Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I have three major financial goals at the moment. I achieved one of them this year (unless my situation changes drastically, I will be able to pay my taxes in full in April, having already paid half of them via estimated payments) and I promised myself that if I did that I would buy a piece of particularly expensive software I particularly covet (Vienna Strings, which is like Ivory for stringed instruments). I am having second thoughts – partially because of guilt over the fact that not all my friends are doing well, although I am helping out several of them, there’s still more who are struggling – and partially because there is repeatedly a little voice that tells me I should really get over my dream of going pro with my music, since I’ve still got so far to go to be there. I haven’t really decided what to do about it..

So, I spent a fair amount of time avoiding facebook and other social sites over the last few days.

My reasons are that I don’t want to expose myself to the latest horrific disaster about which I can do nothing.

I’ve come to accept that cops are going to shoot innocents, religious nuts are going to use their religion as a excuse to hurt other people, and countries are going to fight incredibly stupid wars. I’m slowly coming to understand that there is a group of people – and for the most part it’s the group that’s interested in having power – who would far rather build hell than heaven. But I have enough nightmares of my own without tuning into other people’s. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t think caring is a good idea. The worst part is I can trace a lot of this back to the actions of the united states. My tax dollars at work.

Recently, someone on my facebook pointed out that if I pay taxes, I help finance our army, and our school of terrorism which trained Osama, and our drone strikes. There’s not a lot I can do about this. Our “democracy” gives us precious little power over the Powers That Be. I don’t even have any reason to think our votes are counted accurately, and after reading about how electronic voting machines are made, I have a lot of reasons to think they’re not.

But I can choose my own actions, and I choose not to be exposed to the people that are being hurt. I can’t stop them from being hurt, so if I expose myself to the trauma TV, all I’m doing is hurting myself and therefore adding to the net misery of the universe. It’s a net loss for everyone.

I do wonder if all these attacks would be as popular if everyone reacted to violence by turning away. And the truth, painful as it is, is that 140 people is insignificant in terms of the number of people that will die on any given day. As Blue Oyster Cult says, “Another 40,000 coming every day.” That number has probably gone up as the world population has.

And, if you really believe we have a immortal component, this isn’t really such a tragedy. They’ve logged off of Earth, but they’re still around somewhere. We’ll see them again soon enough.

Is it really a good thing for us to all wallow in pain and fear? Why do we do this to ourselves? I remember after 9/11, the news ran constantly with images of the planes striking the towers. And no one really talked about our part in all this – how we used Osama as a pawn in the cold war, and got some of his family killed, and maybe that’s why he was so angry – and how we trained him in our school of how to be a terrorist in the first place.

Part of the problem, clearly, is the religious texts. But I’ve tried talking to religious people, and they don’t seem to see the inherent contridiction between there being a all-powerful God, and there being a number of contridictory religious texts lying around. I really wonder what they think – God *can’t* remove the ones that aren’t the truth, or he *won’t*? Really, I think it would do us all a lot of good to throw the past away. But religion appears to write itself into neural networks in a way that disables their ability to think critically about it’s contents, or recognize that, in the case of Islam and Christianity at least, it has a very high “this makes no sense!” factor.

At this point, I’m fairly convinced that a lot of my own insanity is wrapped around the fact that some of my mind accepted Christianity and some of it rejected it. I’m fairly sure the part that rejected it is the better person. I know there was a way to see it that made it a good thing, but it wasn’t how I saw it. And I can’t see it that way now. I can see it *enough* that way to understand where Christians are coming from. But not enough to think we should keep this and expose our children to it.

But, it still hurts. It still keeps me awake at night. I still wrestle with it, over and over. If we could stop believing so many stupid things, we could have heaven here and now.

I struggle so much with the idea that I seem to be smarter than a lot of the people around me. I’m convinced this must be something that’s wrong with my mind, that makes me incorrectly evaluate my own intelligence. Or that I’m not seeing the people around me as they really are. Or something. And really, there’s no objective way to measure, and my intelligence hasn’t bought me much. It hasn’t bought me my dream career, or my freedom. I’m so convinced there’s something wrong with the way my mind is configured, but I haven’t been able to change enough to be free.

A long time ago, when I was more inclined to lie, I told a lot of lies that I experienced later coming true. Sometimes I wonder if I should tell people I’ve achieved lucid dreaming to see if it happens. Or at least a end to the nightmares.

I have spent some time struggling with the old Calvinism thoughts, only brought up to date with a more complete understanding of what our minds are. Do I really have free will at all? Am I really making decisions, or does it just feel like I am? Am I just playing a tape? If so, where does it end?

