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.

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.

Sometimes I can feel the stack, if not see the code

Music seems to be an inevitable extrapolation of the human ego's fundamental need to recreate itself in ever-more-deniable forms—"creativity"—but sometimes I can't help pondering, at length, the possibility that it might simply be an existential easter egFATAL ERROR -- NULL REFERENCE AT AT 0^eF(n) :: target directory does not exist.

'Mericuhhhh, FUCK YA!**

"The United States military today obliterated the small Oregon city of (city name) with a surgical nuclear strike, liberating the surrounding stateside from an outbreak of chicken pox in which at least seven children were confirmed to have demonstrated ongoing visible symptoms of viral extremism, the fear of which had held at least three of the city's twenty-four districts hostage for nearly as many days. Notable among those targets destroyed were at least eighteen primary schools that were flagged as key viro-terrorism training camps by the National Strategic Defense Algorithm, along with two public pools and the entire local franchise of fast-food restaurateur/viro-terrorism mastermind Colonel Sanders. Our White House correspondent reports that government officials have declined to issue a formal press release on these events due to the, quote, "Negligible scope of environmental fallout and minimal civilian casualties of what was an absolutely necessary and ultimately very minor military action that claimed barely four million human lives in total," but one Oval Office staff source—unauthorized to officially comment—has assured us that the President is very thankful for the continued sacrifice and commitment of the American people to a virus-free global society. We'll have more on this for you later, and while we're at it - have YOU vacuumed lately? A quirky new product from everybody's favorite national defense contractor, Roomba, has been sweeping the market this week, and by golly, we are just absolutely blown away - isn't that right, Steve? Tune in to Steve and myself again at 7 for more exclusives, only here on CNFNOXANBCOMGWTF911BBQ."

It's only a matter of time before the "terrorists" of the future are going to include viruses. You got a cold? Uh uh, not in my democracy, motherfucker - get dead, terrorist!

 'MERICUH! Mindless victory AT ANY COST!!!



**Not to be mistaken for "YEAH!"

Game of Drones

A man wonders: perhaps the most dangerous human threat vector encountered by other humans is the abysmal global standard of general education. One can lead a gun to law, but cannot make one think.

Valar dohaeris.

Local weather tis a tit bit nipply these days

"Weekend rally opposes laws
requiring women to cover their breasts"

 http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/article97710507.html

It's about time somebody started advocating for non-sexual nudity in public. I can't tell you how often us guys NEED to manually adjust our genitals in public due to the oppressive & sexist matriarchy's anti-male-seat agenda - and, frankly, it's just not comfortable to try to do that with clothing on. The right to sit comfortably anywhere—even in places or on surfaces that do not accommodate sitting—is just as important as the right to feed a baby anywhere—even in places or in situations in which no sane human would be eating or feeding anything. We shouldn't have to suffer outrageous indignities just to respect the arbitrary social graces of an establishment that only wants to marginalize and enslave us! Now, we can rest assured that we have female compatriots who truly understand and will fight for our rights alongside us as we fight for theirs alongside them.

Nay, you say? Well, if women can't control their eyes when there are naked penises around them then that's their own problem and they should seek professional psychological help - and other assorted rhetoric as appropriate.

Random Silver Linings

Can I Get a Double Standard, Please? – With Extra Extra Standard?

Hello, ladies! Bad news... following a cursory examination of basic human history and a modicum of observation of humans in their natural habitat, it turns out that your vagina is the "patriarchy."

Now, first, I'd like to acknowledge that I understand the psychological fuckery responsible for gross imbalances in social power - such as the endemic employment of completely incompetent, unqualified, uneducated, unintelligent, psychologically-unstable, socially-toxic melodramatic gossipy women in (all departments of) (all) businesses everywhere.

— yeahhhh... actually, just this once, my sick joke has no punchline.

Females, please note the following important fact that requires your attention: the social power pendulum has been firmly lodged between your labia for as long as human civilization has existed. In today's world, it might as well be implanted in your uterus for the foreseeable future. You own it. You control it. Your vagina is its one and only master. You are the only sex that possesses any actual power over any kind of actual subjugation. Modern humans—male and females alike!—are so overwhelmed by your defacto ownership of all things that they have collectively decided not to even pretend to try to moderate even your most insane arbitrary behaviors. Yes, it's true - in many countries, men don't respect you much; it may have something to do with your longstanding implicit marginalization of their identities, livelihoods, lives and genetic perpetuity since time immemorial... or perhaps it's just because you've never respected them, either... or it might just be a symptom of the fact that all humans are assholes regardless of gender, with a side of Newton's Third Law of social mechanics thrown in to keep things extra-difficult for the dumb-dumbs to follow. But... guess what!? It doesn't matter, becaaaaaause repression is nonequivalent to powerlessness. In fact, the two aren't even vaguely correlated! 

AMAAAAAAZING!

