Never been one to let the carrier drop

I Waited Until My Wedding Night To Lose My Virginity And I Wish I Hadn’t

This is a battle I still face. To the extent that I am DID, I personally endorse sexings as a wonderful way to spend time with a friend, great exercise, something that I love how feels, etc. However, there are voices inside my head, so to speak.. not voices, that would make them too easy to identify and squish, more sort of.. text messages? Inherent thoughts? I think it’s the worst at 3 AM. Lately it’s had a lot less power over me, which is nice, but there is this inherent internal meme that I spend a lot of time fighting.. it’s actually more a set of memes. You’ve got the sex is sinful and wrong set (although I really hope that A: heaven is real and B: there’s a lot more sex and a lot less fear) but then you’ve also got the sex isn’t wrong, but YOUR breed of it is.. and then you’ve also got the boys enjoy it but girls don’t and similar sets of insanity.. as I said, I’ve got a set of alters, the most prevalent one being one that is a Root Rep of my mother, so to speak.. I think this definitely falls into the Pink Floyd The Wall thing nicely..

It’s annoying and I wish it would go away. Fortunately, it seems to be going away, so perhaps my wish is being granted. Anyway, the counterarguments are beyond obvious:

1) Sexual contact in my experience, at least the way I do it, is friendship-building and leads to really close and loving emotional moments. So it’s pro-love so insofar as God (the one we’re defining as defining sin here) is in favor of love they’re not going to be anti-sex.

2) How can something feel good and right and be a sin? I think this is the scariest one because there are moments where I believe this is possible and these are the moments where I believe God is evil. Athiesm is a preferrable mental place to this by a long shot. Living in a universe where there are no escape routes and God is evil is *disturbing*. Even if it’s only happening in your imagination for a few minutes it’s not a few minutes you’d really want to be present for.

I have to remind myself that there are parts of my mind that are not as well connected to my personality as a whole as other parts – parts where absurd and absolutist thinking make sense because of the limited context of available memory and experience. And yet, when ‘mother’ crops up even in my thinking, I want to run far far far away.

So, to hit the usual high points of discussion of what I believe about the spiritual universe, at least in passing.

I believe I’m not the biggest thing out here. So in that sense I believe in angels, Gods, what-have-you. I do *not* believe Earth has accurately captured them and put what they believe and want and need into a book – or if they have, I haven’t read it yet. However, I probably agree with enough of the talking points of Christianity that you could call me a Christian? Of course, this might also be true of Islam, certainly is true of the Unitarians, etc. I think it’s safest not to give me a label. But, I do think a spiritual plane *exists* – however I don’t think you can *know it exists* unless you already believe in it. This one is easy to explain – what you believe forms filters that affect what you experience, so you’re not going to get any signals you aren’t willing to accept. Now, on the other paw, I do believe every adherent to every religion experiences signals that validate their choice of religion because of how they’ve got that part of their mind set up. This part this far is things I’ve talked about many times, news to nobody.

I will say that I’ve had the first valid (to me) spiritual experiences ever, in a church, which leaves me a lot more open to the possibilities that churches might be good ideas, or at least not completely pointless. I think some of the mental damage I took comes from the fact that I was pressured a lot into confirming into a religion while I was experiencing nothing and feeling nothing of the spiritual domain.. it was just like I was tuning a radio in a empty band, while my parents spoke of God as if they were having a actual connection of some sort, and I was upset and didn’t want to go forward with this whole confirmation thing since I wasn’t having this experience at all, and they had already printed the invitations. I will own my own part of that, I should have been a *lot* more assertive. Throughout my entire childhood really.

Now, how does this all tie in with my mental illness? Well, I have to think about a bunch of questions. Am I sick because I wanted to experience being sick (in the course of a infinite amount of time a lot of absurd things become possible) or because I made some bad decisions or because some *other* people made some bad decisions? We’ve definitely reached the point in my story arc where I want to *stop being sick* – I mean, I’d really like to stop living on a world where the pyramid of needs isn’t just guaranteed covered, leaving you free to figure out what you want to do with your self-actualization – it drives me nuts that we let people starve to death and be homeless just so we can waste a whole lot of resources tracking our resources, and that no one can design a better system. But that’s a subject for another blog post. Anyway, I’m definately ready to stop having there be something wrong with my mind.. one of the things that was wrong with my mind the strongest, and is a lot less present right now, is paranoia.. persistant, irrational fears and the inability to lead my life because of them. As you’ve all noticed in my blog lately, I’m a lot more willing to just talk about whatever instead of letting my fear keep me silent. It may be a irrational hope, but I have hopes that as I talk about some of this stuff solutions will be found, patterns will be noticed, etc.

