Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I’ve come to have a pretty good understanding of most of the process.

First of all, it seems like my subconcous plans for these even though my concisous mind doesn’t know about them. I am not sure why although one thing I would note is I come back each time with new abilities and they have also enabled me to fight a entity in my mind which isn’t me and which wanted me dead. (I have a feeling that I’ve largely won that war with this particular battle, although maybe this is just the optimism of coming back fresh from a slaughter)

Anyway, first, I get the urge to stay awake for long periods of time. Staying awake often feels very good for the first 48 hours or so, and then starts to feel, um, less good, but I get the urge to continue anyway. Somewhere around 96 hours, it becomes necessary for my brain to do the maintenance that normally is done during sleep. This is largely releasing neurotransmitters that have been uptoken – uptook? – during neural firing. There is a *reason* this is normally done during sleep. When I have it happen while I am conscious, I lose access to most of my memories for a while. In fact, I have to do a repair process to get anchored at all. I will normally check myself into a mental hospital or do something that cues society to do so, because I shouldn’t be working on anything computer related while I’m doing the restart procedure.

The restart and repair process takes a few days. The fastest way to cue it is to force sleep, for which normally 100mg of seroquel is adequate. Using larger doses of seroquel is not advised unless 100mg is not adequate, because Seroquel is actually antagonistic to restorative sleep, but of course, you have to get into the sleep process. There is also a self-test procedure that I will automatically run, mostly involving remembering song lyrics, parts of my past, skills, etc. Often there will be many neural chains that have to be relinked – this usually presents as me not being able to remember lyrics and reworking the same song over and over until I can.

Recently I said to my sister we have got to stop this ridiculous not talking to each other. One of the things my sister said was “You will not like court”, which implies she has some terrible list of things to say about me – maybe she was planning on getting $PERSON to tell the tale of how I’d repeatedly tried to get to her and therefore was stalking her..

Um.. wait a second. I *never*, after the first time, got to $PERSON’s house. I kind of assume this was by design. I certainly could have. I was often within a few blocks of it, but I knew she didn’t want to see me. I don’t know what I was doing, or looking for, exactly, my subconcious is full of interesting stuff, but I don’t think it’s really all that scary to come to within a mile of someone. Especially given that I’ve never owned any weapons, never been charged with sexual assault, and would rather die than hurt $PERSON or force her to do anything she didn’t want to do in real life.

Did I send her a bunch of very confused and probably scary emails including one that could easily be interpreted as very inappropriate? Yes. Wish I hadn’t done that either. It felt so good to be able to talk about what was wrong with my mind.. I tried to back off and range by asking her where her lines were since I’d obviously crossed one – and I was so used by this time to having friends I could say almost anything to – but. alas. It was a fuse, not a breaker, that I had opened.

I’ve offered my sister a apology for anything she wants. I think as far as changed behavior I already have. she has *NEVER* apologised for her psychological abuse, for her threats to kill my family, for her repeated physical abuse. I wonder what all she would trot out in a court case, and what she would say. At this point my theory is her goal is to get me disowned so she can get all of the inheritance.. or maybe she still, for reasons I can’t fathom, just takes joy from hurting me.

So, here with a new set of thoughts. The first is wondering how often I subconciously plan my runups and occasional mnetal crashes. It would be nice to think that I don’t do so – I’m not cosnciously aware of any plan – but the timing gets increasingly suspicious each time. I seem to plan them for minimum damage to my life, if I do plan them. I am not aware of having any plan.

I figured out something that’s vaugely terrifying.. in the same vein as my theories about Milgram – if we accept the idea of the human mind as a loose confederation of subnets rather than one cohesive whole – which certainly fits the data – then we have to consider that any lie created within the system is inherently dangerous to the system as a whole. For several reasons

1) A ‘lie state’ network has to be created to remember which subset of individuals have heard this lie, unless it’s consistantly told to everyone
2) Routing of some firings occur through fairly complex means and the pointer to the data will end up being inaccurate because it’s not the truth

The biggest problem will come if the user of the mind thinks they can lie to themselves. This is NOT going to end well – among other things, #1 becomes reentrant (ponder whether that’s the right word.. recursive might be better)

Once I realized that lying is both using capacity better used for other things and is literally causing brain damage in that it’s leading to incorrect routings and signalling inside the mind, I resolved to confess all my lies, no matter how difficult, and to never do it again.

Another thing to contemplate – if you are lying, you are on the side of noise rather than on the side of signal. I know which side I want to be on in that particular battle.

