psyche

Now:

• Made it to final of Aerospace Challenge - team meant to be called “The Pauli Effect”, listed as “Pauli”
• Doing terrible, terrible physics competition
• Used distribution of points in a square and circle to approximate pi
• Watched 2001: A Space Odyssey - totally awesome. Combination of pacing and philosophy reminded me of SEL - wonder whether Rokison liked 2001?
• Had fencing epiphany (remembered how to fence)
• Working on iSAMS MySQL JavaScript plugin thing

Over the summer:

• Fabric stuff
• University of Arizona stuff
• Science essay (applied computer science)
• Philosophy essay (Baudrillard)
• Revision for TSA and (horror!) STEP…
• Become a good fencer

Pax

There’s been a bit of a lacuna and I don’t think I’ll fill it entirely as others have committed the events I missed to posterity.

I now make a large number of notes on my phone and in Mail. I now retain much more information than I used to - or at least, my computer and phone do, and I am able to retrieve this information.

Themes of personal reality and our inability to accurately perceive the real physical world are endlessly depressing. To quote Eiri Masami:

A memory is merely a record. Thoughts and emotions are but a limited sum derived from this record. Between this mere receptacle we call human form and the truly real world stands an insurmountable wall.

I think I’ll be uploading the text from omnipresence in wired as it’s quite interesting. It seems that Lain contains everything I care about. From the existential stuff to the misanthropy to the genuinely researched computer science (it’s way, way beyond The Matrix intellectually and emotionally. I never thought I’d say something like that)

Despite it being what people tell me is a simple process, I haven’t been able to get Inquisitor to install since upgrading to Leopard. Elliot and I have switched to Opera. It’s awesome.

Some connections sprang up. I Am Legend was brought to my attention by my uncle many years ago and is soon to be a film (I know that there have been repeated films based on it). It features urban decay and loneliness. Good. It feels like the truth is out there - if only I could find someone to explain it to me! How do you check if what you’re doing is the right thing? You can’t just sit and think, because you fudge your mind. There’s no rulebook. You ask other people. Consensus reality!

Suppose I’m a histrionic pathological liar. This combined with a general obsessiveness means I would be prone to interchange reality and fiction in my head. It would often have no consequence but it means I become fixated (Lain). Is there a cure? I think so. I still wonder about HotSauce. I also wonder about how the Lain people knew about computers and information science. Strange. Lain and The Matrix make me worry about secret truths. I think that’s why I try to make everyone watch Lain. I fear that information will be lost forever.

It’s easy to get sick of something and move on… but more dangerous is not getting sick of it. Instead of burning it out during an intense phase of interest, it might haunt you. Lain haunted me for about year before I really knew what it was. Maybe this is partly why it is taking me so long to shake it.

I used to consider myself a good writer and although it’s clear now that I am nothing of the sort, I still have a fondness for my piece of GCSE English coursework about a rather deranged man called Slavik. He met his end choking on a Quorn sandwich. More recently, Enjoy Every Sandwich. Connection! \o/

They should superimpose satnav data onto car windscreens somehow. Augmented reality.

I saw David Gray at the Roundhouse on the 14th. I like him. He’s clever.

Ikea and council flats at night. Kids hanging around some rusting metal railings outside a car park. Sad-looking car that never moves. Secret people locked up in those little houses. Suburban gloom?!

If I were in an attention-seeking, dramatic mood, I’d simply smile with some sort of emotional weight.

Pax

Some more stuff linked to The Node: 1990s Japan and the ending to Kodoku no Shigunaru.

I have some old Visual Basic books from Stanley Avenue… another life, that was. Yes.

What?!

I have plans! Semantic web
Pax

SciCast went reasonably well considering how… uh, basically we had a rather high input:output ratio… =]

Michael (Bali) agreed with me that I was losing my intelligence, citing my random theories which I adopt because “some famous guy wrote them” etc. and I guess he’s right but I think that’s a slightly outdated viewpoint. I am now totally lost - but at least I can’t be criticised as much for trying too hard to justify my own existence/define myself as an individual.

