Never been one to let the carrier drop

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.

For most of my adult life, I’ve had two wishes.. $PERSON and music. I broke my friendship with $PERSON – and I’m not going to claim it was anyone’s fault but mine – a very long time ago when I acted very badly at a party she was throwing at her grandmother’s house, and then I was too ashamed to talk to her about it. But I’ve always missed her.. and it appears I always will. This is somewhat complicated though by the fact that I talk to someone who is very much like her – and claims to be what she will become at some point in the future – in my mind. My consolation prize I suppose, if you don’t get your first wish perhaps the universe – or your own mind – will give you the next best thing. The person I talk to in my mind can’t provide the one way I have of authenticating the real genuine $PERSON – the way they talk – the pacing and cadence of their voice.

Music, of course, became something I could – and am – giving myself. I’m my own genie there – after all, it’s not a experience you can buy – you kind of have to earn it one day at a time. And I am.

One of my major challenges – what with wish 1 being what it is, and me missing $PERSON every day – is that when I go manic-crazy, I have no access to any of my memories. I have finally, and with $PERSON’s assistance in fact (thank you!) managed to store a authentic memory very close to my CE, where it won’t get lost even when I haven’t slept in 3 days, of her saying she doesn’t want me in my life and wishing me the best of luck. Of course, I wish she felt differently about the first half, but my god, I really can’t blame her. It astonishes me a lot of the time that I manage to succeed in the adult world as much as I do given the level of brokenness parts of my mind exhibit. I don’t know what happened to me, exactly, although I have some guesses.

One distinct possibility is that it has something to do with my sister. Now, my sister currently doesn’t want to see me, and I think her reasons mostly have to do with some pretty awful things that I did when I was 13-14. All of them I regret, all of them I think I have apologized for, and none of them I would ever do again, but I did break into her bedroom and watch her sleep, look at her naked in the shower, and then when I was 15, when she was pregnant and wouldn’t stop hitting me, in anger I said I would kick her in the stomach if she didn’t stop. Never would have actaully done it, and it kind of underlines how little she knows about me that she didn’t actually know that. But I was *so tired* of being her punching bag.

I would point out that the things I did to her that show a lack of respect for her bodily atomoy, *she earned* that lack of respect through repeated physical abuse of me. She can’t treat me as if *I* have no bodily atonomy and then expect me to respect hers – she broke me, and then was angry that I was broken. This shows a special kind of stupidity, a lack of respect for the laws of cause and effect.

Do I wish I’d done things differently? Of course I do. But I am beginning to really get annoyed at her weaponized victimhood of not wanting to see me and keeping me away from family events via that. The problem is I have no reaosn, to be honest, to think she isn’t just, well, basically evil. I’d like to have some reason to think otherwise, but we are talking about the person who repeatedly talked about, for example, killing my whole family in their sleep. This is NOT normal sibling rivalry stuff.

Anyway.. as I was saying. I don’t think $PERSON owes me anything, I’m grateful for the time and love she did give me, and I’m grateful for finally giving me a goodbye I can hold onto at the top of a manic peak so I don’t keep trying to get back to her. I also did eventually mostly solve what I was trying to reach her for, which is that my relationship with Kayti rather thoroughly broke me beyond the level of broken I already was. But maybe you have to really break before you can be fixed, like a bone being set.

That said, $PERSON, if you ever decide you do want me in your life, even as a call once a year for 15 minutes, I will be grateful for what you offer. I’m curious what you now thinks of you-then’s goal to be the CEO of Pepsi if nothing else. IF you change your mind, I am not difficult to find 😉

I do think I am going to make it to being a world class rock pianist, eventually. I wonder what my message for the world will be. I do wish Earth was a lot better – with better government, better resource allocation, more physical affection of all sorts, less people who think monogamy is the best answer, and more abilities to do what you want for a living instead of what will pay. I am curious when I will be able to make music pay.

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.

So, a long time ago, back when $PERSON still talked to me, back before my mental illness had picked it’s particular focus.. slightly before or slightly after the first really recognizable manic experience I had (I had a few before this but they always ended up with heavy duty coding sessions so I didn’t end up in any hospitals).. $PERSON asked me if I ever emptied the dishwasher. Now, from this distance, I can grok she was probably fighting with her husband-at-the-time about who empties the dishwasher. At the time I probably said something pretty noncommittal because I didn’t *own* a dishwasher and never at that point in my life had, although I had rented in houses which had one. But at that particular moment in time I was trying to live on minimum money in order to maximize the time I spent exploring music and so I was feeling pretty good to have air conditioning.

