Never been one to let the carrier drop

Found that man reported missing,
He wandered in his home.
It don’t seem to bad if you consider
Just what he’s been through.

Seems he met up with a gang of thieves,
Who mistook him for a man of means,
They locked him up then found he had no money,
So they let him go again.
Now he’s back at home and happy
Just to see the kids.

I wish that I could really tell you
All the things that happened to me
And all that I have seen.
A world full of people their hearts full of joy,
Cities of light with no fear of war,
And thousands of creatures with happier lives,
And dreams of a future with meaning and no need to hide.

Oh, keep it dark.

It seems strange to have to lie,
About a world so bright.
And tell instead a made-up story,
From the world of night.

I wish, that I could really tell you,
All the things that happened to me
And all that I have seen,
A world full of people their hearts full of joy,
Cities of light with no fear of war,
And thousands of creatures with happier lives,
And dreams of a future with meaning and no need to lie,
No need to hate,
No need to hide.

Oh, keep it dark.

So, one of the quotes that I’ve often given of my internal version of $person is “The people in heaven and hell inhabit the same physical space. The difference is in what’s going on in their minds.”

And, this may be one of my more tinfoil-hat thoughts, but it occurs to me it would be much easier to immerse people in a utopia and then degrade it inside their minds to be hellish than the other way around. Anyone who has studied information science knows that it’s much easier to take a optimal signal and degrade it than to take a suboptimal signal and enhance it – this is kind of the point of the oft-mocked Enhance Button trope.

Now, it’s really not unreasonable to think that I might be in $UTOPIA, experiencing $DYSTOPIA – since not a lot of horrible things are happening to me personally and almost all of them involve communication streams from other people, it would not be that difficult for my neural network to be ‘green-screening’ things – subbing out news and facebook with alternate signals to make it look like the world is a much worse place than it is.

I’ve talked about how our conscious experience is at some distance from our senses – there are many layers of neurons between the part of us that is on the ride, and the part of us that is detecting the ride. So, this isn’t as insane as it sounds on the surface. Of course, you kind of have to play it as it lays – you can’t know if what you’re experiencing is real or not, but you have to treat it as it is – if for no other reason than you wouldn’t want to risk the other individuals on the ride by treating it as if it was a video game unless you had absolute proof that there isn’t a monolithic reality and everyone is getting a custom feed of the ride, something which is rather hard to prove or disprove either way. (One of the things I’ve talked about is the challenges of authenticating God, or determining whether what you’re experiencing is a diety or mental illness)

And, I know there’s something wrong with my mind. It appears to me to be a rare and intermittent fault, but it could be that it’s far more prevalent than I think and that in fact most of what I’m experiencing is in some way altered by it. Debugging the system that’s damaged from inside the system that’s damaged is a challenge, which is why I have so much hope that my friends will choose to help me figure out what’s real and what isn’t rather than retreating from me in fear because there’s something wrong with my mind. Of course from my perceptions, I’m not the only one who’s a bit on the sick side – in fact, almost everyone I see here is crazy in one way or another. It may be, if evolution is the correct backstory for us, that we’re pushing the bounderies of the size or configuration of neural network that’s stable. Or, if you like my personal pet theory, the problem may not be the hardware but rather the memetic cruft that has built up over the years – bad software, malware even, which is resulting in suboptimal results.

As I’ve talked about before, it’s possible the reason I’m experiencing $DYSTOPIA is that I chose to do so, either because I wanted the experience for artistic reasons (This seems extra-reasonable when considering the current track I’m working on) or because I wanted a challenge. It’s also possible that I’m being punished for some previous behavior (karma) although it seems like if the purpose of the punishment is to help me grow, it might help to know what the behavior was. If the purpose of the punishment is just to punish, then the universe is governed by forces that are at least partially evil, and it could just be random or sadistic.

