Reticulumination

Each day we mourn yesterday's better self, knowing tomorrow's to be a lie.

The human condition is grief.

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.

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.

I Blinked

and I don't know why, but I had this stray thought about homelessness on the drive home tonight, and it got me traipsing down this deep-dark thought trail punctuated by musical tangents... like, what would it be like to have no access to music?

Can you imagine not being able to listen to your favorite songs AT ALL, much less whenever you want? No phone, no iPod, no computer, no headphones, no mp3s - not the good kind of silence where you're alone in nature, surrounded by trees and sunlight, the smells of fragrant flora and elemental earth, the faunal ambiance. It would be so horribly quiet of good sounds, and wouldn't that make all of the awful noise of humanity even louder? What would I have been like—and would I have even made it this far in life—if I hadn't had music to stimulate and expand my creative processes in my formative years?

While at first the thought-train's friction was generating altruisticity that made me want to go back to volunteering on a regular basis, the end of the line felt like a black hole filled with the haphazard tapestries of the homeless condition hopelessly tangled up in the tragic truths of a much stronger social machine to which catharsis is merely a masochistic gnat, and I realized—not for the first time, but for the first time from this thought vector—that this is yet another case of "nobody can unravel the former without first dismantling the latter." This all made me very sad, so I listened to this to focus my thoughts - because I can... which really only made me sadder. 

Brain Dump (Thanks T)

I have a weird theory

– that extroversion and introversion are opposite troughs of perceptive oscillation driven by the human condition—extroversion representing id: the fundamental drive to connect, love, contribute, be acknowledged/affirmed, exhibit tribal survival instincts—and moderated by the ultrarational components of individual consciousness—introversion representing supergo: will to be rational, to be organized and stable and balanced, to evolve beyond the limitations of the present state and to cultivate the skills and knowledge necessary to achieve as much—and that it is both normal and healthy to vary somewhere between the two extremes depending on the stage of growth - with a tendency toward extroversion when comfort is possible and comfort level is generally high, and toward introversion when impossible or less accessible.

... and here's where it gets crazy: that the whole mechanism is just another subroutine of our instinct to survive - one that effectively controls our basic drive to evolve beyond—or else relegate ourselves to—herd behavior based on a balance of rational comprehension + instinctual reaction to the present state of said herd.

(OK - it's actually not weird. I'm a huge psych nerd, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, but I try to explain it to people and their compulsion to defend their own behavior on one spectrum or the other takes over any rational process that might otherwise exist).

The ramifications get pretty intense when you extrapolate the idea to account for the way modern human society treats (pun intended) antisocial "disorders," too. This could bite our species in the ass someday.

I can only hope.

Putting Some "un" in Your "Fun"

The warm, agreeable biases are far easier to miss than those more blatant and obnoxious - but their cognitive inertia is no less confounding to otherwise-navigators along the path to otherwise-wisdom.

Intelligent folk must not fail to differentiate constructiveness from mere positivity, nor achievement from mere catharsis.

Frank's Observations

An intelligent person makes all measurements with immediacy, accuracy, and thoroughness. Any person inclined toward such observational acuity will quickly learn that the average human soul's contents are rather unremarkable - disappointing, even.

Happiness is a tenuous, many-layered delusion, and each of its layers relies upon a foundation more unstable than that of the layer beneath it. To maintain a modicum of contentment consistent with this delusion, intelligent people must avoid being too knowledgeable—too intelligent—about other people.

As for those poor souls whose happiness is contingent upon stabler and more fundamental notions of meaningful living, the notion of such contentment is merely a cruel abstraction.

Intelligent people must either take care not to evolve too far beyond the herd or else learn to sufficiently tend the substantial wounds received in leaving it.

Always,

Frank

Not that I really care, but...

Existential crisis is the hallmark of sentient growth; if you're not in the middle of at least one right now, you're regressing.

Thankstaking Paingiving

11/29/2015

Today, the reality most believe in is still far less real than the fiction everyone knows about. We're still rolling backwards down Mt. Progress at full speed, and fewer care to remember which way is up or forward than did yesterday. Hope is a dark and heavy joke among the learned, employed in earnest only by necessity - as a litmus test of astuteness and intellectual discipline in strangers, and to inevitably discouraging effect. Most of us mistake truth for momentary smatterings of coherent confirmation bias in the otherwise din of attention deficits, and we couldn't learn the difference if our lives depended on it; we know this because our lives *have* depended on it for a long, long time - yet we're learning even less with every passing moment, each generation more content to die more ignorant and wasteful—more wasted—than the last. Typical conversation and interaction is so obscenely vain that it amounts to little more than oblivious pedantry.

— Diamonds are made of the densest bullshit ever, everyone wants the most carats, and nothing else matters. Life.

