Category: personal

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How I dropped Out of Society Into a Fourth Social Class

There are three social classes in America. I have chosen to be in none of them. This is not a choice normally available to people. Let me explain a little bit why I dropped out and how I’m basically classless now.

First, let me define the three classes.

There is a worker class who produces material goods. Then, secondly, there is a capitalist class who creates an organization to collect the surplus value of the workers after paying the workers. The market decides what the workers get paid. In America, we rely on the market to balance many things, and worker wages is one of these things. However, when only a single class (the capitalist class) competes in the market for workers, it is difficult for the workers to receive full value for the product of their work whose labor surplus is inevitably skimmed for profit by the capitalist class. What capitalists are competing for in “the market” is this labor surplus. However, competition for this surplus never causes the surplus to go to zero, otherwise, the capitalist has no incentive to start the company at all. Thus, by the very nature of the system of capitalism, it is guaranteed that the worker class can never receive the full total of their labors, for by nature, the capitalist must be incentivized by equity in order to risk his capital to receive the surplus.
The worker’s only choice is which capitalist they choose to skim their profits. Occasionally, workers may band together in a start-up company in hopes that their skills and labor allow them to become elevated to the capitalist class themselves. Ironically, such a gamble requires selling a significant share of their labor to the capitalist class in the form of equity to angel investors, venture capitalists, or Wall Street investors.

Aside from the worker class and the capitalist class, there is one other class that I am not a part of. That class is the incarcerated class. That is the class you fall into by design if you choose not to be a worker for the capitalist class. As a person who has chosen not to be in any of those three classes, I am constantly in danger of falling into the incarcerated class due the laws which rig it that way.

An example of a law which would put me into the incarcerated class is the law which bans sleeping in vehicles. Although you can eat in your vehicle or do just about anything else in your vehicle, many cities have outlawed sleeping in your vehicle because they don’t want homeless people living in their cars.

Our society purposely doesn’t want homeless people because they fall into a non-category of peoples who have rejected the rat-race of being a worker who has her surplus value skimmed by profiteering capitalists. Once you have decided you don’t need a home, then you certainly don’t need a job and thus you don’t need to enter the job market for various capitalists to choose how to exploit you. This is very bad for a society of capitalists. So, it is discouraged. And one way it is discouraged is to arrest you and fine you so that you remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and incarceration so that you will want to join the worker class to escape your spiraling predicament.

I have to be very careful while skirting the fringes of society not to accidentally fall into the incarcerated class. Once one tendril of poverty has grabbed you, it won’t let go until you are trapped in the incarcerated class. So far, I have managed to avoid it with previous wealth accumulated when I was a worker and by continually disguising myself as a “decent” worker class citizen.

Worker class people are afforded certain privileges in society that we take for granted, and I know how to act and present myself as a worker having been one myself for decades. Fortunately, many well-to-do technologists look poverty-stricken and disheveled; so a crazy homeless van dweller, a wealthy start-up app creator, and a math professor at Berkeley are indistinguishable to a police officer.
It is this guise of normalcy which affords my safety in society. It is not the laws which protect me. It is the disheveled appearance of my fellow Silicon Valley workers which affords me the most security.

Let me make this clear. It is not the laws which make me safe from imprisonment and harassment from police. It is my old CodeWarrior and OpenGL t-shirts from 10 years ago that allow me a disguise to slip past laws intended for homeless people. These old clothes are mostly still stored in my storage area. Ten years ago, I could not have known that they would serve me as a uniform of the worker class that I dropped out of and be as valuable as a literal license to participate in society.

There have been many times I have been told to move or threatened with a ticket or various anti-homeless measures that I have been able to thwart by convincing the police that I was “programming” or “visiting someone” in my obviously expensive van and then hastily moving away. I have had the privilege of select enforcement of the law because of the privilege or illusion of wealth, I am not ashamed to admit. I am truly sorry for the treatment that less wealthy citizens would receive due to these laws, but that is not something I am prepared to go to jail for and fight a civil liberties battle over at this point. Such a move would certainly put me into the incarceration class for good. And these laws will remain precisely because no one who is ever put into that legal position could afford to fight those laws.