Yet again I seem to have overestimated my ability for being alive and landed somewhere where the doors won’t open. Probably not for that long – I’d certify myself sane now, really. One advantage, painful though it be, I have a immutable memory of a rejection from $_PERSON which hopefully means that loop can bloody well die now and I can mourn what could have been without thinking there’s any path back. And still try to learn balance and health from what I knew to be true about them. $_PERSON, should you happen to read this, you have my sincere thanks for your kind and well worded rejection while I could actually write it to memory. I know none of this is your fault and you didn’t deserve any of the flack and annoyance factor that came from my mental issues.

In upcoming sheer’s mental guesses about neural architecture, look for a post about why creatures of our type should never lie.

I am wondering if we would think more reasonably about mental illness if we called it by what I think might be a more appropriate name – neural misconfiguration.

The vast majority of these are the results of either our current very stupid memetics (things like our current religions and our misunderstandings about the nature of life, love, and happiness) or abuse from others as a secondary effect of same.

side note: It is no kindness to let a friend hurt you. They will regret it later.

So, last night I had a dream in which Phoebe had written a book about all the things about me that sucked when I was 19. Of course, I had to agree with a lot of them myself. Sometimes that all feels like a different lifetime.

I do think I like who I am now a lot more than I like who I was then – or, for that matter, liked who I was then at the time. On the other paw, I think I had to go to that place to get to this one – at least I don’t see a process that would have given me the dedication to do the things I need to do that hadn’t gone through some of the unfortunate steps needed to get to this place.

One of the topics I do occasionally worry about is what if there just isn’t a objective reality? Since we know that our minds are easily powerful enough to generate a experience of reality being created out of whole cloth, this seems possible. It would explain how for some people the Jan 6 USA misadventure was a bunch of tourists on the lawn while for a bunch of other people it was a armed insurrection, for example. It could of course go a lot further than that. It’s a worrisome concept, because it can’t be disproven – but if there isn’t a objective reality I’d really like to reprogram the simulator so that *my* reality is more what I’d like to be doing.

This is going to be a article about one way mental illness can occur, with some side digressions into how we do not do a very good job of treating this particular way mental illness can occur.

So, those of us who don’t believe there’s some sort of voodoo going on in the human brain understand it to be a very, very large neural network. It has 10^11 neurons, broken up into probably somewhere around 10^8 subnets, and those neurons have both excite and inhibit inputs and are also affected by the chemical soup they live in in a number of ways – including that there is a limit to how many times a neuron can fire before it has to uptake chemicals that permit it to fire because firing uses up resources, that a bunch of neurons firing near each other are all working out of the same resource pool, and that the presence of various other neurotransmitters (and even some more exotic things like moving electromagnetic fields) can affect firing probability.

It is also possible there is additional voodoo going on – I’ve seen arguments that the brain is using relativistic effects, that it is using quantum effects similar to a quantum computer, that it is a lies-to-children simplified version of the actual system brought into Earth to help us understand, that it is actually a large radio receiver for a complex four-dimensional (or more) wave, and other less probable explanations. We can discuss things like how this relates to the soul in another article – this one is based on the idea that yes, it’s real hardware, and yes, it follows real physical laws.

One thing commonly commented about people who are experiencing mania is that they appear “fast”, sped up, and indeed you can observe in some percentage of manic folks a increase in the frequency and amplitude of some of the various “clocks” the brain uses to help synchronize operations (i.e. alpha and beta waves, which themselves are somewhat mysterious insofar as a EEG is only picking up a gross average of millions of neurons and even that is not likely to be too accurate given that the electrical signals have passed through the blood-brain barrier, bone, etc)

Anyway, it seems completely reasonable to think that during periods of mania, signalling is occurring faster. One clear law of nature we’re aware of is referred to as the Shannon limit, and it’s the idea that for any given bandwidth and signal to noise ratio there is a maximum signalling rate that can be successful. Attempts to exceed the Shannon limit (by signalling too fast) result in a breakdown of communication – the exact failure mode depends on the encoding method being used and some other variables.

I am fairly clear that some of the undesirable behaviors and effects of mania are the result of some of the signal pathways involved in connecting the various subnets that make up a person’s decision trees experiencing signalling that exceeds the Shannon limit, thusly resulting in islanding. Side effects here can include loss of generation of memory (and apparent ‘jumps’ in time from the manic person’s POV), extremely poor decision making akin to having inhibitions suppressed by alcohol, and all sorts of interesting delusions. I think all of this is what happens when some of the longer inhibitory circuits stop carrying data, or meaningful data, because they are signalling beyond their Shannon limit and thusly the signal arrives at the other end either hopelessly smeared or of inadequate amplitude to cause the neuron in question to receive the excitory or inhibitory input.