Anyway, if it’s not the work of a agent at all, but rather simple random chance that has led to me experiencing something less than utopic even though I’m immersed in a utopia (which is possible, see the thesis at the top of this post) then it seems like it very much behooves me to debug whatever’s wrong with my mind and figure out how to get back to the ideal experience. And, of course, if it’s possible within the confines of the amount of CPU I have available to me, it seems like it behooves me to be able to experience a utopia even if one’s not actually there. Clearly our minds have ample CPU to make up reality out of whole cloth (as I discuss in this article) so the question is how to I motivate the rest of my mind to work with my conscious experience to make this happen. In general, the ability to be a Bal Shem – to hack my neurological software to do whatever I want it to do – is a ability I often cultivate.

So, one of the things that I think I’ve gone on about a few times before is how Christians, who ostensibly want Heaven, are busy making the world Hell.

I thought I’d list a few things that Christians – not all Christians, mind you, but enough of them – do which make the world less like heaven and more like hell. Whenever someone engages in one of these behaviors, I feel they are doing the work of the devil

1) Encouraging people to believe that if they are members of any other religion, they are wrong and are going to hell

2) Encouraging people to believe that $SUPERUSER is in the business of torturing people *e doesn’t agree with – or in general, that you should fear God. We’ve got enough to fear in the world we’re actually in.

3) Slut-shaming. Sex is one of the most positive experiences on earth, but Christians have this disturbing idea that you should only have it under certain circumstances, and if you do otherwise, you’re a bad person.

4) Encouraging people with alternate sexualities to think that they are less-than, sinners, incomplete

5) Encouraging everyone to believe that they are so flawed that someone “had to die for their sins”

6) Starting or promoting wars which are primarily over resource allocation (i.e. not sharing) or religion

7) In general encouraging people to think that they are less than, often for things which have no direct bearing on the Christian doing the less-than-ing at all. “If you’re not a member of my religion, you’re not as worthy of a person” “If you don’t do well on standardized tests you’re not as worthy of a person” “If you’re not interested in learning what *I* think are the important things to learn, you’re not as worthy of a person” “If you enjoy playing with your body chemistry, you’re not as worthy of a person”.

8) Promoting monogamy as the only true way, even though we seem to be neurologically and biologically wired to fall in love more than once. The bible even alludes to the fact that in heaven things would work differently (Luke 20:34-36). Why exactly are we not doing the optimal path now?

9) Making and promoting laws against freedom, even when the freedom doesn’t harm another person. Blue laws, laws against nudity, laws against flag-burning, things of that nature. Even worse, laws against people who like to have sex with members of the same gender, even though if we were really engineered, clearly said being had to put in a fair amount of neurological work in order to make things like being on the receiving end of anal sex feel good.

10) Encouraging people to believe that they should be required to have children if they conceive, even though it’s inconceivable that a omnipotent being would connect a soul to a body that wasn’t going to be extant and, if one is of a more scientific bent, highly unlikely that bodies that don’t have a large, functional neural network are self-aware.

11) Encouraging people to embrace a system of beliefs that contains unresolvable logic failures, which damage their ability to think rationally

12) Encouraging parents to try and encourage their children not to be sexually active, promoting a inevitable neurological war

13) This may be kind of a repeat, but thinking that they are “God’s Chosen People”, and by extension, everyone else isn’t. This is again the kind of ‘I’m better than you’ thinking that I feel like is at the root of a lot of the evils of the world. In the old testament, this “I’m better than you” goes as far as “It’s okay for me to slaughter you like cattle even though a you’re thinking, feeling, self aware creature just like me because God Said So”

14) Encouraging children to imagine a being of pure evil – children have a lot of unassigned neurons, and imagining the devil literally brings him to life in their mind. (Of course, as my friend Jeremy points out, it is far from clear that the devil is evil – if he was against the being described in the old testament, he was at least sometimes for humanity, although clearly from the story of Job he wasn’t all good either)

15) Encouraging people to wait for heaven, instead of building it here now.

16) Encouraging people to believe in a $DIETY that builds traps into the world – Just one of many examples is that the bible says “Suffer not a witch to live” (Ex 22:18) but if witchcraft works, it’s clearly because the universe has a built in API for modifying reality which $DIETY would have had to have created – and if it doesn’t, then it’s pretty harmless.

