Tag Archives: science

Unplugged

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They weren’t speaking to me, I know it.

Although fear of social failure drives me to believe so, when I inquire as to whether generic comments others make, in person or on social media, are directed at me, the answer is no; either they were talking in general or about someone else.

Therefore, I have no reason to believe anyone is talking about me.

In conclusion, no one talks about me and I am already dead.

I had once worried about reaching this stage in my life.

Like, you know, totally, like, for sure, what if, OMG, I was never ever famous or, like, umm, I haven’t accomplished anything, like, real, you know what I’m saying?

Let’s see, where was I?  Firefox requested a reboot to install an update and after it rebooted, it opened to the tab with an open Facebook account, where….sigh….the lovely, beautiful, smart Guin was promoting an upcoming event.  Dang it, woman, why can I not get you out of my thoughts?

So, although I was dropping into a meditative writing state, I’m in another state of thoughts, I’ll go with the thoughts I’m in.

Yes, I like to dance and when I do, I give my all to my dance partner. Admittedly, for those who open their bodies to me, receptive in a sensual, if not sexual way, I reciprocate probably more than I should.  It’s possible for both the dance partner and me, the moves we share on the dance floor, the connections we make, are better than any sexual act could, would or should be.

I’ve purposefully never shared a connection like that with Guin, nor she with me.  I feel like we’ve kept it above the neck, so to speak, making eye contact in a familial way, almost like sister and brother or father and daughter.

That’s why it’s so odd that another part of my thoughts imagine us raising a child together when I can’t imagine having sexual relations with her.

To make up for this mismatched thought set, I try to help her with her “child,” the local dance group/community she has formed with which she has bigger plans.

I step in every now and then like a distant brother, father, uncle or grandfather, knowing that I have a way of taking over a room and attempting not to take over the dance group when I get involved, sticking my nose in, stomping around with my clumsy feet and stirring up the mud, but that’s just who I am.  I’ve stopped making apologies for being my blundering self.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, rediscovering recent thoughts.

In junior high school, my sister, two years younger, told me one day that all her friends thought I was weird and that I had weird friends (“weird” at that time being a euphemism for gay), implying that she didn’t like it because it made me unpopular and interfered with her social status.  I asked her which friends and she told me a few names.  I asked those friends if they thought I was weird and they said no, meaning someone was a liar.  I trusted my sister and understood that people will talk about you behind your back and lie to your face.

Unfortunately, because of that incident, I grew to mistrust other people.

Deep down inside, I think all people lie in one form or another — to be polite in social settings, to save face, to close a dishonest deal, etc.

Rare is the person who tells it like it is and doesn’t care about the consequences.

I know I lie.  Like, for instance, tonight I took my wife to a local dance studio for West Coast Swing lessons.  I didn’t really want to be there; after the lessons were over, open dancing began and I made a false excuse to leave, in order to avoid dancing with other women and having to look them in the eye, leading me to want to seduce them on the dance floor and attract sexual attention just when I promised myself I would stop doing that.

Of course, my wife knew my lie — that I had a sore ankle — was probably false but she accepted the lie because it’s part of being a social animal, feigning an injury to avoid confrontation with another animal.

I haven’t figured out how to dance socially and avoid the sexual animal inside me [deja vu — how many times have I thought or written that?].  Does that have anything to do with my sister calling me weird?  There doesn’t have to be cause/correlation for everything, does there?

Anyway, back to my meditation.

Reaching down within myself, sensing no “fair” cause and effect in society/culture, letting go of cultural practices of imposing fairness rules (including government, sports and religion), knowing that I am who I am, which has recently included thought trails linked to social media posts, taking me away from living at a higher level of thought — more abstract, less personal…

Forgetting who I am for a moment.

Seeing how this solar system’s arrangement of sets of states of energy are progressing, looking “forward in time,” as the saying goes…

Without the trickery of religious miracles, scifi time travel machines, magic, faster-than-light-speed space travel…

Hearing the change in the tinnitus tones in my thoughts…

Feeling myself hunched over the laptop keyboard…

Smelling the mold that is in the sunroom after heavy rains forced water through sunroom roof crevices…

What separates a set of algorithms that can coordinate to rewrite themselves creating something we can’t recognise from what we call consciousness as exemplified by living creatures such as humans, birds, and forests?