I also sometimes feel like maybe we’re all the result of some incredibly simple, Conway Game Of Life process that was left running on a enormously powerful system. That there is no God, that the system is just burning idle cycles. Maybe we’re all the result of the hashing algorythm for a far more advanced race’s Bitcoin.

I think if there is free will, it must be partially in when a neural connection is made or not made. We must be choosing the shape of our minds. I really want to think there’s some bigger overarching pattern that will make what I’m currently experiencing fit into a beautiful complete picture when I see it from above.

I’ve been pondering what the difference is between the neural structures that represent data stored in our minds that is changeable and mutable (for example available programming languages, the contextual meanings of words, etc) and data stored in our minds that isn’t easily changable (for example religious beliefs and political ideas).

It seems pretty likely that religious beliefs are stored so immutably that people are unable to let go of them even when they see concrete evidence that they are incorrect, or that they are hurting other people. On the other hand, we have no problem letting go of ideas about, for example, product quality (we routinely adapt which brands we use according to who is currently producing the best products). I am wondering, physically and structurally, what this means about how these bits of data are stored. Since data is stored in our minds via the physical structure of neural interconnections, it’s very interesting that some bits of data tend to be more immutable than other bits.

So, as my two readers know, I am a proponent of the idea of intelligent design, with the designers being *us* – it seems clear to me that since we have the ability to program, including at assembly language levels, that coding up DNA is not beyond us. People tend to counterargue that we can’t edit our own DNA, that our minds have no ability to change our DNA. Well, here’s another study discussing the idea that we can in fact do so..

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/21/study-of-holocaust-survivors-finds-trauma-passed-on-to-childrens-genes

So, I’m of two minds about this.

On one paw, people shouldn’t really do this to each other (reveal information so private). I’m not really happy with the hackers who did this, and I feel like they’re just making the situation worse.

On the other paw, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all didn’t *have* to keep secrets from each other? If we could in fact accept each other the way we are? I mean, I know from personal experience that we can’t.. but wouldn’t learning how to be better than feeling like we have to sneak around behind each other’s backs and use web sites like this one?

I have never used Ashley Madison.. I have a policy against pay dating sites in general and sites that look like they have the potential to add to the collective unhappiness of the world in specific.

I am still against possessive and coercive relationships, and I still am in favor of polysexuality and potentially polyfidelity.

Somehow I thought I’d have more to say about this

You know, I’m really curious how much overhead our resource allocation system tracking some things adds. I’ve talked about how much cheaper it might be to run the city bus if we didn’t collect fares (and have to deal with keeping the collection system working, and taking the money to the bank, and counting it, and accounting..) but another, even more obvious example of how could this possibly make sense occured to me.

Why do we meter power?

How much does it add to the cost of running the power grid to have people doing disconnects? How much does a disconnect cost when it ruins resources (food), sometimes kills people (disconnects in the winter)? How much does the power meter itself cost? How about the collections department? Isn’t there something better these people can being with their time than having a job making other people’s lives worse?

We seem to have more or less agreed that most people in the USA (I’d say 95%) want large amounts of energy delivered via copper. Why not just make it a government service – no charge, it’s part of your taxes – and run it to be as efficient as possible? We’d still need to measure usage over large areas, and shut off people doing obnoxiously stupid things – but I’m fairly sure we’d save a lot of resources..

Sandra And Woo: Grown Up

I just finished bingereading Sandra and Woo.. it was over way too soon..

So, I seem to be making significant progress – last night I was able to control the music I was hearing, not perfectly, but I’d throw out a sequence of notes and some of them would be correct.. interestingly, it was *stereo* – I was seperately controlling the notes for my left and right virtual ears.. the thing I’ve changed most recently that I think might be making a difference is for years I kept my dream journal online, in a wordpress blog, and now I’m writing it with pencil and paper after reading of another lucid dreaming hopeful who did the same and found success. The other thing that I think might be affecting it is the new psych med that I’m on.

So, the problem here is that by all indications my mind has some sort of intermittent fault. Despite my investment of (at a guess) $100,000-ish and a smaller but not insignificant investment by my parents into same, we have not found and fixed this fault. What we’ve mostly found out is that the state of our current health care system is awful.

Me, with everything working correctly, accepts $person’s decision. That’s who I want to be. I wish she didn’t want to not talk to me, but if that’s what she wants, it’s what she should have. I certainly wouldn’t want someone forcing their existence on me. However, from time to time, this intermittent fault arises. And, you have to remember also that until my most recent adventure the last time I had seen $person face to face she had been friendly and not been telling me to go away.