These days emptying the dishwasher is on my housemate/friend/etc’s chore list but I still do it pretty regularly – it’s one of those chores that I really almost don’t notice doing, and I can do it while I’m waiting for my coffee. I was pondering, though, today – almost writing this post in my head – how I am much, much more together than I was in my 20s as far as getting stuff done, showing up on time, etc, but I get a lot less credit for it. And I think it’s because by the time you’re in your 40s people expect you to have adulting down.

As may be. I’m still trying to be a better person every day. I really enjoyed my read of my friend Randy’s latest book about the bible, The Bible Reexamined. It fit in a lot with my beliefs, but it did re-amplify my desire to contribute to making Earth slowly more towards a utopia because it’s probably all we have or are going to have and at any case, we’re here now.

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.

So, one of the things I struggle with is the challenges surrounding sexual relationships. I think I’ve talked before about how I think a big part of this is that the memetics surrounding sexual relationships on earth are really not too good – we’re wired to fall in love more than once but we’re encouraged by the powers that be to mate for life, assured by various religions that non-monogamy is a sin (God forgot he wired us to fall in love more than once – or this is part of his grand plan for torturing us for being imperfect – a even bigger and more successful part of that plan is to ensure that sometimes we fall in love with people who don’t love us..)

Now, I don’t want to come off like a incel at all, but one of the things that I find frustrating is that feeling sexual attraction for people is very likely to end in disaster. Not only are the odds fairly low that you will be attracted to the same people who are attracted to you, but also if you do have a friendship that includes sexual overtones when the sexual portion of it is over you probably will never get to talk to the person again. I still miss Phoebe enormously, 15 years later, and Vinnie – although I will acknowledge that I screwed that one up in just about every way there was to screw it up.

Which is perhaps part of the problem.. sexual friendships bring out much more intense emotions than other friendships and so as a result things get a lot more extreme in general. I do think it’s true that we say and do things in sexual friendships that we would never do in others. And of course you have possessiveness and jealousy, both of which are *encouraged* in our current world memetics and turned up to 11 whenever possible in our world’s fiction.

Of course, another problem with all of the above is that if you’re going to try to follow the dictates of religion and mate for life, you have to find the right person – on the first try – while you’re very young and inexperienced – with all of the challenges that apply above. And you might end up with someone who physically or emotionally abuses you, because our memetics have set up situations that leave people in states where they do that, and then you should continue to live with the person no matter what because divorce is immoral. Yes, I have periods of really loathing earth’s memetics.

I also of course wish we could work out the whole ‘sharing’ thing. You would think, given how good falling in love feels, that we would want to encourage people to do it repeatedly, that if we in fact did love the people we are connected with we would want them to be happy. Part of the problem here, discussed many times by many different people, is the fear of abandonment – and the fact that Earth makes being abandoned quite dangerous at times, with worries about things like eating and living indoors. But beyond that I think that a very big part of what ails us is the elders feeling the need to know *which* humans are the parents of which child, and our idea that each individual should be responsible for caring for all the children that share their genetics. (In fact it would be *much* smarter for the entire tribe to be responsible for children – and then we could also stop having teen pregnencies ruin lives. But this would take away the fun of those who delight in punishing and love to sneer at the lack of morality of the teens that react to things *they are deeply evolved to feel*)

I do think a big part of the problem is also all the religious nuts who can’t accept that there are all kinds of signs that we are evolved and almost none that we are designed, and therefore want to blame us for things that evolution has done instead of trying to work out a memetic system that aligns with our evolution. I am sure you have all seen me talk about this many times before and I am sure I will talk about it many times again.

Anyway, I really hate the whole ‘if you are attracted to someone they may also never talk to you again’ bit, and I will be the first to admit that I have (partially due to mental illness) impressively screwed up communications with one particular $_PERSON on the subject. But I also think there’s got to be some middle ground and better communication methodologies that could be taught such that we had a lot less #metoo incidents and at the same time did not have no good way to say what we’re thinking and feeling without breaking any friendship or communication we have with people.

