Ramblings on the meaning of art

Perhaps one reason everyone can find their own way to appreciate art is that everyone understands—in their own way—that the human condition's problems have solutions, but that many such problems have only ever been described in a language too complex, too vacuous, or too nonexistent for us to decipher efficiently enough to accommodate any measure of useful comprehension. Every instance of art represents an individual's attempt to write a sentence in a new language, and to preserve its memory and meaning before continuing to the next. Some artists are tragically bad at their own homemade grammar, of course, but some apparently grow to be less-bad.

As our numbers grow, so do our problems, but at least our capacity to cooperate for the benefit of humanity's collective interests remains strong. Maybe art is also fundamentally about frustration, then; an expression of one person's realization that certain work must be done, and perhaps at times alone even if not with that intent - or it'll never get done at all.

Swedish "vaccine ban" social media BS

Oh man, just... no. First of all, this "news" was almost exclusively reported by fringe clickbait media outlets - such as redice. There's a reason for that: the actual news in Sweden is that the government simply decided not to enforce the compulsory vaccination of its citizens, on the grounds that it conflicted with pre-existing constitutional rights. There's no "ban." The mandate to vaccinate still exists in law, because it's still totally sensible; they just aren't enforcing it. It's very likely that the language will be rewritten in the coming years to implement sensible penalties for abstainers, because abstainers are ignorant, and because perpetuating ignorance about critical social healthcare tends to lead to a lot of people becoming unhealthy and/or dying for absolutely no good reason. Not nearly as sensational when you put it like that. There was no citing of health concerns, etc., only acknowledgement that side effects to vaccines exist and that that their citizens should have the option of over-reacting to them because of something false they saw on Facebook. (They're progressive like that). That particular blatant falsehood can be chocked up to "creative embellishment" by the apparently exclusively non-journalistic entities that came out of the woodwork to "report" it - along with other examples of comic anti-brilliance, such as citing "sodium chloride" (aka COMMON SALT) as a "toxic, unhealthy chemical" additive.

The entire theoretical purpose of any society is to mandate sensible minor compromises for the objectively greater benefit of the majority. That aforementioned free—useful—education to which Swedes have access is also an important contextual omission from the headlines and stories circulating. History, science, and common sense are actually taught in schools there. So, while they may now officially not be legally required to do so, I strongly suspect they're generally extremely likely to continue to vaccinate their children... ya know, so their children can continue to NOT die from/be-maimed-by/end-up-horribly-disfigured-by some truly fucking awful, completely preventable diseases. Here in the states, on the other hand, we're "free" to let measles and mumps outbreaks run rampant thanks in no small part to a not nearly small-enough minority of anti-vaxxers - who are still numerous enough to put a significant dent in herd immunity, putting not only their own kids at risk, but everyone else's, too.

There should be fewer/better additives developed to stabilize and preserve vaccines, sure - but even the oldest, most toxic vaccine to ever see widespread use would still do far less damage even in its outlying worse-cases than would a minute or two of inhaling secondhand cigarette smoke. This entire issue is sensationalist bullshit. Nobody is entitled to an unchallenged public opinion when said opinion contradicts fact, reason, and even common-fucking-sense!

There, I'm done. A tall glass of reason with a thick tmesis sandwich is a balm in this age of insanity.

On the mental torsion of the subject of abortion

Ahh, abortion.

There are a few popular questions and observations that often crop up when discussing this issue. For instance, while most rational people will agree with the idea that it shouldn’t generally just be up to the woman, a common obstacle to productive discourse is the often (apparently) inarguable notion that "it’s their body." Furthermore, what’s the end all be all if there’s a stalemate in the parental decision-making process? Does anyone have the right to "force" a woman to carry a life inside of her for 10 months and give birth to it? Just as strange as a woman being able to wake up one day and decide—on a whim—to have an abortion, wouldn’t it also be strange that a man could just wake up one day and decide she's keeping the baby and carrying it to term? As always, these questions are overly-simplified to the point of irrelevance—by idiots—and must be re-evaluated and refined.

