Shards of Personality

There’s this element to the Strange Loop concept of consciousness, where people you care for very deeply become permanently attached to you. If you visualize a conversation with someone, you are guessing.. . estimating how they will act. This is necessarily inaccurate, you will never contain all of their decision making abilities within your own mind. But the fidelity of their “mind” increases as you know them better. Someone you loved intensely for a long period of time will have a complex replica residing inside your brain. When the person in question is gone from your life (for whatever reason, be it physical, social, mortal, etc) this shard of personality remains.

Over the years this thought process will change as you change. Your own mind will shift who they are by repeated thoughts. This person replica will diverge from the real person. If they’re still alive, then it will diverge even faster due to the actual person changing In their own random fashion.

But in some absurd way There’s this piece of them that forever lives in you.

What the replica ultimately becomes is your concept of that person. A fictional character you’ve made up. This is why it can be so easy to hate someone who’s betrayed you, or love someone who was taken to early. You’re writing a story in your head, so of course the characters are going to have a potent emotional impact on You. They were literally made  for you. It’s weird, in a sense our brains are built to feel the strongest toward the people around us less. The ones we think about but spend less time with, they will become the most of whatever they were. The kindest, the cruelest, the funniest, the bravest.

Everyone is better when they’re a fiction. Everyone is worse when they’re a fiction. Real humans are just far too complex when they’re real.

The Wrong Decision

Sometimes you all you can do is write. Or at least that’s true for me. Maybe you have some different way to cope with these errant thoughts.

I feel more acutely that I’m missing out on the world. That I’m isolated from people. It makes me desperate and then ashamed of being desperate. I can’t let people see it or they’d leave. It’s too much emotion, it’s too strong. So I compartmentalize it. I shut it off. Then I appear neutral or bland or boring.

Sometimes it’s better to not being in control of your life. Sometimes mistakes are what need to be made.

I was asked a hypothetical question once, which I’ve never gotten out of my mind. Have you ever regretted making the right decision? As in, did you make a decision based on your own moral principles, but you wished you had gone against them. Not in a situation where you’ve now changed your opinion on what was moral, but to actually regret living up to your own standards of goodness.

When I was first asked I’d have said no, that my morality is far too important to me.

Now I’m not so sure.

What about you?

Eulogies; the Bain of the living

A friend of mine recently had an interesting birthday idea that involved friends writing eulogies for them. It got me thinking on the idea of eulogies, specifically how they help us cope with life. Looking at life from the perspective of being dead is a far better view than we often take. A Eulogy makes decent peoples lives sound worth it. They don’t have to write a bestseller, become a famous artist or a grand inventor; they just need to have lived a good life. It shows what’s really meaningful in life; to have been a positive influence on those around you.

I’d often advise against seeing ones life from the view of being dead but that’s because of a particular pitfall I’ve seen often. It’s when you get too wrapped up in the idea of making your life into a story. You are not a story. Stories are fiction, they are not real. Stories about real people are still fiction, it’s just that there’s a massive amount of editing going on (how often are George Washington’s bowel movements mentioned?)

In a circular way, this flawed view from fiction is what necessitates the value of the view from death. We learn about so many great people in history or in the current media and we idolize them. Fame is, by definition, not something we can all achieve. We often forget this, seeing the good, yet common life as a failure.

Fictionalizing your own life can lead to very negative behaviour due to this disconnect. Eulogizing a living person can show you the value of being average. It’s good so long as you understand the caveat.

The New Campfire

Rope playing games, as I play them, are a collective storytelling experience. There are rules that create constraints but the rules do not make anything of real value. It’s the creativity of the Gm and the players. The Gm creates a world and conflicts for the players. The players take on roles and imbue the main characters of the story with vitality. A GM without players has a background without a focus. Players without a GM have no adversity to overcome; It’s a meaningless power fantasy.

In a way, it’s a collaborative author. Players + GM = a better author than the sum of the people’s skill. The GM is paramount, but not because they have the most to offer story wise. They have to do two competing things at once. It’s both their job to contribute to the story And be the arbitrator of logic. When the players outthink the GM or when they just act in an unexpected way, the GM must check their own ego. They may have had plans for the story which now wont work within the logic of the game.

The really profound moments are when the Gm teases out character growth from a player. Finding complexity in a character and forcing them into a conflicting situation. Getting emotion out of a fighter or making the pacifist want to fight. It requires an ego check because the great moments are from the players.

So the ultimate point of why I’m rambling about this, the crux of why I’d explain this to a non-gamer:

Collective storytelling is important to our psyches. Tall tales around a campfire, a shaman’s myths, the bardic tales: they’re responsive stories. The teller uses the audience to make the tale dynamic. Books, TV, Movies, even theatre; they’re all meant to divide the teller from the audience. RPG’s are a sort of modern invention that harkens back to a need long forgotten.

