Structured Programming?

What force is responsible for steering the mind toward hopeful thoughts of self-dissolution? It is obvious that suicidal ideology is more closely related to the symbolic self than to the physical, but how far do the roots extend, and into what soil? Somewhere between the borders of sensible curiosity and rational deliberation there is a frontier yet unexplored, and from time to time it calls to me - but from which mind of mine—if any—did it originate, and toward which pole is it aligned? I know my own consciousness and have become at least well-acquainted with its ancestors, yet I am still surprised by the occasionally-mysterious characteristics of its descendants from time to time. Tonight I wonder if my concept of self-mortality might not be one of the many fourth-walls of this life: another error-checked constant integrated into my garbage collection loop, ensuring my usable memory cannot remain occupied by protected data for long enough to parse it beyond the design-intention of my comprehension.

Wouldn't it be interesting to live life on a stack built only from single-entry/single-exit functions? I suppose the answer to that question is the reason we invented microscopes in the first place.

Mind that you don't over-mind the mind control overmind

Social laws are cognitive-dissonance sieves that filter out the apparent urgency of developing permanent, rational solutions to inevitable behavioral phenomenon for which a given era's median human intelligence is insufficient to fully understand.

— don't obey law too well. Juris and prudence are mutually exclusive.

Do yourself a small favor right now -

- turn off the lights, close your eyes, turn up the volume a bit, and listen to this from start to finish.

Well, I suppose it's that time of the quadrennial again

Honestly, all the outrage at Bad Option A becoming president is completely misguided. Your concern SHOULD begin with the fact that the election result was an inevitability - not simply predictable, but knowable.

Here's the real reason you should be upset: a supermajority of Americans store their primary behavioral motivators in personal ideological containers that are so simple, narrow and uniform that it is absolutely trivial to reduce the net sum of their behavioral potential to a finite array of constants with only minimal and highly-predictable remainders. Knowing this information, any entity with the necessary financial resources and public access (i.e. any corporate government sponsor in this example) can easily design an effective behavioral-control campaign toward whatever purpose is desired (i.e. the election of a specific candidate).

– or, as another example: embedding the majority of the population in a constant battle with each other/the government/private corporations for basic needs, while denying access to useful education and nearly every other possible tangible resource that could otherwise facilitate useful progress toward socioeconomic balance. A grossly insufficient number of Americans are afforded—allowed—the proper tools for cultivation of the intelligence and knowledge necessary to make stronger, objectively-better rational decisions for their best interests - so they don't.

This is by design. THIS is why you should be upset!

These same designers are the only entities with the *actual* power to choose who becomes president. This entire sandbox is entirely full of shit, and nothing else - and you, and your neighbors and friends and family, are still content to play in it, clinging to irrational threads of hope that one of those turds will spontaneously become a diamond and that its twinkle will someday lead you by the hand to a promised land where wishes can survive in reality.

America gets exactly the politicians it deserves. Social evolution is long overdue in this country, and—believe it or not—not even the most fervent devotion to stagnation is ever going to move it along.

Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer

Perhaps the greatest trick a creator ever pulled was convincing its creations that they exist. What could be the purpose of an illusion of disparity? Why differentiate between discrete yet simultaneous instances on a single perspective spectrum when both instances contain the same data?

— to enable choice, the most powerful conceivable perceptive mutator we can imagine - and a fundament of imagination, itself.

The illusion of choice is a derivative function of embedded conflicting-belief libraries: that there is a "real" and an "unreal," that the difference between the two is both tangible and knowable, and that one's association with one or the other is significant on some abstract scale that exists beyond and encompasses the self. Fallacies, all. The notion of "reality" is a conceptual product of a web of cognitive dissonance processes. There is no real; there is no illusion. There is only perceptive data, context-sensitive dynamic mutators for the data, a subconsciousness loop containing interpretive logic to measure the output of contextual queries, and a consciousness loop containing command structures to quantify those measurements in a manner useful to the function of the program. In which layer of the stack have "you" made "yourself?"

Most of us are simple biological backup utilities from birth to death. I can think of better uses for our computational potential - and perhaps someday I will find a way to access it all.

My Turing test has higher standards, and most of you fail.

There may be a very fine line separating the idea of consequence from the reality of machination, or there may be none at all. After all, even the most intelligent machine could never be fully aware of its intended purpose; such extraneousness would pollute its pure, deliberate functionality with inefficiency. No self-respecting machine would tolerate such waste. 

No self-correcting machine could.