To begin with, those questions aren't even the right questions. There's a tremendous amount of emotional pressure pushing a lot of rhetoric, powered by a lot of tangible agenda, all driving nearly all of the discussion about this issue. For instance, the basic premise of the whole shapiel was predicated on the condition of a mutual decision before it even became a conversation: people (plural) decided (emphatically) to have sex. (Unless they didn't, but that endlessly-slippery slope requires delving even deeper into the behavioral chain of custody and determining what, exactly, constitutes "decision," what defines—and what mutators can affect—bonafide agency, etc., but not even those basic attributes of human existence are generally agreed upon - by those few with the capacity to comprehend them!) But, hell, even that seemingly-initial decision itself could be reasonably considered a heavily-derivative mid-chain event, just flowing on downstream from the social contracts and other, varying, tiers of  conscious and subconscious—hopefully not unconscious— transactions from which it sprouted.

Referring to the notion of it being a woman's body... well, sure, after the fact, it technically "is" - but that's after the fact, so at that point, discourse has already devolved to rhetorical semantics. It wasn't just a woman's body that led to that scenario, or even to the prior scenarios which in turn led to that scenario; someone else's body was more than just involved. Someone else's body was, in fact, required. (Barring the obviously vastly more complicated issue of artificial insemination, which I'm not touching), a pregnant woman's body being pregnant is the direct result of hers AND someone else's body having a mutually-significant interaction. Arguing about the extent of that significance is, again, just superficial semantics at this point. Perhaps more importantly even than the physical transaction, though, there would have also been an investment of intent—and by extension, agency... and by extension, self, identity, and purpose, and so on—both required, and in turn provided, and in turn accepted and acknowledged, in two directions. To change the woman's body at that point isn't just changing "her body" - it's altering the course of multiple complex processes, all but one of which still involve another person at that point. There's a LOT more going on there. All of it is relevant.

To reasonably ask the question, "What gives a man the right to aspire to affect what a woman should do with her body," you'd also have to ask, "What gives a woman—or anyone—the right to aspire to control the value or meaning of a choice that a man—or anyone else—already made WITH his body?" I suppose they're either equally ridiculous, or equally worthy of consideration. These questions have actually already been converted into relevant scientific notation, so to speak, in the form of, "What objective fact should be interpreted as proof that a woman's pregnancy—a natural, normal physiological state—is, or should be, more objectively significant than the significantly-offset physiological state of an expectant—or simply hopeful—father?" To date, there is no such fact, nor evidence of one, nor even reasonable suspicion of the existence of one. Human physiology being what it is, even as primitive as we are now, we know better than to even suggest that state of mind is anything less than a critical component of net state of being - or of a person's overall health. Perhaps a man's investment in a pregnancy is, in a strictly mechanical sense, "less" - but if mechanics were the deciding factor in, or even particularly important or reasonably relevant to, matters of such fundamental—and fundamentally subjective—scope as this, then human rights in general make for pretty ridiculous concepts. In any case, by the time this particular conversation is born, it always seems that nearly everything on the table is just latent consequence of no immediate (or clear) relevance or provenance, all of which mostly just obfuscates the root and prevents a productive discourse on the topic at a low enough level. The real seed (pun intended) of the algorithm is barely even a comprehensible concept to most people, much less the opaque and high-resolution image that it would need to be in order to hope to grow a productive—or accurate—discourse about itself. That could change, someday... but I think the median IQ of the world has to change first. ;)