If we do believe in a God of Love, and we believe said diety wants me as part of *eir stable, then we have to ask some interesting questions. Does said diety want me to be sick? I mean, perhaps my mental illness makes me a interestingly shiny gem, but I like to think that a diety of love wouldn’t want to have people collected like specimens in a bottle but would rather have real friends, in which case having me not be sick, or not be as sick, would seem to be a desirable thing. And indeed I would say of late that I seem to be getting some sort of assistance from the spiritual domain. Of course, that might just be my imagination, but then, *everything* might just be my imagination.

Okay, so this is going to be a difficult couple of posts to do. I am crossing my paws I manage to do it all accurately and with as little observer bias as possible and in a way that doesn’t cost me any more friendships.

Whoever you are, you might want to start with Assume Good Faith. I don’t want to add any more pain and fear into a system (Earth) I already clearly see as having too much.

However, let’s talk about the deep dark past first, when my intentions might not have been so well formed. I feel the need to bring up the past because one of the reasons for one of the things I wish was different in the present *is* the past.

In particular, I’d like to start out by talking about my sister, who I think is probably the victim of a mental illness at least the size of mine. Now, at this point I have forgiven her for everything she has ever done. But, in my young-Sheer adventure, she was weirdly and scarily violent. I later discovered there was a lunar cycle thing going on there, but at the time it just seemed like sometimes, I got my hair pulled, I got punched, I got kicked in the stomach, often for apparently no provocation at all. And she had.. well, still has, last I checked.. this way of talking to me that made me feel about three inches tall. She was a master of word choice and tone of voice and all the things you need to make someone feel tiny and she used them.

Now, at some point in our cohabitation, I did something which I still (Sort of) regret and which is still (apparently) quite in her memory.. she was pregnant, and she had been attacking me pretty much whenever she wanted, and I threatened to kick her in the stomach. I don’t think I would have actually ever done it – my parents check my memory (or at least claim to) that I wasn’t violent towards *her* generally. But I had reached that mental and emotional place that I think is often referred to as “Enough”.

It had a dramatic effect on her. At the time I was quite pleased. she moved out! I think she didn’t trust her ability to not attack me (not something she had a lot of practice with) and she wasn’t sure she could still get away with attacking me whenever she wanted.

Anyway, I’ve never been proud of that particular moment.. as I said, I don’t want to add more pain and fear into a system that has too much..

Somewhat recently.. about five years ago I think.. my sister decided that she’s terrified of me and wants me to stay as far away as possible. As far as I can tell she thinks that at some point I’m going to end up raping her. This is difficult for me to credit insofar as A: I’m really militant about this whole nonviolent thing, B: I wouldn’t want to have the memory of having done it and C: This is so far out of my core personality that people who know me often laugh at the idea. But I guess if you’re 3000 miles away and learning about all my exploits via the internet it sounds credible, and I think there’s a little group of people in that position that have started passing the idea that they should be afraid of me around like a joint. And my sister is definitely a big part of that. Okay, for me this has been mildly annoying, insofar as she can’t be present at any family gatherings that I’m present at.. at some point I started realizing that it is yet another way for my sister to bully me, which resulted in me rolling my eyes a bit and sighing and wondering if she’s ever going to get over her Issues.

But lets move to nearer times for a minute. As most of you know, I have this repeating issue I’ve been having where every six months or so I go manic, black out, and end up in jail or a mental hospital after sending a bunch of emails to one person who wishes at this point I would go away.

Now, let’s get a few things out on record. If I had one wish without wishing for more, at this point, it would be to have my friendship with this person back. And I undoubtedly in these emails say a few things which are inappropriate insofar as a lot of my internal censors are not working correctly. They’re never threatening (because that’s not the person I am) or graphic, but clearly they make her unhappy and my inability to just stop has been upsetting everyone, myself included. Now, it’s possible if my sister wasn’t ostensibly afraid of me, this person would be willing to just talk to me and everything could come down from defcon 1, but that is not to be.

Obviously something inside me is not working right. For a long time, I went through the motions of going to shrinks and doctors and taking pills and surely this will fix me. Of very late (the last few days) I’ve started to ponder whether I need to take a somewhat more self-directed and aggressive approach insofar as I do have this sinking feeling that nothing is getting any better and it has been not just years at this point but a solid decade.

Anyway, so, it’s gotten to where friends can tell when one of these events is about to strike me.. I recently came from SoCal wound tighter than a clock spring and decided, if such a word really describes how things happen in this state (I think maybe the words “it eventiated” ) that I was going to go, not for the first time, to Virginia.

