Archive for the ‘mental illness’ Category

I keep feeling sad about recent events

Friday, July 24th, 2015

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.

Okay, *that* time I’m sure that bridge burned behind me…

Thursday, July 23rd, 2015

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.

Blame

Sunday, February 1st, 2015

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

Wednesday, January 28th, 2015

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.

A overview..

Friday, January 23rd, 2015

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.

Is this the price for having learned how not to cry

Thursday, January 15th, 2015

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.