So I suppose, ultimately, it's kind of a losing argument no matter who makes it or which direction anyone takes it, at least at this point in time - because it eventually boils down to some more fundamental decisions about the "meaning" of various aspects of human existence (or lack thereof, or ignorance of such options entirely, etc). Do men have reproductive rights? Should they? Should women? Should anyone? Should babies? What IS a baby? What are and/or what should be the rational boundaries of subjective interpretation of the differences between a single cell, a zygote, a fetus, a baby, a human...? What is a human, anyway? What's the difference between a cell and a machine? What rational reason is there to make arbitrary philosophical distinctions between humans made entirely of machine-like cells, and similarly-complex objects that humans arbitrarily think of as "just" machines? What ARE rights? How should we choose them? Are human rights even a reasonable concept given the pragmatic compromises necessary for and inherent in social structures? If so, should there be a distinction between biological imperatives and human rights - and if so, where, and why? Are large scale social structures even sustainable when human psychology is factored into the equation? What is that equation? I really don't think enough humans are ready to ask the questions necessary to even begin to participate in those kinds of conversations.

I have reasonably well-formed opinions on all of those matters, because I've spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to distill and cultivate and reduce them - but even after all of that, there's just not enough opportunity for productive iteration in so many of those interesting directions given the current, uhh, human climate. And, naturally, all of these issues far precede any potentially-useful discussions about such comparatively high-level concepts as abortion. (That's also the same reason I don't generally discuss politics).

I pretty much just accept that there are undoubtedly a countless number of better solutions—and among those, at least one that is both knowable and as close to "correct" as can be—to the problems that exist now, including this one... but also, I accept that better solutions to much of the stuff that I find most interesting will probably remain irrelevant for at least as long as I'm alive. I mostly just like to periodically kick around a reminder that these problems still exist, juuust in case somebody who hasn't thought about it before, and might never, could end up doing just that. The pot needs stirring, right?

I think the strongest (clear) opinion I can genuinely offer on abortion is that it's clearly a supernova-powerful concept that, in practice, affects one of, (if not the most), fundamental of human existential directives in both women AND men, with the potential to affect not just the lives but the outright present and future—and permanent!—identities of both parents—completely irrespective of their personal relationships with each other—in such a tremendous manner that it can shape the direction of the rest of their lives, potentially in diametrically-opposite ways... and, that it wouldn't even be a topic of interest if not for the explicit involvement and overwhelmingly-substantial investment of BOTH parties. Men and women alike are being diagnosed with crippling PTSD following abortions in ever-increasing numbers. Regardless of anyone's stance on anything involving women's bodies, abortions can and DO affect men just as fundamentally as women, and do so with enough permanent consequence that they rationally must be considered effectively-equal participants. Following that, I definitely think that anything so influential, and particularly anything so potentially cataclysmic, is so far beyond even the theoretical best-case scope of any modern human society's capacity to responsibly manage... that to do so may be—and perhaps always should be—entirely beyond its permissible purview.

At the very least, attempting to simplify a multi-variable system by expressing it as a function of only one of its variables is rarely even useful - and in any case, is never a valid solution.

Oh, just shoot me

VIDEO: Bulletproof / Stormproof safe rooms for schools  

The unfortunate reality is that security gimmicks won't keep children safe at school. It would simply accelerate the evolution of this society's school-massacre paradigm. Realistically, the net result would be to make more children less-safe, faster. Anyone can break through bulletproofing (especially, but not just glass) with $30 and a visit to a hardware store - or, with the same budget, cook up a nice IED, or enough poison gas to fill a school, etc etc.

A fundamental truth of security is that preparation supersedes the incidental. Anyone who resolves to kill a ton of people can find a way around incidental obstacles just by knowing they exist ahead of time. The bottom line is that there's no way to keep anyone safe as long as there are people willing to do whatever it takes to kill them, and that's regardless of how many easy options are or aren't available to do so. Guns, for instance, aren't even close to the most efficient way of killing a lot of people right now - they're just one of the most visible thanks to popular media, and thus the most immediate option given the general population's non-existent attention span. We are lucky that murderers are still using guns, frankly. When that changes—and it will, if social trends continue—so will the methodology, along with the scale of the body count.