Now, there were some signs from the beginning that this trip was going to be different. Normally, I don’t actually get there, and I think that my mom has a good time calling the person who lives in Virginia and gossiping / winding her up about how afraid she should be of me. (If it sounds like I don’t have a lot of trust in my family, well A: I’m paranoid, we know that B: I don’t C: I have DID. That doesn’t happen because you come from a great family situation). However, first of all, the ‘Blackout’ phase of this trip was a good deal longer than usual.. over a day is completely missing, and the resulting jump looks to me like a teleport from the west coast to the east coast.. second of all, I spent so much time with crosstalk among alters that I ended up with a blister on my tongue.. I was present for some of that, and it was delightfully weird, as crosstalk among alters generally is. Third of all, none of the usual thing stopped me. I got a ticket in Minnesota, that didn’t stop me. I got stuck in St Louis because of the usual confusion of why we bother to do resource allocation tracking for food. That didn’t stop me although it did get me a three day hold. I finally got to $CITY and carefully did *not* go to person’s house (I was really hoping person would come out and talk to me on neutral ground, and either give me a Last Goodbye or, there was a bit of me still holding out hope, return to being my face to face friend)

What I did do was go to a bar and sing “Little Pink Houses” and “When The Saints Go Marching In” – I actually got invited up on stage with the singer, which fit my energy just fine. I talked to some old timers about being patriotic. I went to a church.. twice.. and both times had some pretty authentic (not to mention awesome) spiritual experiences that I have yet to fully grok but make me think I should go back to some churches. The church service was in Spanish. I think that helped *a lot* because the words didn’t make me mad.. and recently at a class I learned that only 7% of human communication is the words.. so I was a lot more aware of the tone of the experience etc. The second time I went to the church (a day later) they had live music and I think they were expecting me and ultimately I cried my eyes out about the whole situation, which has probably been something that has been needing to happen for several years now.

And I sat in my car and I waited. When it became clear person was not wiling to come to me, I decided.. partially as a matter of a way to make myself even less threatening and partially because I had reached the point where I did not trust myself at all to be myself after trying to operate a car while peaking on seroquel.. to check myself into a hospital and see if *that* would get me some kind of something.

Well, it did. Last Goodbye was apparently the answer, but instead of showing up to deliver it in person, I got a court summons and a protective order. This was both good and bad, and I still feel like I should have done things a bit differently here. It gave me a chance to hear person talk (and I *love* hearing person talk.. the way she uses her voice and her hands when talking just pets my brain somehow) and it also gave me something I had been really badly needing, a 3d memory that wasn’t text of rejection. See, the last time I saw her face to face she was behaving as a friend to me. And knowing as much as I do about information theory.. not to mention having *had the experience* – I know it is trivially easy to hallucinate text.

And I will say, she wasn’t actively mean about it. If my sister were ever to take out a protective order, she’d take advantage of the time to also make me actively wish that suicide is something that woudl work. (Repeated testing has told me, at least in my case, there’s a hypervisor, suicide doesn’t work. Not that there aren’t times lately where I wish it would). I can actually sort of imagine my sister describing how sick, perverted, useless, stupid, ugly, weak, and other undesirable behaviors I am.. I guess I have a alter who is a software model of my sister. Now there’s something I could use to lose.

Anyway, protective order… initially my response was “Well, if that’s what she wants, she shoudl have it” since I’ve never been of the position that if person wants distance from me she should have anything *but* that.. it’s just the alters that come up during a mania that, I honestly forget, have no memory of the times between. But, it occurs to me, this is giving said alters a tool to hurt me a lot a lot since person can now have me thrown in jail for sending her a email. I wonder if person has ever worn handcuffs the way cops put them on, which always hurts you paws, or been in a cold room of cinderblocks designed by idiot humans who think punishing is a good idea to send the message “You’re a bad person. You deserve to hurt.”. I also wonder if person really does think I deserve to hurt because there’s something wrong with my mind. I doubt it a lot.

Anyway, I already do hurt because something’s wrong with my mind.

I’ve begged God for a early death.. like, now would be good.. bu that’s not the sort of wish apparently that we get. So I’m stuck here, wishing I wasn’t. Maybe if I had a better attitude you’d still want to be friends. I do have a lot of friends, and I’m grateful for them, and I’m loved, and I’m grateful for that, and sometimes it gets all the way into my core and that’s very nice, and sometimes it can’t and that’s not so nice.