In short, the human memetics surrounding sex are a mess. I think pretty much everyone knows it. No, I don’t know how to write the perfect memetics surrounding the topic either. I suppose we’ll all just continue to muddle through, often with broken hearts and/or holes in our lives.

http://sheer.us/stuff/2020/SheerCoversIndigoGirls-DeadMansHill.mp3

(Toto : I’ll be over you)
(todo: record cover and place link here)

Some people live their dreams
Some people close their eyes
Some people’s destiny
Passes by

There are no guarantees
There are no alibis
That’s how our love must be
Don’t ask why

[Pre-Chorus 1]
It takes some time
God knows how long
I know that I can forget you

[Chorus 1]
As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
As soon as forever is through
I’ll be over you

[Verse 2]
Remembering times gone by
Promises we once made
What are the reasons why
Nothing stays the same

[Pre-Chorus 2]
There were the nights
Holding you close
Someday I’ll try to forget them

[Chorus 2]
As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
As soon as forever is through
I’ll be over you

[Guitar Solo]

[Chorus 3 with repeats]
As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
(Anticipating)
Someday I’ll be over you

As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
(Anticipating)
Someday I’ll be over you
As soon as my heart
(As soon as my heart stops breakin’)
(Anticipating)

Only one musical post in all of 2018. Going to have to do better in 2019. I tracked ten different songs that I didn’t think were good enough to release in 2018, and I’ve tracked three so far in 2019. I’m not sure if I need to turn down the lint level, or if I’m just working towards another plateu. On the other paw, it’s not like I get emails clamoring for more of my music or anything 😉

One thing I’ve really been feeling is the sense of missing people. I miss Phoebe, I miss $PERSON, I don’t really ever seem to get over the people I’ve lost. I miss my uncle joe.. I’ve even reached the point of missing my dad, who is still in my life. (I have set up a camping trip with him – I’m not so stupid as to not fix the ones that can be fixed).

One of the things with Phoebe is remembering and regretting all the stupid things I said, especially during our break-up. I know that I participated in breaking that friendship too badly to be repaired and I wish that I had a time machine so I could do things somewhat differently.

Ah well, we go on. What other choice do we have?

I think part of what bothers me about missing $_PERSON at this point is that it’s been so long since I had any kind of contact that I have *no* idea who she is. At some point your copies of copies of memories have no real reliability to them at all, and generation loss has pretty much etched that one away to where it’s nothing but a guess. That combined with the sense that the things that pushed her away were not really me – I mean, they certainly weren’t who I would choose to be and they all occurred in extreme mental states.

Recently I spent some time talking to a facebook friend who seemed to have been experiencing a extreme mental state of her own. A number of my friends criticized me for this, or at least expressed doubt that this was a wise use of my time, but I am fairly sure that what I was doing fit nicely inside my philosophy of ‘be excellent to each other’, and that if more people behaved the way I do, the world would be a better place.

and I have to admit as I research neural networks, my half – and often scarred memories – combined with blackouts – of the periods where I wasn’t myself are telling. I’m fairly certain what I was experiencing was islanding – very large collections of subnets, large enough to be able to respond to stimuli but not large enough to sustain consciousness. This brings up the interesting question of, in DID, are the alters conscious? I’ve always assumed that they are, but then I’ve been doing kitteny neocortex research that is making me question that assumption.

One of the things I’ve realized is that there’s no way we currently know to know whether a neural network is having a conscious experience or not. A NN will learn, and respond to stimuli based on what it’s learned, whether or not the ‘magic’ of consciousness is there or not. At this point I tend to agree with the person who theorized that consciousness is what information feels like when it’s been processed, but I think that’s only true in a very specific context which likely has to do with the way temporal memory works. However, in building my unsupervised learning system for the kittens, I found myself implementing something very similar to short term memory because in order to do unsupervised learning in the model I’m currently using, you have to let LTP create the bindings first, *then* learn the lesson. You also have to keep track of previous lessons so you can unlearn them if they turned out to be wrong. (At least, to solve my particular problem that I’m working on at the moment you do).

I haven’t really come up with any new years resolutions – I have a vague sense that I’d like to exercise more, vape less, eat less, write more music, and generally try not to break anything critical about my life.

So, my first post of 2017 will be a bit of neoclassical – this actually started as a completely improvisational attempt to express my sadness, pain, fear, and other negative emotions surrounding a situation in my life. Whatever else you can or can’t say about it, I think some of my emotions when I played it come out nicely in the recording. Happier stuff in the pipeline, folks, including a cover of Angel From Montgomery that cooks pretty well, but for today, this is what we’ve got.

Vicky2.