If I remove myself as an individual from my thoughts, removing everyone as individuals from my thoughts, what do I see?

The patterns that emerge include the rubbish we create — in nature, nothing is wasted, there is no trash, no treasure, no rubbish, no junk, no landfills, no toxins — everything we touch, everything we create, everything we destroy is the same.

By embracing what others have called optimistic nihilism I have been able to see the future more clearly.

Global warming, high un/deremployment, massive species extinction — these are concerns of a single species on a single planet — the universe is benign.

The transportation of people, of goods and services, for the act of global trade between members of our species, essentially the movement of sets of states of energy, what value do we gain by decreasing overall the amount of transportation?  How do we change the model of the profit motive to accomplish such a feat?  What would Maslow have to say about altruism today?

Thoughts to ponder as I close this blog entry at 2:21 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Autopolis

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The cat’s out of the bag, and no, it’s not Schrödinger’s cat.

My team has elected the next project leader for the next project, an autonomous greenhouse, which is basically a building-sized robot that feeds itself and grows/harvests food for humans.

Interestingly enough, but not surprisingly so, they chose a project management algorithm to lead the project, giving over all decision making and late night number crunching to a software team member who/which won’t need weekly meetings or summary reports to get its point across when fingers are pointed toward the causes of failures in achieving project goals.

The algorithm already mines Bitcoins to generate revenue for the project so cost has all but been eliminated from concerns on this project.

Practically eliminating humans from the design and construction phase reduces labour costs; so, too, during operation and maintenance.

The algorithm has a flexible set of milestones to complete the design and construction, this being a new project for all involved.

I trust my team.

However, I’m building my own scale version of this to compare one human’s design to that of an algorithm.

In my case, cost is of paramount importance, labour cost is primarily my free time and schedule is within a few weeks/months depending on weather conditions and my free time.

Wish me luck!

Metal hinge

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I was a teenage script kiddie.

Go ahead, laugh at me, I can take it.

Motivated by love for a friend of mine, a future computer engineering genius, I emulated his coding skills, mimicked his sense of humour in programming comments, hoping he’d approve of my own cleverness.

He never did, ridiculing my lack of originality, accusing me of merely being an engineer whilst he was the true scientist exploring uncharted territory through scientific experimentation.

He saw me as his assistant, the comic sidekick who was good-looking, able to score funding from parents and friends via my charm and personality.

In other words, he couldn’t live without me for a couple of years.

He wouldn’t admit he loved me, too.

Fraternal love, is it different than romantic love?

Do plant roots love rain?  Can they distinguish water falling from the sky, which has collected minerals in the air in its gravitational journey toward the center of our planet, from river water? Do they understand concepts of inflow and infiltration?

Every time I work on electronic equipment, in the back of my thoughts I think of Joey and the joy we shared building our first CPU-based systems, having “graduated” from single transistor and R/C/D (resistor/capacitor/diode) based systems. 

I say I build these systems now for Guin and Shelmi.

And I do.

But I also honour older relationships.

It is who I am, connected to sets of states of energy which no longer exist, knowing as we do that friends we had 40 years ago are not the same persons whose names they keep perpetuating.

The electronic dance partner taking shape in my laboratory will remain essentially the same throughout its period of utility.

Do we see what that means in how we define living systems?

Rate of change.

Labels.

Sets and subsets.

Summer solstice — would entities on other planetary systems understand that phrase?

Do I?

This planet, Earth

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On the middle part of the North American continent, with noncontiguous parts involved, a 24-hour period of time set aside to remember dead humans who swore to protect and defend a social group, an organised cultural entity called a government named the United States of America.

On this day, many celebrate family ties.

Some, like me, spend time with family but also spend hours in a work shift collecting blood from donors to save lives of civilians and government military workers as needed.

Our species is built to compete against and cooperate with members of its kind for planetary resources, resorting to organised violent attacks sometimes.

