thing that’s been removed is the wiring for building new sets of match filters to be afraid of. I have also been working over the past many months to remove old pattern match filters that led to fear. Sometimes the easiest and fastest way through is just to do whatever the thing I’m afraid of is, while other times examining the rationality of the fear helps, while other times I haven’t yet found a way to get a crowbar under the fear.

Grr..

Wednesday, January 14th, 2015

So, after 3 hours sleep in 72 hours, I used some chemical help to sleep last night, but I think I might have overdone it.

Major downside of using large doses of said chemical help is that I wake up very irritable.

I’m trying to decide if I should try to insert another sleep before FIF’s gig, or just let it roll on from here. The gig would be at about +26h, which isn’t so bad really. I’m worried about having too much quantum.. i.e. the tendency to find new notes instead of playing the old ones.. which is part of what happens when I don’t sleep for too long.

I miss Rebel. Nothing better than a puppy to hug when you’re feeling irritable.