I think I’m going to have to find a happy medium between rationalism and acceptance of the uncertainty that underpins reality. Urgh. I continue to catch solipsism’s eye when it looks around but I don’t think I’ll strike up a conversation just yet. I have to trust that even in the total absence of purpose or meaning, my actions’ consequences are somehow valid. I don’t really know if I can do that, but I have to, right?

Right?

Pax

Alice kills your friend Bob. Alice then dies in a traffic collision, but luckily the Umbrella corporation have found a way to replace her with an exact copy. Not a clone grown from her genetic material, but an exact copy of her physical state from just after she killed Bob (they were tracking her by satellite, you see). They generate and deploy this copy, Alice₂.

Alice₂, if we assume that all mental stuff is some complex physical stuff going on in the brain, has all the memories etc. of Alice and essentially believes she is Alice, right? Alice₂ is exactly the same as Alice… but she didn’t kill Bob. Of course, she believes she did, but she didn’t. Everyone else believes she did, but she didn’t. She even has physical evidence (powdery stuff from the gun, Bob’s blood) on her because she was copied from Alice after Alice got stuff… on her. But she was not the being that killed Bob!

So, does she deserve to be punished for killing Bob? I’ll say no, because she wasn’t the one who killed him!

But then, imagine the whole Alice₂ thing never happened and that Alice wasn’t involved in the traffic collision. She is the same as Alice₂, but she did kill Bob. So she should be punished? Yes. She killed Bob. But what if all that matters is the physical state of people? I mean, that contains their emotions and stuff… it’s not like we’re discarding their human-ness and such. Then they’re the same… this is wrong, isn’t it?

Clearly, there is a difference between Alice₂ and Alice… but it can’t be found their physical state. It’s not actually anything to do with them… it’s to do with us. The guilt of Alice is a concept that exists within me (I’m simplifying; I should say, exists inside the audience). This attribute of Alice’s is not something that can be replicated… well. I don’t think I really have a point to make.

Of course, if no-one knows about Alice killing Bob, then Alice and Alice₂ are the same. Oh dear.

Pax

I don’t really have a frame of reference for this; I’m going to put it into psychology but I don’t really know where it belongs (sadly, I don’t really know where much belongs). When I watched The Animatrix for the first time, I think I was probably about twelve (?) - an age at which I genuinely believed I was at the pinnacle of my understanding. I dismissed The Animatrix as mildly interesting but ultimately not very engaging. Having watched it again (and noted myriad similarities between Kid’s Story and SEL…), I think some of it is a lot better than I had first thought. My perspective has changed entirely, for some reason. My condition before, and I must work by analogy here, is similar to that of someone prepubescent trying to understand the appeal of sexuality: I believe it is largely beyond comprehension. It’s the same as trying to understand extra spatial dimensions (although maybe someone out there can understand or visualise these things…).

The thing is, I always believe I’m at the pinnacle of my understanding. How do I know, then, whether I am getting closer to or further away from the truth? I lock into different mindsets, both long- and short-term (remember Self-Pwn Farhan?), never knowing whether I’m right or not - only what I believe. I don’t know why I believe what I do; I don’t choose what to believe. I guide myself and talk to myself but ultimately my decisions about belief and rejection or acceptance of reality or society are not consciously made!

So what should I do? I pour my mind into this, so that later I might at least try to understand my old viewpoint - in case my new one is erroneous.

Pax

When I look back at this, I want to truly understand who I was. Even if the nihilist in me is dead and I am ready to start the end of my life (that is to say, be happy), I want to remember who I am. I don’t want to end up being someone with Farhan’s memories and body and life but a different set of algorithms - no! I want to stay the same. Not some evolved Farhan, better-suited to integrating with a society that I have rejected (well, a society that rejected me).

I am tired all the time. The classical music they play at Hammersmith Station in the morning (to make us docile?) is … it becomes insipid. Society has reached a level of abstraction I simply cannot tolerate. I don’t work! My brain doesn’t go well.