So, I was talking about things I might have done right or wrong. I got a lawyer, which might or might not have been a good idea.. as I said, I didn’t really exacly want to win but I also was willing to admit that it would be a good idea for me not to lose. THe judge, not too suprisingly, sided with person – I can’t really conceive of the situation where the judge doesn’t, since person is there saying “I want this person not to talk to me”, which really is a reasonable request and something we should all be free to ask for. My position doesn’t look very reasonable at all, since it’s “If I forget and do talk to you, I want to not go to jail.. “. I keep hoping if I develop the habit of writing the things I would have put in the emails into blog posts instead, maybe the next time I go manic.. plus, of course, as I mentioned, I now have a very real, visceral, 3D memory of rejection. And the wish that I hadn’t dragged person through all the unhappiness in the spaces in between. Not to mention dragging me through all said unhappiness.

What I wish most is that none of the ‘be afraid of me’ club were convincing themselves of something that, as far as I can tell both from the way I’ve behaved my entire adult life and from the way my friends treat me, makes any sense at all. However, this is America, and fear is something we love to sell ourselves, so I guess I’m not surprised to find people convincing themselves that I’m a threat.

More later.

So, I wanted to talk some about what this is like for me. Most of the time.. I’d say 99% of the time.. I just experience being me. I make choices, I see the results of those choices, I appear to have normal free will and it appears to operate normally. During a period of my life that ended in 2009, I appeared from my perspective to have almost no free will at all.. I actively wanted to be doing one set of things, or would even try to do those things, and my experience would be of doing other things. This was extra difficult for me because I wanted to get as far away from a romantic entanglement I was in as possible, starting (let’s be honest) a few weeks after the entanglement started, but I couldn’t. So, that’s one form that whatever’s wrong with my head manifests as.

I don’t do scary things to other people.. I mean, I don’t have memories of my doing violent things or forcing people to do things or knocking over banks or anything. I guess that’s one thing to be grateful for as that would be a bit more nightmarish than what I do experience. I do experience blackouts.. about every six months, suddenly I feel amazingly good and then.. from my perspective.. its just a blackout, and suddenly I’m thousands of miles away from where I started. Recently I got to sit in court while someone talked about how I’m not doing a good job managing my mental illness.. I don’t think this person realizes that I take the medication I’m assigned, I talk to the people in my mental health teams, and nothing gets fixed because, to be honest, this particular problem is probably a bit beyond what we understand so far about how the human mind operates. It’s a intermittent fault, which means that there’s no way anyone can know whether the drugs I’m on and the things I’m doing are working until the fault conditions are met and we find out, no, they’re not. Intermittent faults are hell to debug even when you’re not trying to debug them from *inside the running system that’s got the fault*. I won’t even start on my impressions of the medical system that the U.S. has to offer the average citizen, which appears to be way, way, way more concerned with privacy, not to mention who pays for what, than fixing *anything*.

Okay. This wasn’t supposed to be a whinefest and certainly I shouldn’t be whining at the person who’s life I’m degrading by constantly wanting to talk to her every time this intermittent fault activates because she certainly deserves it even less than I do. I was explaining what it’s like for me. (There is a part of me who thinks, *very strongly*, that this person should really talk to me *while I’m sane* because it could simplify everyone’s life a little bit, but this might just be because as everyone knows I want my friendship with this person back – although at this point that seems improbable – or even because even when she’s in court describing me as a potential rapist hearing her talk in her unique way of talking was making parts of me feel happy as other parts of me were feeling, wow, you really think THAT’S me? )

There are periods where I feel like I’m not the only one driving the bus. Like, I’m getting to add my *influence* but I’m not the only person around. That’s easier to deal with than total blackouts. I’ve been assured by various people who talked to me in (to me) total blackouts that during total blackouts numerous personalities are present. I keep hoping some of these people will guest on my blog to talk about what that’s like for them because I, for one, am interested. Sometimes I feel like my influence is very limited, like in the start of manic periods, and other times I feel like I have a fair amount but not enough, like in the periods where I didn’t want to be getting hooked up with a particular young lady but wasn’t able to say no in force of her very aggressive personality. I don’t, by the way, think that was in any way her fault. I think it was mine, in that I was somewhere to the left of submissive. See earlier posts.

I assume, after reading various things, that something hit my mind like a hammer back when I was a few months old. I have all sorts of guesses as to what that might have been, my most popular one being that my parents perhaps had a fight they don’t even remember having while they were moving from germany to the U.S..