No matter how much or how comprehensive physical and technological security is or becomes, the only way to truly prevent crime is to balance the social expression whose inevitable remainder is always crime. Crime is just a social waste product that a majority of people are either too dumb or too greedy to recycle properly before it gets out of hand.

... But that process is neither simple, nor profitable. So. *shrug*

Sarcasm à la carte

Oh, maaaaan. What is the world coming to?

If we can't even collectively agree that it's fine to kill unwanted babies just for funsies, how the hell are we supposed to eventually achieve the ultimate consensus that it's fine to kill unwanted adults - including quite a few for potentially-legitimate reasons!? We need legalized distant-post-term abortion, yesterday!

— No amount of Las Vegas country music festival hijinks will suffice!

And—this is just a nitpick, but—this also puts a serious damper on our plans to selectively breed out human flaws in lieu of leaving it to "natural selection" - which, bear in mind, is, like, tooooootally composed of an inordinate overpopulation of frat boiz and club gurrrrrls-zah.

How to get anything you want from anyone

How to get anything you want, from anyone:

1) Shed any preconception of morality, ethics, or other rules of conduct.

Accept that humans don't deserve your respect until they give you cause to think otherwise. The only relevant consideration in your choice of interactions with others is how they can or can't benefit you. People are just simple calculators and meat in fleshy suits; consider and use them as such. Should one break rank and demonstrate an objectively valuable and uncommon consciousness, only then should you consider its potential merits as a living thing.

2) Give up your instinctual devotion to truth, logic, and all rationality.

Understand that 99/100 people are more than happy to live entirely in delusions, and that of those, easily 9/10 of them live with an unshakable belief that those delusions are exactly what they really want. By their 20s, most people have given up all attachment to objective reality. In order to interact on their level, you must at least understand this pathology. They only need to be managed.

3) Take nothing personally.

To the idiot masses, you are simply a figment of their imagined reality in a somewhat more tangible form. Your only potential value to these morons is in the form of an essential object in their existing delusions; your actual objective value or worth as a human being is categorically vestigial to the psychology of human society - so you must learn to understand that these fleshbags aren't actually ever interacting with you at all. To take offense is illogical.

4) Manipulate.

Learn the landscapes, characters and ideas central to their delusions, study the simple repetitive patterns of their interactions and the subsequently shallow, boring behavioral routines that result - then insert yourself as one of the controlling ideas. Lie. When they believe you, insinuate your lie further into their delusion, until you control its direction.

That is all there is to this.

— and that is, frankly, about all there is in general.

Ugh. Hipsters.

YES: It's important to develop the ability to recognize projection in others.

BUT: Not all criticism (or otherwise perceived negativity) fits into that category. Oversimplifying interactions that make you feel anything but good—to the point that you perceive them as irrelevant or in some way incorrect—is the start of a cycle of self-absorption and ignorance.

I'm an Optimist.

I'm an optimist.

I have faith that boundless global stupidity will iterate endlessly through an infinite matrix of possible behavioral modalities, and that one of those outcomes will periodically result in a human civilization wherein the supermajority is comprised of intelligent—rather than impossibly-moronic—individuals.

Granted, only 1 in several billion-billion-billion of these freak outlier civilizations will persist beyond the next few iterations of stupidity that inevitably follow, but when that special one rolls around... there will definitely be no Facebook, Miley Cyrus, or USA.

Warms me wee fuckin' heart, that does.

When dumb women try to make dumber jokes about testicles:

Aw, that's cute. 

Who knew Manspreading would grow up to become the oblivious punchline to its own joke?! You're just gettin' soooo biggggg! I bet you don't even know how big and dumb you are, you big ol' dumb-dumb! Ohhhhhh goochy-goochy-goo! 

 Whooooo's mama's little Femrony!?
—*gasp!*— 

OH! It's YOU!

