psyche

It is Lain herself who asserts that people only have substance in the memories (did she mean minds?) of other people. This means that although she doesn’t literally “kill” or “delete” herself, she becomes nothing. No-one will ever properly know her and all her previous sacrifices are rendered meaningless by her final one. I am becoming insane. To be forever alone and never remembered? I don’t… understand.

That’s the worst form of immortality! I would have been less saddened by SEL if Lain had just killed herself! It’s too much.

People complain a lot about how slow and sparse SEL is, but isn’t that the point? The idea of eternal loneliness while surrounded by people… being totally forgotten… it is what disturbs and harrows me about SEL, but it’s the essence of SEL, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Eventually I’ll just call SEL “a good thing to watch” like I do The Matrix (and how I now think Harry Potter is “good” instead of totally amazing like I did when I posted Potter.) Nonetheless, at the moment, SEL’s bizarre combination of loneliness, sadness and psycho-horror is compounding my total aimlessness into some total delusion. I continuously Google “Who is Lain?” but am all the while hoping that I will somehow stop caring. It’s the same as when I’d ask “What is The Matrix?” or just generally feel that the world was messed up.

Pax

I’ve just realised that the multiple personality thing in Requiem is in Lain. Argh, worlds converging… I think I’m becoming slightly demented. The sounds of computers humming or random chatter or the sight of anything electronic reminds me of SEL, or of Lain herself.

Pax

I would probably call it The Matrix or Lain but God is a strange thing that crops up for a combination of many reasons. Some glitch in the human psyche causes a strange feeling of yearning for some higher meaning or purpose. It is magnified culturally into religions, cults, philosophies and methodologies. It becomes all-consuming.

When I am alone, breathing in cold, scentless air in some empty place, I think of it. I can’t help feeling that I’ve forgotten some god. “Forgotten god”! A David Gray lyric, I believe. I don’t want to forget. I really don’t. That is why create persistent data on the web.

I want it to persist!

Pax

Apart from the obvious thematic connections, there are some things in Lain that I’ve seen in The Matrix, like the techno-punk raves, the men-in-black idea and the idea of a teenager killing themselves to escape this reality and enter another (Kid’s Story in the Animatrix).

Similarly, the idea of scouring the internet to find the answer to a nagging, slightly ethereal question. “What is The Matrix?” wasn’t, I think, as well executed as “Who is Lain?”, which, while not a theme in itself, was very well put in at the end (the feelings that everyone had of recognising Lain or recognising her absence but not quite knowing who she was. let alone that she was a goddess). I think I’m going to find the ending to this thing quite sad, actually.

Omnipresence in the Wired
I named Psyche Psyche and put a glider on it a long time ago. Now, SEL and Conway’s Game of Life cross my path again but this time I understand them better. It’s a little bit frightening but not unwelcome.

Pax

I have just redone the CSS for Psyche yet again. Its readability and layout is improved, in my opinion, and I have hopefully allowed it to render in Internet Explorer (for a long time it simply did not render!).

It has survived for a long time. I am also in the process of updating its content (useful, no?).

Connections between everything continue to grow stronger. There’s a talk at school on Monday about Conway’s game of life. My old maths teacher told us something about John Conway a few years ago. He’s pretty great (both maths teacher and JC, I mean). Also, the glider, one of the cellular automata in Life, is prominently displayed on Psyche’s frontpage as a hacker emblem. Similarly, the Lain thing. I’ve only just made an effort to watch it, having had references to it lying around on Psyche (which is itself a reference to Lain) and lo and behold it is awesome.

Interesting?

Pax

I just watched the first volume (first four episodes) of Serial Experiments Lain. It’s pretty awesome. I named Psyche for the Psyche chip and I think I made the right choice, despite knowing very little about it all that time ago!

I wonder if consciousness is simply an artefact of our fundamental decision-making being quite slow? I mean, our brains are very fast indeed, able to process an astounding number of sensory data, but our core algorithms seem simple - if fuzzy - and slow. I wonder if the reason we feel like we choose things according to some “will” as opposed to a slightly-chemically-fudged algorithm is simply that we can “feel” the decision being made and thus feel as if “we”, the “chooser” are in fact in control of the choice, when we are in fact following ingrained instructions?

Is my computer conscious? Is it in a perpetual state of sensory-deprivation? Will computers be accidentally made conscious? I think the distinction between thought and what computers do now is abstract and artificial. I think they think already but aren’t conscious. They have arisen from our poking around, not from probability as life did. We just happen to work remarkably close to perfectly (perfect as we see it, I mean). I mean, somewhere in the universe, it had to happen. Computers are our creation, and we don’t have nearly enough time or resources to keep experimenting randomly (like nature fluctuated randomly which created us). We don’t have the luxury of the law of averages. Stuff won’t necessarily just work out.

We have to be intelligent.

Pax

If my brief encounter with Buddhism taught me anything, it’s that serenity can be just as useful as rage. I have now found a happy* medium between optimism and pessimism that isn’t quite realism and likewise a compromise between extreme anger and a feeling of being completely in control. The Internet (and I do mean that; the web combined with IM and IRC) late at night is one of the best things ever. Being alone but totally immersed in the collective.

It’s interesting!

* Well, happy/sad…

Pax

Some people are completely forgotten. This is beyond normal death; this is close to total death. Total death would be if all memory and achievement and legacy were removed from the collective consciousness along with everything else about the person.

I think Baudrillard did something about what I called “total death”. I believe he called it “disappearance”.

Pax

It’s not a uselessly semantic distinction, as YouTube commenters would have you believe. Even Apple, in their dumbed-down advertising campaigns borne of their selling-out (they’ve been doing it for a long time), refer to things like “surfing the internet” and making the “internet look good on your phone”. I understand that when this ridiculous error is so prevalent, even intelligent people can inherit it, so here is the truth:

• The Internet is hardware - it is the network (analogous to, say, a LAN)
• The Web is software* - it is one of the many applications** of the Internet (analogous to your company’s intranet site)

* It’s a big bunch of HTML documents. On its own, you wouldn’t be able to access web pages from anywhere unless you were directly connected to the computer or server they were stored on. However, you can connect via the Internet so you don’t require a direct connection. See?** Yeah, ever heard of e-mail? File transfers? Internet-enabled games? You don’t connect to “the web” when you plug your modem into a phone port, do you?

For clarity, Wiki strikes again.

The internet is a marvel of engineering and hardware design coupled with software transfer protocols so awesome that I believe that it is the pinnacle of not only communications design but of all electronics.The web is a dynamic and thus shifting, self-maintaining in some areas, self-destroying in others mass of files designed to be opened by web browsers over networks connections and ultimately the internet. It is a remarkable experiment in content creation and sharing and is obviously one of the most important and frequently-used applications of the internet (along with e-mail, IM and file transfer). A massive sociological wonderland, it is novice programming on steroids and in another dimension.The internet combined with the web (no, this is not called the interweb) and other apps is, I believe, humanity’s greatest achievement. While retaining our individuality, we are becoming able to function as a true collective, silenced by no-one. It is great but it is not good or evil; it is neutral, as things with extreme power often are - and thus corruptible.

However, it remains the basis for my faith in computer science. We have become more than the sum of our parts. We are both man and machine. We have transformed into something altogether more interesting than I thought possible.

Pax