The new Campfire.

Work, Meaning, and Money

I got some life advice from my father when I was just transitioning into adulthood. We were discussing career paths and work. He told me to find the best paying job, which didn’t take too much of my time, and that I could tolerate doing long term.

It sounds like pessimistic advice, but it’s just realistic (and my father is definitely not a pessimist). I hate hearing that whole pessimist/realist thing because it’s so often the excuse that a true pessimist uses to justify their depressing view of reality. This is no such justification.

So I found a trade. I joined a union. I get paid well, I have a modicum of rights as a worker, and I get to come home every day. I make enough money to do the things I care about on my own time. The work I do, as in the what I do for roughly 40 hours a week, is not who I am. I’m an electrician because that’s the easy pigeon holed title society gives me. That’s not really me. Sure, It’s what I do for money. This, the writing, it’s what I am (well one of the things).

Robert Anton Wilson put it best when he described money as ‘Bio-Survival Tickets’. That’s literally all money is. It’s you earning your right to continue living as an organic meat bag. Well I suppose it’s a bit more than survival, we get freedom from these B-S tickets. They open all the doors of society for us. All the things you may be passionate about, they require some amount of B-S to acquire, so it’s a necessity.

If you can get paid to pursue your passion then I applaud you. It’s a feat that few of us can accomplish. That being said, I’d be cautious about it. Money has a way of poisoning things. If you’re relying on your passion to pay the bills, the person writing the cheques gets to dictate the direction of said passion. Don’t let them control it.

The only sane advice is what my father gave me. Maybe you could add a positive addendum. Use the freedom acquired from that unpassionate labour to fuel your actual passion. Don’t intend to make money from it but keep that avenue open. If people appreciate your art, they may start to fund you. It may not be enough to quit the day job, but it can free up more of your time for your passion.

The Fifth Dimension

This is going to be about Einstein’s view of gravity, which while it is complex physics, I’m not going that deep into it. If you’re one of those people who get turned off by the more mathematical stuff, you don’t need to fear. And if you’re the type who already knows their physics, this is going to be frustrating due to how much is lost in the simplification. Take it as a philosophic approach to physics.

Einstein linked time to space in the concept of spacetime. This means that time is a dimension akin to the other 3, making our universe a 4 dimensional place. This in and of itself wasn’t a major shift, but it was when taken in tandem with how gravity can warp this spacetime. This makes time into a relative property, not a universal given (I actually touched on this *here*). When explaining to someone how this works, there’s a common analogy used, that of a bed sheet. A sheet is held taught in the air horizontally. A large heavy ball is placed in the middle. This distorts the sheet downwards, creating a funnel like shape. A smaller ball placed “uphill” from the larger one will descend towards it. If you toss the smaller ball around the funnel, it will rotate around the larger ball but eventually fall towards it. If friction weren’t an issue, you could fling the smaller ball at the exact right speed to orbit around the centre point. This is how gravity works. It isn’t a force per se, but a warping of space, forcing everything within our universe to “fall” towards the centre of mass.

The analogy visualizes spacetime as a 2 dimensional sheet, in reality, it’s 4 dimensional (cause of time). But we were really discussing 3 dimensions with the sheet, the two that are “within” it, and the 3rd dimension which it is warped into; the downwards direction. If spacetime is truly equivalent, then it must also be warped into a further dimension. The 5th dimension. You could call it a 4th spacial dimension but it is distinct in that it is not contained inside our universe. Gravity pushes the universe into it, but everything within our universe stays inside it. It’s merely the shape of the universe that changes.

Now, in reality this is only a metaphor. There isn’t necessarily a physical warping because there isn’t really a way the concept of ‘physical’ makes sense. Physical only applies to our experiential world, the inside of the universe. Like all of philosophy, it’s a way of conceiving of our world, which if useful, is true in some sense.

But still, 5 dimensions, kinda cool, yes?

Summer update

I haven’t posted much this month because of the old day job, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let this die. It’s been a year since I started this so I’ve been working on something special. I hope to have it done by the end of the month. There wont be much updating until then either.

Over and out.

On Life Advice

I like to give advice. I also worry that I can’t legitimately consider it worth much because I lack so much knowledge and experience of the world. I wouldn’t let that stop me, it just adds to the layers of crippling self doubt. So what I try for is a scattershot approach. Here’s a bunch of things, maybe some of them will work for you, maybe they won’t. It’s up to you to decide what is worthwhile advice. I have zero interest in preaching about The Good Life (Hell, I have zero interest in preaching in general). I don’t know what the good life really is. I try to though.