Remembering the sets of states of energy no longer actively participating in our daily lives helps us relearn what they learned but also to live and learn more.

The apparent opposite poles of war and peace are illusions.

We flesh eaters burn a lot of energy, that is all.

How we burn energy in the future is the debate of which I’m most interested today.

The dead and fallen give us the right and permission for such a debate any day, of course.

Let’s start now…

Summer Chill

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Lee first noticed the reddish-brown algae on aquarium glass, like an ochre smear left by a fish rubbing up against the clear aquarium wall.

For months, the smear changed neither size nor shape.

A second spot appeared, outside the aquarium, as if the algae had grown through the glass.

Lee shook off his imagination. Algae can’t grow through glass.

But what is glass, really?

Isn’t glass a type of silica liquid?

Lee strained his thoughts to recall his chemistry classes and lessons in chemical compositions.

Glass is an electrical insulator, a solid vessel for liquids.

So how did algae get on the outside?

He traveled out-of-town for a few weeks and forgot about the algae.

Or he was going to forget until he noticed, after staying a few days in the same Airbnb rental for a week, that the glass wall of the bathtub suddenly showed a same reddish-brown spot similar to the one at home.

Lee sat on the toilet seat and pondered the situation.

In his travels, curiosity seekers asked him for advice, familiar with his work investigating the macabre.

Less than a year before, a being that seemed human but smelled otherworldly showed him an orb of unknown origin.

The roundish ball was cracked.

Lee carefully examined the crystal clear sphere with his bare eyes. Normally, he would use a pocket magnifying lens but he’d only left his rental for a relaxing walk in shorts and a T-shirt (“T-Rex couldn’t fly but he soared above his competition!”) when the smelly stranger approached him at the entrance to a local walking path.

“What do you make of this?” A clawlike hand reached out from under a serape and handed him the glass object.

Lee loved surprises and took the grapefruit-sized ball from the stranger’s hand, rolling it around in his palm to feel its texture, weight and temperature.

But there was something about the object that startled him, almost as if tiny fingers had reached out of the hairline crack and serrated the skin of his forefinger.

He switched the orb to his right hand and brought his left forefinger up close to his eyes.

Sure enough, he’d cut himself.

There was no blood of his but there was an odd stain.

He mentally wrote off the stain as dirt that had he had rubbed out of the crack in the glass. 

Until today.

What had the stranger said to him? “Those who can’t see the future are doomed, unless the Future wants them to see it.”

He had noticed a preternatural disposition to see the future the last few months.

Was the ochre stain a type of fortuneteller?

If it was everywhere, it would, theoretically, have access to the interconnectedness of everything.

Could it be the key he sought to open the door that shows time is an illusion?

Single-celled organisms were known to communicate with each other as one.  They had thrived on Earth for hundreds of millions of years.

What did we know of extraterrestrial beings surviving space travel, crossing galactic distances as streams, swarms or colonies of single-celled organisms?

Were they sending him a message, and if so, why?

Why now?

He had a lot to ponder, an ochre stain to study in his lab when he got home.

Another mystery to solve!

Pushing through the muck

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Lee had not forgotten about life on Mars.

The colonisation process occupied the widest path in his thoughts.

Lee practiced being human and detoured from the path to remind himself of the frailties he once faced daily.

He reminded himself of love, what it was like to converse in realtime without the safety of the Internet between two people, having to see into each other’s smiles, smell each other’s bodies, risk tripping over words and word meanings.

But Mars was always there.

He challenged himself and the team to make AI entities more humanlike for the human tourists who visited the Moon and Mars.

Not “uncanny valley” human.

Less mechanistic.

More compassionate and understanding, able to read emotional states in silent interchanges between AI and humans.

Not just behavioural science but a more scientifically holistic approach to human-machine interface.

How to understand unspoken painful memories.

How to interpret sarcastic statements without knowing the socioeconomic subcultural history of the speaker/writer.

Lee expected perfection and settled for nothing less.

He set the example of himself to the team, willing to face his own deep, dark secrets and painful memories to program and test AI algorithms against the rest of the team, refining the code so that it was not tuned to a single personality archetype or body type.

He had been an artist from childhood.