In my case one clear case of islanding that has been repeatedly observed is the presence of multiple personalities. This is not that I have DID but rather that this is what happens when islanding occurs in a neural network – you can think of a natural neural network as somewhat holographic and indeed a number of experiments (too many to document here, but I can write a separate article about this topic if there’s interest) bear this out.

(I should also clarify for those of you who aren’t familiar with operating a electrical grid – “islanding” occurs when individual parts of the system are out of touch with each other – in the case of the AC grid this would be because they’re physically disconnected or too far out of phase with each other to allow a connection to be made – neural networks can display similar behaviors and it’s possible to experiment with this with ANNs simply by progmatically disconnecting bits of them. We’ve had chances to explore a lot of the different ways islanding can behave in a natural neural network because of stroke, head injury, various experiments such as cutting the corpus callosum, and the like )

It is possible that this state is even a evolutionary advantage as having something which causes some members of the tribe to take risks they would not ordinarily take may be how we got to, for example, understanding that lobsters and crabs are edible. There are certainly advantages to taking intelligent risks.

Of course, one problem we have with this is that often people in this state will commit crimes and while they are clearly not guilty by reason of insanity, our legal system loves to punish folks and is ever eager to make more money for the people running private prisons by putting them in jail. (It’s also extremely profitable for the lawyers). I suspect the majority of nonviolent criminals are just unable to manage the imperfect nervous system evolution has given us – survival of the fittest turns out not to be the best fitness function for creating creatures that are well suited to today’s world – and also a number of them are probably victims of abuse from predecessors that also suffered from similar problems.

In the meantime, the solution that I have found – using stepped doses of a psych med stepped according to how fast the system is trying to run in order to prevent revving past the Shannon limit – seems to be frowned upon by western medicine. They prefer the ‘I have a hammer so every problem is a nail’ approach of using a steady state dose no matter where in the cycle the individual being dosed is. The net result of this tends to be that the best medications for depression are hugely inappropriate when not in a depressed state and the best medications for mania are hugely inapprorpiate when not in a manic state – therefore the patient ends up overmedicated and often decides to go off the medication because of the damage to their quality of life the medication is causing.

On the other paw, using a stepped dose – this is far easier when the cycle is predictable as mine is but can probably be done via measuring various metrics if the cycle is unpredictable – I don’t know, I haven’t had a oppertunity to test it – leads to very good results. There is no overmedication during periods that are not either manic or depressive peaks, and in the case of medication that suppresses mania you avoid amplifying depression – and also the drug does not lose control authority because it is not being overused.

(In this article, when I speak of a stepped dose, I mean a dose scaled to the need that steps up as the system tries to run faster and down as it returns to normal. One advantage I have that may or may not work with all people is I can tell how fast I’m running by how long it takes to get to sleep, and can step the dose up until I’m able to get to sleep within a hour of initiating sleep)

I should also mention that even with a stepped dose it is very helpful to have some complex activity to engage in during manic periods in order to keep a load on the engine, as it were. I suspect it helps a lot to have activities that follow hard laws (programming, electronics, etc) in order to avoid drifting too far into mystical/magical/delusional thinking, which is another risk involved with mania.

So, the other day I called a friend I hadn’t talked to in a few years, and discovered I had again waited too late to call someone back. It’s not that they were dead (although I’ve had that happen too) – but the conversation went something like (me) Hi! (them) Hi, Buddy! (me) How are you doing? (them) The grass is in the chest (me) What did you say? (them) I see. It didn’t improve from there either. Dementia strikes again ;( If there was any connection between my statements and their responses I couldn’t find it.

In some ways I think it’s actually harder when someone is fading in that way than when they actually die. Because there’s this tantalizing ‘almost’ about the link, like there’s this sense that you’re just in a bad reception area and if you moved things would get better.

Another reminder to stay in better touch with the people I love 🙁

So, as I rant about conservatives, one thing that worries me is that I may be somewhat a victim of confirmation bias, or worse yet, input enhancement.

I’ve talked before about how every adhrent to every religion sees their religion validated in the world – and my theory that part of how this is achieved is by filtering out all the data that is obviously inconsistent with their beliefs. At times I worry – as one does – that the reason I see all this horrible behavior from conservatives is that I have come to expect it – and I’ve come to expect it because I’ve seen it, and I’ve got a self-reinforcing suboptimal setup for my input filters.

The challenge there, of course, is to expect something other than what I’ve seen.