psyche

In previous posts I have alluded to things from my past reappearing in such ways that I understand them better this time around (e.g. the Game of Life and SEL). Something else is happening too. Usually, I phase through interests. That is to say, when I am interested in one thing - be it fencing, physics, computing or music - I neglect the others, both in terms of wanting to do them and actually doing them. However, now I feel like I want to engage in all my interests. I’ve never experienced this before - it’s some kind of consolidation of who I am. I may still lack an identity but now I am ready to forge one. I am no longer a computer enthusiast OR a bad musician OR a wannabe fencer etc. - I am in a state of superposition of all of them.

Observe me and my wavefunction collapses and I appear to be only one, but observe me again and I may differ… or not.

My analogy is approximately 1*10^-999999*awesomeness_of_Feynman.

That makes it the single greatest analogy ever.

Pax

Of course, of course I have considered that my demented obsession with things like The Matrix and SEL - that is, things which say that there is something odd about the world, lurking around, totally invisible or totally forgotten - is similar to a search for God. The thing is, I never really connected with God. I have never prayed believing anything would come of it and in extreme situations in my youth I tended not to pray so that I would have fewer invisible people to credit were I to survive. Neither, then, is this search borne out of the general religiosity factor. I need evidence. In fact, this is part of my search. I could have a knowing smile and talk about how I just know the world is askew, but it’s impossible as I would need some reason.

I’m definitely looking for something. Although The Matrix and SEL and every other piece of fiction I love all present eternity and sorrow and hidden conspiracy in different ways (some stylised and shallow, some deep and disturbing, changing type even internally) they have one thing in common: there is a long search of some sort that has to be done.

Some of the dialogue in SEL which initially went over my head as technobabble is beginning to crystallise in my mind. The conjecture that Lain’s mother apparently makes during a hallucination in DISTORTION (LAYER:05) that the balance between the real and the Wired may have shifted to the point where the Wired no longer represents goings on in the real world, but in fact dictates what happens in the real world, is shocking. The idea that we could one day exist only to do things on the basis of what the data in the wires tells us to disturbs me despite it being a rather mundane metamorphosis. Sometimes I think “So what?” and sometimes I simply think “No!”

Pax

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 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

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

This is the only blog post yet to be mostly copied up from hand-written notes I made while in Venice - so beware! (…)

This is the first time I’ve hand-written something hand-written non-school-related since I wanted to be a writer (excluding birthday cards).

Now I feel like I should properly re-read all the Harry Potter books. They are actually good. Combined with my idealised notion of J K Rowling writing in some quiet cafe (the feeling of which is extended by her well-designed Lightmaker website) the Harry Potter series makes me want to sit at my desk hugging a box set and cry. However, like everyone else, I will reduce this feeling to the sentence “The books are really good” or something, which, in various forms, recurs throughout all descriptions of things too emotionally powerful (for some people) to be expressed properly without seeming demented.

Although the post-modern philosopher in me balks at the idea of millions of people buying merchandise, books and film tickets that are all items with little use (well, books can stop bullets) and attempts to class the entire Potter phenomenon as a disgusting facet of modern consumerism and the commercialisation of “feelings”, some more sentimental part of me is glad that Potter is ubiquitous enough not to be forgotten. As you may know, I fear forgetting about things - usually fleeting feelings - and I think that my recent phase of writing things down is a behavioural manifestation of this. While not a literary type, and having turned my back on English despite it being interesting, I almost regret relinquishing the opportunity to learn more about the way in which people create fiction. I wasn’t so bad it it but my heart wasn’t it int. On a career front, I feel like I want to do something important and helpful - or is that just some artificial conscience speaking? I don’t know. I also want to fence and cook. Nice.

The Harry Potter games on the Game Boy Color were interesting. They also possessed the epic, emotional feeling - it’s in the same vein as nostalgia, I think - that impressed me as an element of the books. They also had some nice music. Unfortunately, they were cut short just after the completion of the second one and the less RPG-like GBA and now DS versions dominated quickly. Economics.

Venice is nice but I hate family holidays and being a tourist. Luckily, the Venetian display an admirable contempt for tourists. They have a dialect but, being in the north, it is similar to normal Italian (one of the few things my unobservant mind has noticed is them saying “ci” for “si” [as in "yes"]).

Harry Potter is tempting because of the fallibility of death it keeps dangling like bait. I could sit here smiling sadly, believing that I will have an eternity to meet people or think things that I did not have time for in life. It is extremely tempting. However, I think I will close this Potter book and shelve the Bloomsbury-bound book one last time and confine JKR to the shelf for now and evermore. Although infinity is reassuring when presented through religion, I find the closure of finiteness (finity?), while much less emotionally satisfying (no tightness in my chest or tears in my eyes), more acerbic but yet more welcome.