Our most acclaimed modern tradition is that of "investing" our best years in life into the best schools we can afford to teach us the best brand of consumer programming our withering faculties can accommodate, after which we peddle such pathetic trade for little more than the meaningless right to the laughable claim that we've earned it - and that "it" isn't the vacuum we know it to be. Nearly no one recognizes the con before becoming a part of it - but rather than choose to grow the backbone necessary to overcome the psychological inertia born of such shameful participation—rather than teach the lessons of our tremendous mistakes to those who will inherit the consequences—we lie to the next generation; we tell them it was worth it, that it was an achievement, that it was useful - that it contributed to our lives in some tangible way instead of pigeonholing our potential and dulling the point of our once-honesty about it to the point of our becoming completely useless human beings. Worse than merely allowing it to continue, we go so far as to build our identities upon our false endorsement of this lie as "education" - and so we limit what REAL education might become, dragging it even further away from what it should be with each celebrated diploma.

We are all cowards.

We're all so committed to resolving the cognitive dissonance of our long- and hard-fought self-loathing that we just can't help but preach it and ourselves as the best god-damned things since sliced bread - singing our praises all the louder as we bury ourselves deeper and deeper in our own proud bullshit. Black is white, truth is fiction, down is up... and thank god for that, too - because how on Earth else could we justify digging ourselves into the deepest and darkest hole possible while still calling it climbing a ladder?

THIS, here, today, is actual HELL; a grinning emoji; eventually, we'll even forget the denial behind it - and then it really will be all we are.

Happy fucking Thanksgiving.

Common Sense, Made Common Knowledge

False beliefs consume the mental space that truth requires.

Unless you choose rightly, your very thoughts will harm.

Just A Few Things Nobody Will Likely Take Seriously Before I'm Dead.

Nietzsche was the man who wrote, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."

I've learned the same is true of comprehension; one becomes what one does, thinks, interacts with. This is neither insignificant nor irrelevant to anything.

There is a threshold of recondite but primordial knowledge, shortly beyond which the sum of a human mind must eventually correlate less to existing conventions of human existence than to anything else at all. Approaching the boundary of that event horizon reveals a choice: either to continue into the isolating vacuum of infinite awareness, or to succumb to the finite but massive gravity of familiar faces, ideas and behaviors; regardless of the selection, all of the preexisting momentum of one's entire life is consumed at that moment of choice, poured into that direction for better or—most commonly—for worse.

Look around. Clearly, nearly every one favors a single (poor) choice. After that event, nearly no one will ever again muster the fortitude or conviction to reverse the decision - even if they realize the mistake. The cost of re-making oneself is simply too great, and only ever increases between any two points in time. 

Why do we not teach our children that our present notion of humanity is merely the first of a series of stages of growth — that the entirety of our civilization, even at its greatest imaginable height, is merely a humble bassinet, and that we only belong in it until our minds can walk beyond it on their own?

If we were shown the truth from the onset of our journeys to self-awareness, or even so much as given a hint as to its eventual manifestation, the result of our physical maturation might not culminate in a mere misconception of having achieved actual growth. Really, we have only "grown" into a species of singular cowards, perpetually afraid to leave our nests for fear of the intellectual wings we all possess - the span of which dwarfs even our most generous imaginings of our present state of being.

We are terrified by the scope of comprehension we know our evolution will open to us - and in doing so—as a consequence of our nature to become that which we experience—thrust upon us. As the epiphany of our ultimate potential strikes us, one by one we cower in fear before the responsibility it will inevitably demand as its toll. Those who look to others for guidance in this moment of trepidation seem to meet only the gazes of the unaware or, worst of all, the contrary - those who have already reached and grasped nothing in the very same endeavor. We see the fickle effigies to humanity they have allowed themselves to become... but, in a certain light—a misnomer if ever there was one—don't they nevertheless seem "happy?" Somehow, we convince ourselves so.

We might transcend the meager and unremarkable realities of our present circumstances, but instead we choose never to leap at all... and that is the example we then set for the rest who come after us. They are not "us," yet - but we have blazed the path for them: a slow spiral, originating at birth and culminating in a closed loop at its farthest expanse, with a total circumference just longer than the longest human lifespan. Worse still, if they do not follow—if we do not push them to follow—then we cannot project their choice onto ourselves, in which case the impossible rationalizations we depend upon for our fragile illusions of meaningful achievement would collapse. To prevent this, then, we create vast social mechanisms to obscure each moment of our lives from the ones before it, weaving a delusory web of opacity into every aspect of our existence - made of only the air we breathe... and yet we allow ourselves to breathe it.

Such a collapse is long past due. Such perfect irony is a criminal application of such creative genius as we are all—clearly—capable of.

We are wasting ourselves in the worst possible way.

We are the reality we create. Until more than a mere handful of individuals will otherwise, we children of the universe will continue to be known to our destinies not by the names it has reserved for us - but by the limiting designation we elect for ourselves as a civilization, and which we reinforce in every moment of our complacency: "afraid."

Transcend. It's a choice - and, like all other choices, it can't make itself.