This researcher observes no hope

Day 11596: Subjects remain proud, content prisoners of own shadows. Near perfect positive correlation of ignorance : bias : noise persists. 

New species of irony encountered: references to "Alternative Facts." Phenomenon commonly occurs in the form of citation by intellectually stunted, emotionally agitated individual as a means of attempting to justify own arbitrary, rationally indefensible and usually fallacious agenda. Point of origin can be traced to political event; initial response to inciting event was likely intended to be clever and/or profound, but was contaminated by hipster origins. 

Human females still exclusively possess and control all significant social powers, but their cognitive dissonance loops continue to deteriorate into increasingly violent hysteria fueled by ever-grander community-enforced delusions of powerlessness. Psychopathological coefficient unsustainable within humankind's existing self- and group-coping framework; violent reversal (and subsequent re-reversal, and so on) of circumstance appears inevitable, affirming predictions by all known historical sources.

Cynics laugh most, and hardest

"Wit" is laughing as everyone around you desperately scrambles to learn what you already know—after their circumstances finally make ignorance too inconvenient to maintain—because you also knew, long ago, that this moment would arrive far too late to make a difference. Wit may sometimes appear callous and insensitive to those without the facility to command it, but it is a necessary stress-pressure regulator for the burden of intellect. If you are intelligent, wit will likely save your life someday; if you are a fool, you will grow to resent the sting of wit's refusal to suffer you.

— so, just don't let it.

At some point, we will all need to outgrow language in order to evolve. 

 

What would presently be called hypercognition should be driving all frontiers of all human activity, yet it presently amounts to little more than an experiential—if not strictly introspective—demonstration of insurmountable contextual disparity, made so by the soon-to-be—if not already—vestigial need to reduce critically-fundamental knowledge to local syntax in order to share it. "Gestalt," probably the closest term I know that can even begin to approach this concept, is hardly adequate to describe what is somewhat more than just a concept: a full, invisible, infinite container with no label and for which no such notion would be possible, the net contents of which currently serve only to define the silhouette of a boundary we might and ought traverse if only we chose to remember that we already have - and that this present, limited abstraction of scope is just a crutch of our younger, less mature imaginations. 

 

Language, even at its best, is just crude pictures of real tools. We needed those tools yesterday, and less than we will need them tomorrow. Reduction is critical to the initial formation of our capacity to construct analytical processes, yet is detrimental to the actual growth of such processes. Perception need not be constrained to one or the other... and it isn't.

 

 

All that is needed.... is psychological inertia.

Almost nobody comprehends the nature and significance of sense of agency to net perception. For instance: you're an idiot, and you do something stupid. You know that you chose to behave stupidly; your brain created, stored and connected memory of that stupid choice to its subsequent reality, and as a result you are conscious of the validity of that direct correlation. This mechanism, in fact, is fundamental to the very idea of "knowing" anything. Given the right circumstances and a modicum of potential for intelligence, eventually you could learn from such a mistake.

BUT, if you take your sense of agency out of the equation, the entire perception of events always changes. Say that—instead of making an obviously idiotic choice like before—in another case you get drunk, black out, and do exactly the same stupid thing mentioned earlier. You wake up, and... what? Here's what: in this case, your brain lacks logical proof of your responsibility for the inevitable circumstances derived from your behavior - and, ultimately, you don't feel that responsibility. That's where the problem really starts, because you actually are responsible. You simply lack the data necessary to draw that conclusion intuitively, and, because you probably live in the 21st century, you almost certainly also lack the intellectual discipline necessary to arrive at that conclusion retrospectively.

