So, for those of you who haven’t heard my blurb on this..
Most of you know that my consulting business is called numbermining – and that the reason for that is that I maintain that I don’t actually write code and music, but rather discover it by mining infinity for the particular strings that will make whatever the customer wants happen. See, all digital media.. all media really.. can be looked at as individual, very large numbers – that MP3 on your iPod is really just a really, really big number – millions of digits long – and if you start at zero, and head north on the number line, you will find it – and discover that in fact it has always existed and will always exist.
I actually think that we’re constantly surrounded with all of infinity, and that we have input filters as part of the processing our brain does prior to delivering the experience we’re currently grokking to our conscious mind. These input filters are programmable – by us – and part of our free will is deciding what bits of infinity we’d like to experience. One has to be careful with this, because it’s possible – and even easy – to configure our filters such that they will present us with all our worst and darkest fears – I currently think my input filters are more than a little misprogrammed. I have no one to blame but myself for this, of course..
My experiments with sleep deprivation have suggested that it’s much easier to get past both my fears and my input filters when I haven’t slept for a long time. A lot of my personal fear sets surround social anxiety, especially social anxiety surrounding either people I’m attracted to physically or people who I haven’t previously met via the network – the classic glowing screen. So that’s a lot of what I’m working on (on my anxiety management tips) – eventually, I would like to be one of those people who can walk up to a random stranger in a bar and start a conversation. Right now, that’s definitely not me. 😉
Anyway, continuing on this list – what I’d like to do, personally, is figure out how to configure my input filters for the most awesome and amazing experience possible. I realize this may or may not be a attainable goal, but I figure, like many other parts of life, that the journey is more than a little worthwhile.
There are a lot of things that people consider to be solid fact that I think may just have to do with the way we program our input filters – I think that we sort of infect each other with concepts that then control how we see the world – which is a good and beautiful thing sometimes. I’m trying to get infected by people who are happy, fulfilled, and enjoying their experience.. to learn how they see the world, and what they know, so I can also be happy, fulfilled, and enjoying my experience.
I also, of late, think that the physical universe is more or less a lie – or at least a virtual construct. Bill Hicks suggested that we’re all living in God’s mind, and I think this may be a good approximation of the truth – we’re all processes, running and experiencing information in a organic mind of unbelievable size and capacity. It’s very easy to cast limits.. to imagine that some things are impossible, or that it’s not possible for us to experience some things (time being nonlinear, experiencing more than three dimensions of space, experiencing more hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste, etc than our bodies come with in their default setting) but I think that since our input filters are programmable, our experience is largely limited by how big we’re willing to imagine that it could possibly be. Hence, I strive for no limits in my imagination.
As a side note, I think this explains why every adherent to every religion in the world is convinced that theirs is the One True Religion – they’ve programmed their input filters such that they experience their religion to be true. My multiple concurrent religions (at the moment, I claim to be a member of every religion in the world.. albiet one who hasn’t researched all the texts of every one because I feel like religious texts sometimes set more limits than they remove and add more fears than they allay) are a attempt to get past the idea that there is a One True Religion – I think they’re all true, because whatever you configure your input filters to is what you’re going to see. Understanding this has helped me get over my anger towards religions, especially Christianity, although I still really wish people wouldn’t claim, with absolute certainty, that theirs is the One True Way and all other ways are Wrong – especially people who believe that those who follow other ways are going to be condemned to eternal suffering. Is that really something you want to wish on your fellow friends, lovers, and sisters and brothers? I sincerely hope that me experiencing people doing this is a case of me experiencing my own fears and not a case of what you all truly believe.. but I also accept that you all have free will and can believe whatever you want.
More on this later.. I’ve got some code to mine..