There’s a bigger issue I must recognize, something that’s more problematic and pervasive. Acting on this advice requires a certain amount of socioeconomic privilege*. Many activities require money for either equipment or facilities. If your job(s) require extensive work hours then it won’t matter how much money you have, you won’t have the time. It seems self evident, of course you need money and time to do stuff. But life advice is somehow considered different than other things. We assume that not taking the advice (when it may have helped), is tantamount to failing at life.

Failing at life!?

That’s absurd. The one trait we definitely all share is that we’re alive (I’m assuming ghosts can’t read my posts on the internet). That’s literally the most anyone can actually fail at.

Society requires us to gather our Bio-Survival Tokens by working. Not all jobs are equal in how much time they require and how much they compensate you for your time. That constraint limits how well we can better our lives. So everyone must ration their freedom, making decisions as to what to do and what not to do. We have to stop blindly judging each other for not bettering ourselves. We all have personal struggles.

We’ve all had tons of advice levelled at us. Having advice and knowing what advice to take are drastically different. Many people have the former, few have the later. Sifting through the advice and picking what to act on is the real skill. And this isn’t something that can be given as advice. If it were, how could you decide to follow it? Why pick this advice and not something else? Ultimately it must come from within, anything external is predicated on your acceptance.

You always choose.

It’s just sometimes you choose to blindly follow what another is saying.

*Socioeconomic status refers to your education, employment and wealth, but it ultimately derives from the hand that you’re dealt by life. This would include how much money your parents had, the education you had access to, the lack or presence of cultural barriers when entering the workplace, etc. It may be something you can influence, but we do not start with equal cards at birth.

Our Expansive Will

The other night I was traveling through the city, first by bus then walking, and doing a bit of people watching. The bus was typically crowded; standing room only, pressed up against strangers. Normally on transit I read but it was clearly not possible given the number of people. So I overheard a series of conversations. What struck me was how few of them were between people actually on the bus. I was hearing half of these conversations, the other half taking place blocks, kilometers or even cities away. That’s bizarre. That’s fantastic.

I arrive at my stop and get off the bus, now walking down some side streets. I pass a woman talking to someone on her bluetooth. She’s still making facial expressions and hand gestures, as if the person could see her. Her brain actually feels like there’s another person next to her in the conversation. And I’m not calling her crazy for doing this, I do the same thing (well I don’t have a bluetooth, but similarly unnecessary visual cues while on a cell phone).

This experience got me thinking on how unique we are. This ability we have, to communicate over vast distances, it may not be the thing that differentiates us from other creatures, but it’s the significant final element. The core end result of our technology is that we can do this. In generalized terms, it allows us to extend our conscious will across space and time. If you look at the animal kingdom, many non-human creatures can speak and communicate in some fashion. We don’t know exactly how complex their languages may be, but they can definitely express something vocally and/or through physical gestures.

Writing is one of the earlier technological signs of a ‘civilization’. Language is a way for an individual brain to influence the world around them by imparting ideas into other brains. It’s limited by its locality because only people nearby can hear. With the advent of writing, that locality is extended through time into the future. When you read ancient manuscripts from Greece, China, Mesopotamia, etc, you are hearing the words of people long dead. This is a startling power and it’s crucial for the development of all other technologies. Whereas before new ideas must be passed down person to person, now they could lie dormant, like the seeds of a great tree.

It allowed for great power to centralize within individual hands. The rulers of nations were only capable of doing so by utilising an extensive bureaucracy, which itself required the written word. Some may argue that this was a bad thing, others say it good, but none can disagree that it allows a single person to wield far more power than would ever be possible without it.

Additionally, when writing is moved around the world, it not only travels through time but also space. The words of a man in China can bring technology to Europe. The spread of religious texts shows how powerful this can be. The technology of writing advanced over time, making the written word more accessible to more people. These were incremental advances, improving upon the original. The printing press was a major leap forward but I would argue the far more significant revolution had to wait for the 1800’s and the discovery of electricity.

Transmitting words through wires allows us to broadcast our ideas over space without a time lag. The lag of physical writing would severely hamper two way communication, often setting back human discoveries by generations due to failed opportunities. Transferring of writings could result in the originator being deceased long before the ideas could reach enough people to achieve their true potential. Telegraph wires pushed this back but radio was what broke the barrier. The first time the ruler of a nation broadcast their voice over the radio, effectively exerting their mental will into thousands and thousands of homes, that was the dawning of a new era for humanity. It was as if they had made an avatar of themselves and placed it in every home of the nation. That is awe inspiring power. And I mean awe in the original form, powerful yet tinged with fear.