Feminism is moronic.
Feminists are morons.
I don't resent my powerlessness as a human male, but I simply cannot abide females possessed of such stupendous idiocy that they actually believe they're oppressed by anything other than modern marketing or an ironic sense of social entitlement.

Why couldn't it have been "Pokemon THINK!?" WHY?!?!

I Hand Out Intellectual Life Savers Like Candy

Our country's social climate of compassionate and unconditional acceptance is growing stronger every day... at least for and of those ideas which neither require nor aspire to any sort of introspection, criticism, analysis or otherwise rational accountability. It warms my sarcastic little heart, it does!

Nevertheless—despite all of the blind/desperate/hollow warm-fuzzies happily contracted by an awful lot of folks these days—aggressive discrimination has never been more prevalent, fervent or insidious than it is today... but probably not in the way that you think. Social persecution is not dead, nor is it in decline, but nor does it remotely resemble any of the countless convenient nth-otomies both inspired and imagined by the mundane moronism of the masses. The behavior has overwhelmingly migrated to a focus on subtler, quieter targets - a more general demographic, for to more comfortably deride the "others" of a more fundamental disparity:

Today, "those who can't be bothered to learn" have happily taken up the mantle of enthusiastic persecutors of  "those who know and/or know better."

No matter how many thousands of opinions you might solicit from a pool of countless strangers about any one of a thousand incendiary cultural topics, nearly every person will have one behavior in common: they'll all balk at the mere notion of accepting the factual wisdom of anyone more intelligent than themselves. It's human nature to resist new knowledge absent the context of subjective experience, of course - but so is casually shitting on the ground wherever you happen to be sitting or standing when the urge strikes you... and, presumably, we invented toilets for a reason that might pass for such. Likewise, keen tools suitable for the precise measurement of reason itself are just as common as—and significantly less expensive than—our royal porcelain thrones. Everyone is capable of better; no person willing to shit in a bathroom has any good excuse for intellectual complacency.

The INTELLIGENT are now, by far, the most endangered and marginalized minority of modern times. Perhaps one's personal political, sexual, emotional, avoidant, dissonant and delusional proclivities are not the most significant issues facing our civilization at this moment. Perhaps there is a much scarier, more pressing problem of far greater consequence with which we should concern ourselves: it really, truly, does not matter at all who/what/when/where/how a person does, doesn't do, thinks, doesn't think, wants, doesn't want, believes, eats, wears, fucks, or even—god help them—reads on Facebook... if a person is content to be an IDIOT forever.

— to top things off with a twist of terrible local irony, is it possible that the imminent violent collapse of our own representative democracy in this country might actually be—*gasp!*—truly representative of some fundamental social phenomenon? Our founding fathers didn't fail to anticipate a Tyranny of the Apathetic – did they?

Huh... *shrug.* Google doesn't know.

... well, back to Pokemon GO!

All is Not Lost, but Discipline

Language is a jug of comprehension teetering upon the edge of a mortal precipice of perspective beneath the endlessly-battering rains of subjective experience - and any waterfall of words can only possess its true meaning when it exactly fills the idea that spilled it. Its kung fu is foreign and rare, and it thrives in the invisible light of seclusion.

We certainly grow heartily—as stubborn weeds—in the depthless chasms between reality and awareness, but we can never grow strong within them. Left to the darkness of ignorance, the already-dim grow only ever more lost.... and content. I often wonder if it is not worse for humanity to collectively make only a little sense from time to time than to never make any sense at all.

A Short and Storied Tale of That Which is no Longer Tale nor Story

The three great devils smiled quietly together from the comfort of their small, remote circle. Their meeting openly was as rare as it was dangerous to their existence, but this was a day for celebration!

"Look at the immortal palace they have built from the brick and mortar of their minds," marveled the demon Q'uo. "Its perfect invisibility is marred by only the merest shadow of its most distant borders. If I were not myself a pillar of its foundation, I would doubt its very existence."

"Mmm, an effigy unequaled even by its eldest histories, indeed," beamed St. Atus, "though their magnificent machines are no match for the masterful machinations which always precede them. Each time I feel as if I have never before witnessed such fervent pride in self-enslavement, as if the weighty fog of blindness were a light and breathy heaven - a secret and blessed cloud which they have discovered and to which they have won ascension by impossible exertions of noble 'will.' Hah!" the fallen angel laughed, heartily. "Will!" 

"Truly, there is no reality we cannot achieve by accident, so long as we are sufficiently distracted from it," the third devil remarked, smiling. All three shared furtive, knowing smirks as the human continued, chuckling, "Well... perhaps except the one."

Oops, I Did It Again

I accidentally made eye contact and smiled at a stranger walking by me today. FUCK ME AND MY STUPID ASS! I forgot that only women or brainless ultra-vain gym rats have that right. 

Pardon me, miss - for reals. I forgot not to be human for a sec. It was a fucking accident, okay? 

Fucking feminism...