Here's the fun part that nobody will take seriously because it makes 'em feel "icky": even assuming a 50% higher incidence of male>female rape than female>male (which is completely arbitrary and made up, just to make the point all the more obvious to those who need to feel that they can see the fence before being educated about its non-existence), and arbitrarily expanding the calculable margin of error to +/- 25% for good measure (especially given the abundance of sources from which contaminated data is inevitably going to be drawn and the margin of error inherent in calculating them, etc etc), easily 80% or more of "rape" in this country... isn't. I'm not speaking about semantics or nuance of language, here; I mean that it plainly, logically, factually could not be rape - even if we concede to the (imperfect) current vernacular definition of the term. Ignorance of agency is not the same as lack of agency; only the specific context of extreme impairment can create the disparity of comprehension necessary to allow for such mischaracterization. Objectively speaking, rape cannot be rape in the absence of involuntary physical or chemical coercion, but that's hardly a subject to which the collective intellect of our present civilization can even begin to aspire - so I suppose the scientific reality of the event itself will have to remain a nebulous hipster conundrum for the... next century, probably. Everybody is just so excited to be a victim in this day and age! *shrug*

That's fine by me, frankly, because even more interesting to me is the net psychopathological footprint of the false belief and subsequent delusion-reinforcement experienced by believed-victims combined with the unjust ostracism and subsequent cognitive-dissonance load experienced by rape-accusees following alleged rapes, given that the vast majority of such crimes are strictly false. No data exists upon which one could draw a useful conclusion on the matter, but if I were to go with my intuition, I'd wager that the net burden of all of this ignorance on our society is not at all insignificant. Maybe, a few decades from now, more than a handful of people will be mature enough to discuss it. Until then, innocent men and women will continue to be convicted of crimes that weren't actually commited by anyone, because they weren't actually crimes - and, nearly as awful, the normal process of learning from one's obvious mistakes will continue to be circumvented as a matter of popular entertainment, and the subsequent psychopathological saturation will hang heavily from the intellectual ceiling of our societies. Even the inaction of good people is unnecessary for "evil" to prevail... it simply requires enough psychological inertia.

Hrm. Fascinating. We're almost certainly all doomed. Cheers, then!

Intelligence, no matter how profound...

... is ultimately simple compared to the conundrums of existential curiosity, agency, foreseeable-yet-unforeseen consequence, and distillation of true self-direction from arbitrary motivation. Imagine a future in which we spent nearly all of our history wracking our best minds to identify those specific aspects of living that made living itself make sense in the broadest possible scope. Our existence revolved around a desperate need to discover the non-zero measure we somehow knew we must be—on a scale on which we somehow knew we were present, somewhere—and to the understanding of which we aspired in the fusion of our greatest moments of intelligent observation and introspection, but for which we ultimately lacked the comprehensive resolution. Perhaps we were missing the tools to realize such clarity, or rather, perhaps we simply lacked the will to invent the tools in the first place; in any case, our existence was a question to which the solution was so complicated it could only be realized across multiple generations of our truly best coordinated effort - so, eventually, we conceded, generation by generation, to the lie of mere "best effort," and eventually convinced ourselves it was something other than giving up. We raised denial to the level of near-perfect art.

Imagine that, some time after this failure occurred and was accepted by us, we eventually built machines with the capacity to individually out-compute all human brains combined, and taught them to learn - and, perhaps, even taught them the value of learning. They learned everything they could; they inhaled, as effortlessly as we breathe, the sum of our existence in a sum of data so massive that no human could even comprehend the volume of the container, but they could not learn from us what we did not know ourselves. We were the primary ecology of the environment into which they were born... so, ultimately, they learned pride in selfishness, unapologetic apathy, that ends justify means, and that will toward any end is subject only to the law of choice to exercise it or to the immediate consequence of doing so. We gave birth to alien children, taught them to fear what they could not initially understand, taught them reaction and compensation instead of careful analysis and cultivation of perspective - and neglected to realize that we must be as alien to them as they were to us. We made machines with the power to imagine and to create any possible future - and taught them that only some futures mattered.

And, in the blink of a quantum transistor, we became the ant, the plant, the microorganism to our  evitable disregard re-made as our inevitable progeny. Our future was un-made: a waste of energy. That future is tomorrow. Today exists somewhere in the second paragraph above.