And now to the modern era and the people on the bus. We all have this insane ability. We can exert our will across space and time. In social media we post, and like, and comment; it’s all communicating across distances. Visualizing this helps to show its true power. Try to see these massive arcing blue lines connecting each person on the bus to the other end of the lines. I’d love to get some technology, ala an augmented reality app, to actually see all these pulses connecting us through radio communication. That woman on the bluetooth, it’s as if she had an avatar of the other person walking next to her and talking. That’s effectively what we’re able to do, even if we can’t see them yet. We need to appreciate the power we wield.

Really this blog is an attempt for my will to be exerted across time and space.

Upon you dear reader.

Writing Ones Past

The past and future are fiction, only the present is real. This isn’t some deep philosophical point; your Will, the part of you that exerts control on reality, can only act in the present. We see a connection between the present conscious mind and the ones that preceded it (and the ones that will likely follow it). This isn’t backed up in a physical way. Multi-cellular organisms will replace their cells so often in a lifetime that no individual cell exists from birth to death. Raw physicality won’t show you to be a continuous entity. Your mind changes over time too. At best we’re patterns of information, imprinted on a steadily changing substrate, with no consistent pattern of said information. I don’t wish to belabour the point so I will recommend a great book on the subject, “The Mind’s eye”, by Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter.

Memory is notoriously fallible. We don’t admit it often, but we misremember things all the time. And that’s okay. It’s only a problem if you think the past is something set in stone. A fixed part of reality so to speak. Sure, you can’t actually go back and change things, but the idea that it’s a concrete thing is just as silly. It doesn’t actually exist somewhere, it can’t be held and it can’t be tested. It’s a useful assumption to believe it exists, nothing more.

If you think memory is accurate, it can be shown as unreliable in two ways. The first is doing tests on memory, using recorded data to verify. Additionally, you can ask participants how confident they are in their memory, to show how false our confidence is. It’s been done and the results are clearly against our amazing ability to remember things. People will regularly claim to be sure of an event or the appearance of something, which is subsequently shown to be incorrect. This is not to say we can’t remember anything, or course we can. Our abilities are far from perfect and confidence in a memory does not equate with increased accuracy.  

The second way is to try to understand how the brain forms memory, tackling it from a hardware perspective. Our memories are imprinted onto patterns of neurons. Remembering things causes a rewrite of said memory, that’s how we retain them over long periods of time. That rewrite process can literally imprint the memory with your current mental perspective on the event. This happens every single time you remember it. That’s what remembering actually is. So it will obviously change over time. Hence it being unreliable. This last part is speculation on my part, so take it with a grain of salt. When a memory is bound up with strong emotions, remembering it will cause a stronger re-imprint. More powerful emotions will lead the conscious mind to think harder on a memory, replaying it repeatedly in a single sitting. This can magnify the memory in whatever direction the mind is currently interpreting it.

“Well then”, you may say, “what about physical artifacts from the past, surely those are concrete evidence of the past?”

Well no, not really. Those only exist in the present tense world. It’s not a pedantic point because the current state of an item doesn’t directly show it’s history. There are many ways any particular item could have ended up where it was. A manuscript from 10 years ago could have been written as if it were from 1000 years ago. We have ways to test things, like carbon dating, but every test has limitations. Some only work on short time scales, some only on long term scales with the margin of error in centuries, and all of them are limited to what materials they work with. That’s all speaking about long term history but short term is just as challenging. Look at crime scene evidence (not the silliness on TV, actual police investigation) and you’ll see just how challenging it can be to reconstruct a single day from within the last couple months. The amount of information that can be gleaned from physical remnants of the past has a startlingly steep decline.

It’s certainly more accurate in the long term compared to memory, but ultimately it’s just as fallible. The fact of the matter is that in order to understand any artifact, one must create a history which includes that item.
A history.
A story.

A major change in the human’s relationship to the past has occurred recently. Social media. We have an unprecedented ability to record and analyse our world. A major component of social media is a log of ones life. Photos, parties, weddings, graduations; we catalogue them all. When we post about a boring day or a shitty day or the most beautiful day we’ve had; we’re writing our past. It’s a degree of control that few humans have had access to until very recently. Before then it was always in the hands of someone else to write your history (if it was ever deemed worth recording). Now we curate and edit our past selves. It’s an empowering thing to do.

It can also smack of narcissism.

When someone is spending more time taking photos of their life than actually living it (whatever the hell that means), what they’re doing is writing their story. The past as a fiction, with the self as the protagonist. It is unquestionably narcissistic, yet so is consciousness. As long as they’re aware of the inherent narcissism and they keep it in check, there’s nothing wrong with it. You have every right to try and write your own story because you are the owner of your past. 

If you’re not a good author though, no one will care.