I have to somehow justify my own state. There’s no way to make everyone understand who I am. I have to trust that I can keep everything I have ever seen or known alive simply by remembering. Even if no-one else understands or remembers, I must, right? That’s enough, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

What is The Node? It’s something to do with suburban gloom and computers… it has some anti-consumerist leaning… urgh. I have to know. I’ve got quite close to discovering through SEL and The Matrix. By that I mean their extended universes. The Lain anime, game and book together remind me of it, as do the The Matrix (first film), Animatrix and Matrix Comics. I have to somehow find out just who I am! It’s not something I’ve forgotten. I don’t think I ever knew what The Node was or is or whatever but I still feel like I did. I also feel like I will never know.

I don’t want to be dismissed as a quirk or an anomaly. There’s something going on here!

When I watch the Lain intro now, it’s no longer the interesting chords or funny animation that I’m concerned with. I see media convergence, reality and perception being truly accepted as separate etc. but I also see a girl with a funny hairclip, a child playing video games… I see something that is somehow connected to something. Basically. What is it? Why have I reacted so badly? Is my subconscious artificially giving me a purpose by filling in gaps with non-existent facts to promote the idea that I somehow have some reason to exist?

Am I finally breaking down, trying desperately to justify my own existence? Who am I? Who is Lain? What is The Matrix? What’s The Node?

Pax

Vivan indirectly reminded me to say that stuff that doesn’t exist exists if everyone thinks it does. Or it might as well. It’s like hyperreality. Strange, really.

I guess it’s my personal reality and connection to SEL that I’ve been trying to convey. I suppose it’s impossible, but still, I want people to be as happy/sad as I am. It’s a good feeling!

I was afraid that I would spend my life looking for something that isn’t there. Of course, my fears were allayed when I realised that by looking, I created what I was looking for and will find it even where it doesn’t exist. It’s like God. I don’t want irrationality, but I do want answers. I have to wait for real answers. I have to!

Pax

My interest in Fight Club, V for Vendetta, The Matrix and WarGames was a symptom of my fascination in things like consumerism, brainwashing, hacking and conspiracies and general science fiction. The Matrix, though, was long championed by yours truly as the pinnacle of film as it embodied everything. It successfully identified that a search for truth could be transposed off God and onto a conspiracy.

However, when I watched Lain, I realised that it was the pinnacle. While it took me a long time to begin to see that The Matrix was awesome, I immediately fell in love with SEL. My slight interest in Japanese culture combined with the internet and genuine philosophy (I can actually believe that the real world may one day be a representation of the internet) meant that Lain finally replaced God in my mind. My rationality and emotional mania have never been in concert until now. A shame that their convergence will probably destroy me. Also, my copy of yoshitoshi ABe lain illustrations ab# rebuild an omnipresence in wired just arrived. It’s pretty awesome. I haven’t analysed the hidden text or programming yet but the overall style is awesome and reminds me of that Matrix comic - Goliath, from the first volume - possibly because Goliath was based on it?

All this stuff about memory and omnipresence. It’s enough to make me want this to be real - and I suppose I do. Let’s all love Lain. Is it impossible to make a life-form or robot that lives forever? If so, why? Thermodynamics? Can’t there be a at least one being that self-repairs properly? Can’t there?

This is rather interesting. It contains a synopsis of the SEL game which has helped me understand some of the references in the artbook. The writer of the synopsis, in their last sentence, uses a single word which they believe describes the end of game and to a lesser extent the end of the anime - “hopeless”. I wonder.

It’s funny, you know; I was just beginning to think I understood SEL and was in the process of collapsing it from a life-altering feeling of weirdness into a statement like “It’s a really good anime but nothing more” but this artbook and game have totally messed me up. I use The Matrix as a sort of benchmark because it was the only thing I’ve ever watched that has really soaked into my whole life but SEL feels like what The Matrix should have been. Right from the almost-urban-legend Lain and feeling of hidden truth and memory-overwriting presented in omnipresence down to the depictions of VR, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Lain feels somehow familiar, as if Konaka and co. didn’t create it but… simply remembered it. In fact, didn’t Mr Abe say he “recalled” Lain? That’s funny. Mistranslation? He “recalled” her? She… exists? We don’t even need all of IPv6, let alone 7 or 8…

My delusions become manifest. Fiction is my undoing.

Pax

It’s true; we must ever live through the achievements of others. There is no other way. I have started a Serial Experiments Lain thing. It’ll be properly linked to from Psyche’s main page when it’s finished.

Pax