17) Promoting the idea that the bible is a book we should be using as a yardstick to measure our lives. It was written by people thousands of years ago wandering around in a desert, people who knew far less than we know now, people who mistook their prejudices for natural laws. It contains numerous irresolvable logic failures, one of which I discuss above. Yes, it’s got some beautiful ideas and some beautiful poetry in it, but it’s far from a perfect book that you should make the center of your universe, in my opinion. I’m not the only person to have doubts on this subject, see this and this.

18) Attempting to slow down medical technology – in particular I’m thinking of things like Stem Cell research but I suspect this is going to come up with cloning, artificial neural networks, and all sorts of other things of that nature. Look, there’s supposed to be a all powerful diety, why exactly do you need to be the moral guardian of things which don’t hurt self-aware beings in any way and could alleviate suffering

19) Encouraging people to spend time in prayer that they could otherwise spend actually figuring out how to fix the problems that they’re praying about

20) Encouraging people to ‘trust the $SUPERUSER’ for things that in fact there might not be a superuser watching – I’d use global warming as a example of this, but I’m sure there are numerous examples

21) Encouraging the idea that if $DIETY does it, it must be moral – the “Where does a 900 pound gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants to..” theory of reality.

22) Promoting the idea that women are “less than” men and should be silent (1 Corinth 14:34) or submissive. This is abusive to both women and men.

23) Giving a group of people temporal power who probably should not have it – I’m thinking of the catholic church here, and the pope in particular – although I like the current pope, I’ll like him a lot more when and if he comes out and says that birth control is not immoral.

24) Encouraging parents to brainwash / indoctrinate their children while they are still too young to understand the isuses and questions involved, which seems to have a very bad effect on neuroplasticity.

Christians, it’s not that I hate you – I hate the software you’re running. I love you and want you to stop making the world a worse place, because among other things you have to live here too, so you’re not just hurting me, you’re also hurting yourself.

I also recognise that it’s possible that the religion is perfect and it’s being degraded inside my neural network or that the problem has more to do with the fact that different people want different things. However, what do you do when the things you want are getting in the way of the things I want?

(See also a list of good things about Christianity)

It’s my intention that this be somewhat a dynamic and collaborative document, so feel free to comment with your own list entries.

So, I’ve been thinking about the challenges of getting my upcoming solo album to turn a profit. In terms of Sheer Time, if we estimate each track at 20 hours, I’ve got to sell a total of 20,000 units, or have people stream 2 million times in order to break even with my hourly rate at my day job.

This is harder than it looks. Even if we assume that I’m skill-wise the equivilent of Pink Floyd (probably a questionable assumption, but let’s run with this) we still have to figure out some way to get the public to notice I exist. With a band, there’s at least some hope that friends of all four or five guys are going to notice and tell their friends. With me, my word-of-mouth seed starts from one person.

Also, I’m definitely tuning this album for my personal tastes, rather than what’s currently ‘the popular sound’. As a result, it’s going to be that much more difficult to get people to notice it. I think this makes sense insofar as I’m not likely to move enough units for it to make a profit, so I might as well enjoy myself, but it’s still worth noting that I’m not exactly taking the shortest course here.

My gut feeling is that it will be my next album, not the one I’m releasing in December, that breaks even. I’m guessing by my next album I will be past that magic 10,000 hours that everyone says you need to have to make it.

It’s a little frustrating that if I were a pointless political facebook meme, I’d have no trouble getting 2 million views.

Recently I realized that while I’ve played it many times live, I’ve never done a studio version of House Of The Rising Sun.. as it’s my favorite blues song to cover, I figured I should do something about that.

http://sheer.us/stuff/2016/Sheer.HouseOfTTheRisingSun.mp3 is the result. I gotta say, I dig it. I haven’t decided if it’s going on the album yet or not.. perhaps you all can vote 😉

Complete credits:

Everything: Sheer (it reminds me of the Pump Up The Volume bit where Nora asks HHH “You did this?” “Me and Radio Shack”. Only it’s “Me and a multitrack deck..” )

Note this later appeared on Believing Is Seeing.