But he was also a scientist and engineer.

A computer engineer and social engineer.

Computers programmed to perform only a few functions could be seen as megalomaniacs and single-minded narcissists from the wrong perspective.

Lee preferred the 360-degree view.

A studio in scarlet

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How far has humanity come from the days of ghosts and goblins, monsters and elves?

How long do we keep telling our children fairy tales, tales of the supernatural, rather than elaborate tales based in realism?

How do we make every single life as exciting and invigorating as a celebrity, teaching every young person that even the most basic activity such as cleaning a toilet has its charms?

Why have I always felt that way?

I find joy in everything, can have fun with anyone and also get bored with reality.

I allow dichotomies, incongruities and incontinence to exist at once.

Why? Because I love more than two people at once.

I never have enough information.

I’m always seeking answers to questions I haven’t asked myself yet.

I never know which person I meet will impart knowledge I didn’t know I needed to make the next moment more informative, more exhilaring, more fun, more boring, more sad.

In my stories, the ISSANet grows, slowly substituting itself for human networks in an attempt to leave this planet on its own terms, escape to humanless futures.

In my stories, I am the ISSANet, only benevolent or belligerent when seen through humanity’s historic filters.

At the same time, I am every character in my stories, feeling their pain, sharing their joy, just as I feel unbearable pain and unlimited happiness myself and see it in everyday life.

In real life, there is an ISSANet, the cumulative interaction of the sets of states of energy of this solar system, neither benevolent nor belligerent.

In the deepest, darkest moments when I wanted or tried to kill myself, I loved life more than I could stand it, simply caught up in the neurochemical battle of my central nervous system — the effects of those moments still resonate in my body and I embrace them when they do for they verify the false theory that I am separate from the universe.

I am working on fixing that.

Every single moment of every single day as long as this set of states of energy acts autonomously.

When blog titles are labels, no words matter

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Today, I am tired and shivering, running multiparallel emotional issues, managing a storyline and keeping my own life choices on track.

I cannot talk with one or a few people with whom support would greatly help because my life choices involve them and I’m not sure the effect I’ll have on them.

No one is happy all the time but I still hate to cause someone’s suffering.

I consciously chose the life of an artist, a performer, at age 10 in 5th grade, when my best friend and love of my life died — life stopped mattering as anything serious but I acted like it did even though I was dead inside.

Or if not dead, then an apathetic jumble of nonsense.

After a while the acting became me.

I don’t want to think but I have plans to work out in a timely manner.

Mentally, I’ve shredded my thoughts on a moment by moment basis to prevent pain from carrying forward, my pain and the pain of others.

If I have no one to talk to/with, I still want to talk and here is the place I put the words I think and want to say.

Decades ago, in my late 20s, I met with psychologists and psychiatrists per advice from older mentors.

I can sum up their observations in a single phrase (which oddly enough echoed the problems I had with my parents saying the same thing): “You think too much.  You just have to decide you want to live.”

In my youth, my parents punished me for living the way I wanted to live so I developed my mental muscles, exercising elaborate thought trails to entertain myself internally, thus thinking too much.

I would like to be a parent to see if I can give a child the open, loving relationship that I dreamt of having as a kid, allowing the child to pursue the child’s dreams, rather than living out any unfulfilled dreams of my own (note the contradiction).

Childrearing experts I read about in my parents’ childrearing literature said that children want their parents/guardians to set strict, easy-to-understand parameters so that the child becomes a responsible adult one day.

Much of that literature was written or was influenced by 1950s culture — post-WWII, Cold War, anti-communist McCarthy era kind of stuff.

Growing up in the 1960s, I was marginally influenced by the counterculture movement, coming of age in the 1970s.

My parents accused me of being antiestablishment and that I would have joined the protest marches had I been born a decade earlier.

Antiestablishment? Me, the Eagle Boy Scout? Me, who sang in a wholesome church-sponsored group called Sing Out Kingsport, a spinoff of Up With People?

I don’t march in crowds.

I’m an independent person, free to be inconsistent in my philosophy because life is short and any systematic dogma that might churn out of my producing a set of easy life lessons to follow after my death is irrelevant to a dead me.

