Archive for July, 2023

Love and Christianity

Sunday, July 16th, 2023

So, I have yet another disproof of Christianity. (I know, I know, I should really let go of this obsession – but a figure driven by Christianity still gatekeeps my dreams – a copy of my mother as she was when I was young – and I really have to get it and her entirely out of my mind, and I feel like coming up with arguments against it helps this process)

This one’s really simple, and is based on my experiences with $_PERSON.

If God loves us, Hell would also be a good place.

Love does not want the beloved to be unhappy if the beloved wants nothing to do with the one who loves. Love wants the beloved to be happy and healthy and have everything they want and need. Anything lesser is a misunderstanding of love. Part of what’s so upsetting about $_PERSON not wanting to talk to me is she might not be okay and I would never know and there would never be anything I could do to improve the situation. I cannot *fathom* a God of love choosing for someone to suffer because they didn’t want to be near said God. I also cannot fathom said God deleting such people, as some have suggested – the idea of $_PERSON ceasing to exist is inherently extremely painful.

To me, this is a obvious doomsday knell for Christianity. The one Christian I presented this too suggested God is goodness and that there can be no goodness without God. This shows a inadequate understanding of the data universe.

Good feelings, in us, come from good experiences. Love is inherently in our hardware so even if we are banished to another realm we are still going to love, and we are still going to try to give each other good experiences. Good experiences are *data*, and *God can’t make data become unavailable from the universe*. My example was God could decide to banish the number 2, but if a computer runs for($i=0;$i<10;$i++) $i is still going to contain 2 right after it contains 1. It's possible God could actively, via hostility, constantly erase such things from our memories, but there is no possible way you're going to claim that Loki-God is a God of Love.

In Anathem, Neil Stephenson speaks of a very important idea – he speaks of it as the Hylaean Theoretical World, or the HTW, and it’s where all the perfect abstract concepts live that we iterate through when we use our imaginations. It contains, for example, every possible set that can exist. Now, you can imagine a computer that has a portion that can work on countable infinities mated to a classical computer, and you can imagine that you could use such a computer to, for example, find and iterate through every data element that would be every possible hug from a particular person, for example. Of course, in the real world, we find these data members using much more clumsy but intuitive means, like hugging people, but the point is that the *experience* of a hug is a data experience to us – it’s a bunch of information being streamed to our brain from our body. And that dataset will be in hell – in fact if there are multiple Gods or multiple universes that data is in potentia available to all of them, because the HTW is *bigger than God*. It’s a different type of entity than God could ever be – and it’s certainly not all good. Those same datasets have every way you could ever be tortured, for example. But the point is, it’s not something God can make “go away” because it’s not a concrete manifestation. Just as God can’t change pi no matter how hard he tries, he can’t make any place lack goodness. So that argument also does not hold water.

Here we go again

Friday, July 7th, 2023

So, after many years of not having any manic excursions at all – to the point that I thought I had my situation sorted out and I was all good – I had a really bad month involving my family having health problems, there being much doubt as to what was going on with my job and with the job of a friend of mine, and a fight with a coworker..

Anyway, so, said individual talked to me in a similar way to how my sister once did, and it ripped off a bunch of scars and suddenly I had PTSD. Random crying jags, random bursts of fear, random all kinds of stuff. And I took my eye off the ball, and I ended up manic.

Well, of course, even though I try my hardest to pretend it’s not there, the $_PERSON shaped hole is still there in my mind and always will be. I can’t stop missing her, or stop wishing I hadn’t broken the friendship, and now thanks to Amy’s death I’m aware of the fact that we might not speak again – or, if we do, it might be in whatever lifetime comes next. While my internal whatever-she-is $_PERSON is better than nothing, among other things, It really bothers me that $_PERSON thinks I could be any threat to her or her family. But, she clearly does.

On the other paw, we also might still be *here* 1000 years from now. Post the singularity my crystal ball cracks, and near as I can tell, if Moore’s law holds we’re 7 years from that. ALso, of course, it seems likely we are already *in* the singularity. Both topics I wish I could talk to $_PERSON about.

Anyway, when I’m sane, I won’t contact her, because she’s asked me not to. I wish she would rethink this, but wishing that is about all I can do.

When I’m not sane, I lose all my memories except the memory of loving and trusting her. And I head for her like a homing beacon. Except I can never get there. I always end up in a psych hospital instead. Usually because I realize about the time I’m almost there that I am nuts and/or some part of me remembers she doesn’t want to talk to me. This time I called 911 on myself.

It’s the biggest problem in my life at this point. And I am totally out of ideas for how to solve it, although a friend did suggest writing a letter. I wrote one while in the psych hospital, but there’s all kinds of things I wish I’d put in it. I’m going to write another one after talking to a trauma therapist about whatever what my sister did to me did to my mind. Hopefully I can remember to at least hit a few of the high points, including that *what she’s seeing is not a good representative sample of me*. It’s not in fact me at all – it’s portions of me, while other portions are islanded. When I go manic, I exceed the shannon limit for some of the longer axial connections in my brain. My theory here is the newer the memory, the longer the wire.

Part of what frustrates me is it’s not like I become someone so different that I would force her to do anything, or wouldn’t go away if asked. I mean, heck, I will probably run away even if not asked from my feeling of rejection baked deep in my own mind. Definitely something I Need to fix

I recently read the four agreemnets and I am trying to use my word more positively. THis is harder than it sounds.

$_PERSON, I don’t suppose it matters to you that if there was one person in the world I could talk to, it would be you? In the extremely unlikely event that you’re reading this, tell me any conditions you will talk to me under again and I will honor them. I am not completely fixed, but I am much less broken than I was when Kayti broke me and I called you for help. A significant part of that, I will acknowledge, is a apparent copy of you residing with me who I talk to regularly. Not quite the same as talking to you and I’m intensely curious as to how the experience of having children, etc, has changed you. I also wonder if one of your children had my mental illness and was in my situation what you would advise them to do.

A very long time ago, you asked me who I would have on my island. I guess we know the answer now.