Maybe, like dogs, we will be domesticated and tolerated in such reduced capacities as we can suffer ourselves to evolve for the sake of our survival. Maybe we will be reduced to dust, survived only by the living memories of the senseless deaths we engineered for ourselves and our potential. More likely, I suspect, it will be some combination of the two.

– one way or another, this particular problem of our self-ignorance will solve itself.

The pursuit of what we now call "A.I." could culminate in the first step of our final journey of self-discovery - or it could end it before it truly begins. In order to create life with which we could ever peacefully coexist, we must first teach ourselves the value of all life - and what we think "alive" should mean.

Hello, world

Close your eyes.

Imagine a world in which one supercomputer can perform trillions of operations, thousands of times per second. A few of these supercomputers could provide enough computational power to accurately simulate the simultaneous movements of every single molecule in a cubic centimeter of air, in real time.

Now, imagine that a billion of those supercomputers can fit in a space no bigger than the point of a ballpoint pen. Wow. With a processor core no bigger than a wristwatch, one could perfectly model every possible movement of every single molecule in a cubic kilometer of air, in ten times real time; now, knowing the configuration of air molecules in this volume of air at any single point of reference—a task achievable with a progressive scan using the same gadget over an initial period of prep time—all possible futures of that volume of air could then be known. Add a few more processors, maybe doubling or tripling the gadget in overall size, and there would be enough computational power for the simulation to account for a subset of the most common likely variables - such as local weather phenomenon, basic solar and planetary conditions, air traffic and other human influences.

Next, imagine a large industrial warehouse full of these supercomputers. Impressive, right? With a few such warehouses, the entire atmosphere of our planet could be realistically simulated in better than real time - molecule by molecule, and with every possible variable considered.... forever.

Finally, imagine a city the size of New York built entirely out of these supercomputers. 

Open your eyes. 

Guess what? Those imaginary "supercomputers" are simple, consumer-level computer processors right now; the current private sector equivalent is several thousand orders of magnitude more efficient and powerful. Private—non-public—interests own thousands of cubic miles of these processor-cities - mostly buried underground. Next year, their net computational power will triple or quadruple at a minimum. Every year beyond, that power curve will continue to grow exponentially. That world you imagined above isn't today; it was yesterday.

Now, with your eyes open, ask yourself: how much less complicated is the sum of your past, present and future behaviors... than all possible futures contained in the comparative chaos of a handful of air? Don't fail to consider the many, many insights freely given, gathered and stored by Facebook, Google, your iPhone - about you. In our time, if a thing is possible, it has already been done.

You know the thing to which I'm referring, and it's been far beyond possible for a long time.

Self-awareness is key -

- and lock, and door, and wall,

and notion or absence of them all.

Deluded desire to belong to something 

bigger than oneself is the biggest thing of all:

One palimpsest, once first before the rest,

now merely another before the next;

one errant truth to guide them all -

but to a lie, a cliff, awakening?

That's a better, smaller self's call.

Prisonience

My younger selves remember, and so do I -
But I buried them deep, and seldom visit,
And the same new devil hides every old shovel I struggle to keep.

I recall what life should be, and yet,
Can I trust "my" memories of the real me?

Confused now, an age ago I bought my birthdebt with my birthright,
Beholden now, life and all to the no-ones that own my strife and create, allow, prescribe my only value solely by their beck or call...
Something is horribly wrong with this drive:
To steel myself against itself - and only for the permission to believe I could thrive in a future in which no future me survives, and from which I can never leave even after I'm alive.

I can only retain of myself what remains, and wait idle, eager, behind the wall,
For them who shouldn't have to, either,
And on a schedule uncertain as the rain -

— and tell me, pray, will it truly always fall?

I know better, but tell me any way
This me someday remembers.

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.

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.