Well, when this intermittent fault arises, several things happen

1) Often, I have a period where from my perspective, I’m just not there at all. It looks to me like a blackout.
2) Once this ends, I have a time where I have a very hard time figuring out what is real and what isn’t. At times I’ve been convinced I’m a starship orbiting earth, for example. Now, I doubt if I’m going to have nearly as hard a time knowing that $person doesn’t want to see me now that I have memories of her talking about me in third person to a judge and enumerating all the reasons she doesn’t, but until this most recent adventure, all I had was email, and not a *lot* of email or a lot of detail in said email. For someone who has had the experience of hallucinating text without even being in a faulted state, this wasn’t that helpful.
3) A bunch of other people appear, from my perspective, to also be inhabiting my body. I can’t explain to you what this is like, but they appear to be having conversations with each other using my mouth. This is disorienting to say the least. I can often somewhat control their ability to do this, but not perfectly and I am often embarrassed, ashamed, and unhappy about what has transpired after I return to normal.

Now, this most recent fault occurred despite, as far as I know, 100% med compliance (i.e. taking Seroquel exactly as prescribed by my doctor) at the maximum dose I was permitted for the weeks leading up to it. I’m trying a new psych med now which *might* help, or might not.

Clearly, looking at #3, I can’t really blame people for finding my presence disorienting and/or disturbing. I don’t think I present any sort of danger of physical attack, but I’m definitely not *normal* in this state, and I and my stable of alters are likely to say things that normal people wouldn’t say. It is not nearly as simple as to say I am choosing this. Steve, I am guessing you are the sort of person who would think that we’re always deciding exactly what we’re doing, and I hope you never have to learn that this isn’t always the case by experiencing life as I do during one of these intermittent faults.

Okay, so, I can’t help but think it significant that the first time I had a authentic spiritual experience in a church, *they were speaking another language*.

I just don’t think I’m cut out to be mainstream religious. I can’t make myself believe that if some sort of diety needed or wanted something from me, said diety wouldn’t just directly contact me. And a lot of mainstream religions have ideas that vary from “That sounds insane” to “I can’t believe that” when I hear them.

I *wanted* to be mainstream religious, when I was young, because it was obvious that that would please my parents. I think I would have been okay if I hadn’t been such a voracious reader. I read the bible. Big mistake.

But looking back on it, a lot of the ideas seem to be just plain nuts even if you don’t. Either that, or we have different definitions of things. For example, if you want someone to change, and only want good things for them if they fit your desires and expectations, that’s not love. It’s especially not unconditional love if you are going to torture them or allow them to be tortured if they don’t play along.

On the other paw, I’ve come to a understanding of the message of Christianity I can live with. The idea is that you put yourself in hell, by configuring your mind the wrong way – that given that we are all immortal creatures locked in a system that we can never exit from, complete freedom had to include all kinds of torturous and unfortunate experiences. And, of course, infinity is going to contain every possible experience you could have, from the very best to the very worst. Sometimes in the same week.

So, in general my experience of the Bible is the words of Jesus are the sanest in the book. I wish he’d gone a lot further than he did, but I think that his message is sound, empathetic, and good for the most part until he starts going on this whole ego trip of “No one comes to the father but through me”. However, we don’t really have any *clue* what Jesus might have said or not said. We’re dealing with text that’s been edited, translated, bent for political reasons, etc, time and time again. But we can still sort of see the *spirit* of what he meant shining through in the clearly warm, nonjudgemental, empathetic nature of his words.

Anyway, the assumption here is that if you emulate Jesus in your treatment of yourself and your neighbors and the like you can get yourself out of hell, if you have put yourself in hell through inadvisably configuring your mind. And of course Christians promote a lot of ideas that I also believe in, like that we are connected by things we can’t see as well as that we can and we are immortals. On the other hand, they also believe a lot of things that are just plain nuts. See elsewhere in this blog for my commentary on that, I’m not going to rehash old topics.

JL pointed out the idea that maybe we shouldn’t be shoving our beliefs down each other’s throats, and I’m going to second that. However, I am still wrestling with what I want to believe and when and why, so I still tend to write about all this in the hopes that through all the static, noise, and randomness some real signal will appear. I don’t think that attempting to believe CHristianity is what broke my mind (I think that had already happened by then) but I am certain it didn’t help the situation. However, had I not been so literal, and looked at the spirit in which the people who believe it gather, I’m not thinking it would have damaged me nearly so badly. I get too hung up on words a lot of the time, especially for someone who can hallucinate text, and I think often the message isn’t really in the words.

I also wonder, knowing that I can hallucinate text, if I have *any* clue what’s actually in the Bible or not. Just another of those unknowability things. However, God, if I have one and you’re taking requests, a lot more utopia, please?