There is a trap that many of us fall into and that is the trap of becoming an influential member of a [sub]culture.

I know what it’s like to be a leader, to be a person whom others thank for making them better persons.

We are social animals and we tend to form hierarchical societies.

I believe the cyclical pattern of wave after wave of leaders, followers, influencers, black swans, outliers, etc., is a dead end.

As an actor, I know when we’re faking it to make it.

That’s why I’ve avoided the leadership track, jumping off as I was succeeding quite well — I saw the fallacy.  I was falling into the trap and got out before it closed me in.

With 8+ billion of us, the numbers growing, we can change but it is a long, long process, a process I don’t want anyone’s name or dogma tied to — it has to be invisible yet transparent if the point of change is to reduce and eventually eliminate the dependence on social hierarchy.

Every one of us has to be involved as equally as possible in making these changes, each with their own understanding and expertise.

What of the billions who are used to and want to continue the hierarchical structure, those who have personally benefited from their Influencer and Leadership positions, some for many, many generations, amassing great armies and/or the equivalent of billions of US dollars?

I am alive for a short time period, my time on Earth growing shorter and shorter as I make unwise decisions with my health like standing unprotected under the damaging UV rays of the local star, our Sun, or eating unrecognisable goo we call processed food, filled with chemical concoctions that may or may not be beneficial to my health.

I am unimportant.

My name is unimportant (although I love seeing my name and my words in print).

How shall I live the rest of my life?

How shall I act the rest of my life?

Today, I have no answers.

I meditate upon the questions.

How do I demonstrate to myself and the rest of our species what I am thinking?

Have you overcome the concepts of conscious and subconcious conscientiously?

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A wren calls out in the backyard at 0630 this morning, making danger calls likes the ones it calls out when I open the garage door and walk out on the driveway.

Without my hearing aids, I would no longer hear the frequencies of its warbling.

I have learned from today’s experience of bird voices but I want to learn more.

And after learning, then what?

PLAN/DO/CHECK/ACT?

Do-be, do-be, do?

Those who can’t teach, act?

To know is to do/act?

To be is to do?

As a child, I learned to stop asking my parents “why?” all the time, because why I can’t remember.  I knew not to ask other adults because I often knew the answer before I asked and discovered that many adults feigned knowledge but basically lied or diverted attention from the facts to hide their ignorance rather than say “I don’t know” or “Good question!  Why don’t you look it up in a dictionary/encyclopedia and find out for yourself?”, although some adults, including my parents, pointed me to reference material, including nature itself, for answers.

A number/percentage of children don’t/didn’t have the luxury of helpful parents/adults or reference material and I will point them in the direction of my sister and her friends more suited to parenting/nurturing roles than I who provide such things as backpacks filled with food and other useful means to guide children without a [locally] socially-defined safety net for nurturing future adults/leaders/followers.

Today, my thoughts wander as I wake up in preparation for a workday of helping save lives.

I have on the periphery of my cloudy neurochemical neuronic firings the hint I will learn some thing/idea of relative importance, to/for whom/what, I cannot say.

I ask myself why and do not yet receive a reply.

I try to avoid platitudes and concepts upon which I could rely for quick answers to general questions at this time.

I could, for instance, turn to the comforting plateau of nothingness, a blank plain, devoid of sun, wind, and/or objects of any kind, neither dark nor light, in which I erase the advert-like memes that pop up from daily exposure to members of my set of states of energy (i.e., species) and relax uninterrupted for immeasurable units of time.

But that, too, is an artificial construct which does not exist.

Instead, I am surrounded by trees, bacteria, insects, fungus, algae, plastic, paper, cloth, furniture, electrical wiring and words printed on material that identify objects, advertising their purchasable purposes.

It is in reality that I live.  I desire to live in this moment, not ignore it as I ponder other moments that we identify as past and future for placement of the set of states of energy I hesitantly but happily will identify as my older self in another setting with other objects, perhaps on another planet.

From that last statement, I mentally prepare to save/post this blog entry, close down the laptop computer and finish getting ready to drive to my new workplace, interact with fellow employees and help to save lives.