It’s interesting to me, given the blackouts I have and the out of character behavior that occurs during said blackouts, that it’s taken me this long to acknowledge I have DID. All I have to say is, it’s scary. I remember many times thinking “There’s more than one person in my body..” but .. I don’t know. For the longest time I was deeply afraid of what people would say, or think, or do, if they knew.

I keep reading more and more about it, and it seems like it’s difficult to fix. I mean, I’ve been going to shrinks for years, taking whatever pills they tell me to take (despite rumors to the contrary), and while my life has gotten noticably better, it hasn’t gotten, you know, really good. But it’s still.. I don’t know.. it’s like you just finished changing a head gasket only to discover a thrown rod. It’s discouraging. It’s even more discouraging to realize that I don’t really have any way of knowing

A: How *many* people are in me
B: What exactly they are thinking
C: What triggers them to suddenly get control of the body

I know aside from manic periods that happen twice a year on six month centers it’s incredibly rare that I lose any time, which is encouraging but also a little disenheartening.. I don’t know of any way to trigger them to come out of their hiding places.

I know that a lot of positive things happened for a lot of people because of my latest bout of insanity. But I was ready to think the best about someone, and they were ready to think the worst about me, and that’s going to make me sad for a while.

I will, however, be posting the whole, as-I-saw-it-from-my-viewpoint story, complete with court cases, lawyers, protective orders, who’s-driving-the-bus-now, the whole nine yards. My friend Loren has been amazed at my honesty at times, and I am thinking this is going to be another post she’ll find suprising.

Someday, I’m going to have to tell the whole story of the last few weeks of my life from my perspective. It was really interesting getting a chance to see what paranoid thinking looks like from outside, as opposed from inside. It also brought me face to face with the reality that I have DID. There have been all sorts of hints of this.. from a few lost seconds an hour to police reports talking about multiple personalities being visible to hours where I wasn’t present. I was resisting the diagnosis, first because I thought it would make it impossible for me to continue my IT career (that remains to be seen), second because it’s supposed to be *incredibly rare* and I didn’t think that lightning would happen to choose to strike me.

But, someone talked to me on the phone during a blackout, and there was more than one me to talk to. That’s pretty definitive.

One of the realities that I’ve been facing a lot lately is that there probably is a wall between my conscious experience and whatever world I’m immersed in that is shaping my experience of that world, as well as a second virtual wall that is the result of my former beliefs. At this point I would say I’ve faced a couple of my biggest fears and not only survived them, but came out feeling better about myself (although a bit concerned about the sanity of a couple of my friends, at least in my CE)

That is interesting to be insofar as Pink Floyd has a whole album about the idea of such a wall (called, unsuprisingly, The Wall). I can’t help but find the lyrics of the last track hopeful:

All alone, or in twos,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and artists
Make their stand.
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall.

I do feel like I have a good idea how to remove said wall. One piece I really need to hold onto, really tight, for everyone’s best interests (mine included) is that what I’m looking for is something in the future, not something in the past. And that expecting someone to already be what they will become makes no sense.

So, it’s fairly clear to me that in the conventional sense, blame is pointless. Knowing who is responsible for the damage to my neural network won’t fix it. On the other paw, because a neural network stores data associated with other data, knowing who was responsible does help me figure out where exactly to look for the damage.

One of the more frustrating realities I live with is that I can’t imagine someone (Vicky is a favorite for this but I can demonstrate it with almost anyone) hugging me without seeing them physically attack me. I don’t have control over my own imagination where it comes to visual rendering. This is creepy as anything, especially when they start using knives or other weapons. I struggle over and over to complete the exercise.. I also generally can not remember the experience of having received affection from someone. I assume that these are related and the result of some profoundly weird neural wiring.

My mother facebook-posted something about how blaming other people was bad. Now, insofar as I’m responsible for all my neural wiring from the edge on in, and I shouldn’t have been subscribing to datastreams coming at me that involved violence or coercion, I get that it is at least somewhat my fault that I’ve had a set of experiences that have damaged me. On the other paw, I started out my ride on Earth close to tabla rasa – I didn’t have anything to work with, no context to use for knowing I should have been filtering out – or fighting against – some of the experiences I was having.

And, of course, I don’t really know if my family really did something bad to me or not. Because, as aforementioned, I could have very well created traumatic experiences out of whole cloth, simply via poor choices for mental configuration, about the only variable I can speak of with any certainty at all (and even that I can’t speak of with a great deal) is me.

I wish less people were having children. Until we understand the set of circumstances which led to my mind doing whatever it did or is doing, should we really be bringing more people here? Something is badly wrong here – and I don’t think I’m the only one having a disturbingly suboptimal experience.

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.

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.

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.