So, after years of frustration setting gain levels, I have discovered a protools plugin that returns me to a metering format that I understand intuitively and can use even when I’m using one hand to choose patches and the other to play riffs – yes, the old school analog VU meter has come to pro tools in a *excellent* emulation by Klangheim

You can’t tell me this doesn’t just warm the cockles of your heart:

The emulation is extremely faithful, although to get the behavior of the meters of my youth I had to yank the rise time down to 150ms. (And yes, you can tweak the rise, overshoot, and fall times)

Because it’s a plugin that goes into a protools plugin slot, you can also easily do things like sticking a meter both before and after a compressor – and with four skins to choose from, you can easily tell them apart. When tweaking a vocal that won’t sit right in the mix this can be a real timesaver. It doesn’t appear to use any CPU to speak of. As a side bonus, when doing faster than realtime bouncing, the peak lights still work, so you get a nice sanity check if you put it across the master fader on bounce.

I would give this my ‘best plugin under $10’ prize.

Here’s a remix of HOM – this is much closer to the version that will be on the album..

Sheer – History Of Modern

Note this later appeared on Believing Is Seeing.

This is one of my posts that I make so I can link to it from facebook instead of repeatedly typing the same things in comments.

You’d think you guys had never watched pro wrestling.

Trump is playing a Heel. By choice, and I imagine to his great entertainment. It’s pretty clear, since he and Hillary are friends, that they decided to get together and rig a election. Nothing in the rules says they can’t do it, and I have to say, it’s starting to be a lot of fun to watch. He’s clearly having a lot of fun with his mustache-twirling villain role – now he may actually believe the things he’s saying, or he may not, but I would take anything he has to say with a grain of salt.

For me, this is a pretty winning situation. A heel is not going to win the election, and we don’t end up with a right-wing whacko running the country. But if you’re actually feeling outrage about Trump, well, I guess he’s playing his role well. What I really wonder is whether he will break kayfabe at the end or not. If he’s genuinely a force for good, he will, just to help his supporters understand how broken they are. Assuming they’re not just part of the gag as well, which – to be honest – they might be.

So, this is a example of my sense of humor. Personally, I think it’s quite funny. I wasn’t going to release it, because I assumed it was just me who would think it was funny (sometimes my sense of humor is a little out of phase with everyone else’s), but then I ran it by a couple of friends and they also thought it was funny, so here we have..

http://sheer.us/stuff/2016/Sheer.12BarBach.mp3

How this track came to be – I recently purchased http://www.garritan.com/products/classic-pipe-organs/. After much struggling with getting it installed, I spent some time messing with it, and then decided to try doing something absurd with it, just to see how it stacked up. And what could be more absurd than using a pipe organ for the 12 bar blues?

From there, I was reminded of a theory I had discussed with my dad a long time ago, that J.S. Bach was a jam musician. And, of course the talking blues are a traditional thing.. so..

So, in a comment to http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=3006, Alderin said “I agree that the software needs adjustment. The difficulty is that we don’t have the source code, we have to decompile and reverse-engineer it before was can being to find the bugs we need to fix.”

I think this is part of the hope of what we might gain through making a ANN the size and shape of a human.

1) It would let us find out what happens when you run our memetic software with a different instinct table
2) It would let us find out how our memetic software ends up rendered ‘on the iron’, which might be very instructive.

One of the questions that’s still very much open for debate is whether, even if we did know what to do differently for software, we’d be able to change the existing running software on the thundering herd of humans out there, or if all we could do is improve future generations. It is worth noting as a side note that, much as I loathe aspects of Christianity, I also recognize it was probably a significant upgrade from what was being memetically distributed prior to it being authored. Ideally a *really* good software upgrade would tend to be viral because the people running it would be better adapted – this I think was the plan in the fictional work Stranger In A Strange Land.