The power of people’s emotional response to fantasy and depiction of everlasting life (the Sundering Seas in LotR, tangible “memories” and other manifestations of people in Potter, heaven in religions) is just escapism but it fuels the segment of modern consumer culture dedicated to feel-good fiction.

I don’t know whether I should be praising or ranting at JKR - she created a comfort world that makes me sad. It makes people want to believe it while films like the Matrix scupper their own premise by simply existing as works of fiction (although now I tend to think of the Matrix as a metaphor for consumerism as opposed to a literal depiction of an VR-enslaved future humanity).

I think all the desserts I’ve had here have been alcoholic. My head feels awful.

My life feels quite purposeless but I do feel like I want to prepare for a war that will never happen or an important individual task that will never come. All these stories of heroes have made me acknowledge this as some latent inner desire of mine. I am meaningless. Fencing, video games, academia, chess - anything competitive t hat I am drawn to is a dilution of my Fight Club-esque dissatisfaction with modern consumerism and fascism - or what Mussolini (I wish he were still here, the water taxi’s always fucking late) would call corporatism.

As some video game - Metroid Fusion, I believe - once told me, our experiences delimit our consciousness. This is so true. Especially in the case of seasickness. I don’t get seasick and so I can barely bring myself to believe it exists. It would take a lot of evidence or actually getting the propensity to puke on board sea vessels myself to change my view, although by common sense default I always appear to believe in it.

Why don’t wizards study biology? Healers, surely? The sound of the sea here in Venice reminds me of starting out Myst. The food is good. The canals smell.

There’s a busker in Venice (we’re on the Lido) who plays every evening outside the open restaurants down the main road. He sings international things (”Let it Be”, “La Bamba”, “Baila Morena” [lol]).

It’s so painful to believe that dead people are gone forever. I like it. Are there American wizards?

I seem to read books and such very quickly but I don’t necessarily “speedread” as such - although I sometimes skip paragraphs that seem grossly irrelevant, it is easy for people, myself included, to underestimate the thoroughness of my comprehension of written texts. Take, for instance, the copy of “Guitarist” I’m reading. I feel dissatisfied, like I have read it too quickly out upon re-reading, everything feels uncomfortably familiar and stale because I have in fact read most of it. I find the same thing with moist books I read. This is highly annoying.

I have this recurring thing where I wake up believing I am holding something and my hand is closed and I feel so bad when there’s nothing there. Every time, I genuinely believe I have acquired something - but I haven’t. It makes me extremely upset.

I really, really need to start fencing again. There is a picture of an ancestor of the sciabola (sabre), taken in the Venice Naval Museum. Note my greatness. (link soon)

Today (this is post-Venice now) I went to my grandma’s old house with my uncle to pick up some of his guitars (he’s my dad’s brother and thus the grandma in question’s other son). He has an old Telecaster that I like the sound of, a nice Yamaha 12-string (the top three pairs of strings are tuned in unison and the bottom three in octaves, standard tuning) and an Ovation acoustic. I’ll probably put the strings we picked up for the busker in Venice on the Ovation if I can be bothered.

Pax

I don’t know what to do. I am immersed in advertising and propaganda. I don’t know who I am. Everyone around me seems the same. There is something slightly askew. It is grating. I see shadows moving around my room but there is nothing to cast them; I leave my door open but when I look it is closed. I need help!

Pax

It’s easy to experience something brilliant and want secretly to dedicate your life to it. I’ve phased through a lot of things. However, I’ve realised that to take on the world, real or fake, I’m going to have to call upon everything I am and ever was!

I am every Wikipedia article I’ve ever read, every film I’ve seen and every obscure book I’ve tried to digest. I’m every corny TV show that has flashed before me and every piece of profound poetry that has lain before me. I haven’t forgotten. I am every point I’ve ever lost, grinding my teeth and sweating as people lunge into my unprepared torso, and every checkmate - and there have been many - I have grudgingly accepted. Every wrong note I’ve played in front of so many people, every extra session I stayed for at the gym! Every volley I muffed with my unlucky tennis coach, every computer I’ve crashed, every person who’s laughed at me and every person I’ve laughed at. Every plant I watered, pair of eyes I looked into, regret I’ve had, experiment I’ve botched.

I am surprisingly inadequate as a middle-class person but feel enriched in some way. Everything I have witnessed - mistakes and all - I carry forth into the world. When whatever I have to do makes itself known, … boy will I do it!

Pax