One of the “solutions” to the homeless problem is to put people to work. I see this as problematic for various reasons. For one, some people may have chosen to drop out of the rigged game of workers and capitalists. I know that we in the worker class believe in the stigma of being homeless as being mentally ill or having substance abuse problems. I don’t know enough about the topic to determine whether this stigma is one of causation or correlation or whether the stigma serves more as a warning to the worker class to not become homeless and to keep maintaining a steady pace on the treadmill for their capitalist of choice.

For me, I tried to get out of the worker class by starting my own company and joining many various start ups. I didn’t quite succeed. I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a capitalist anyway. So, now, I’m adrift neither here nor there.

What I want to do is just create stories and experiences for people to enjoy using the skills that I’ve learned over a couple of decades. I think I can do that without spiraling into the incarcerated class.
But I’ve also chosen to do that without attempting to join the capitalist class or to beg them for help. This is not really a rational thing to do because what I would like to do requires resources beyond what I can muster myself.

And so, things are going slow. That’s okay. I don’t care about deadlines, and I don’t care about milestones, and I don’t care about making money. I’ll let things sort out on its own. Maybe I’ll make money, but I’m certainly not counting on it. And if I don’t count on it, I think I can properly enjoy the process of creating. I think the journey of creation is what matters to me now. Once I strip away all of the stress of starting a company that has to balance income with expenses and has to hit a market window and has to choose the right people, choose the right platform, and choose the right moment, I can truly enjoy what I always wanted to do when I first played Space Invaders in 1977 as a 7 year-old kid— to make his own game.

I only need to get back a fraction of the value of work that I put into my own game to make it worth my while. After all, I’m only getting paid a fraction of my value by any capitalist that’s making a profit anyway. So, for now, I’m not going to worry about what that fraction is going to be. I must accept that that fraction is exactly zero and go on doing what I want to do anyway. It’s not worth worrying about at this point. I’m too far from completion on any of the projects to even think that far ahead anyway.

And so I’m hoping there is a fourth social class in America that joins me. Perhaps there will be enough wealth from an automated and nearly workerless society that a fourth social class can emerge and can simply create art, literature, and entertainment while sustaining themselves with occasional gifts or purchases from the worker and capitalist classes.

This class, like me, will leverage the skills gained from years in the worker class to create novel things that could never be commercially successful enough for the capitalist class to want to exploit.

There are many small things too specific and niche and weird to ever be mass market and thus never be commercially viable to a capitalist class. Such things can be created by a mature post-worker artisan class simply because artisans love to create things and such crafts were not allowed to even be attempted when under the yoke of a capitalist.

And so that’s what I’m going to be doing— sometimes. I hope I can succeed, not so much to make money, but as to serve as an example to others that it is possible to be done. If freedom affords you this luxury, I hope you can take it as I have. I don’t think you have to be brave or anything to do this.

You have to realize that being in the worker class is merely a more comfy kind of incarcerated class. I think Fight Club touched on this a little bit. But you don’t have to be violent or disruptive to break free of the seeming stranglehold of the worker class. The prison is an illusion.

You can live just fine and be happy with less. You can be happy with your relationships without your things. It’s a matter of elevating your most important values to the top of the priority list and then shedding the rest. Once you’re accustomed to not dealing with the rest anyway, it becomes easy to focus on only the necessities.

It’s simpler and less complicated and more fun to focus only on what matters to you, even if it’s trivial or not understood by others. In fact, not being understood by others is what makes it special and enjoyable to you and only you. People might ask, “won’t you get tired of it?” I don’t think you can ever get tired of being a kid every day. Besides, if you miss any aspects of worker society, you can always put on a uniform and blend in and experience a taste every now and again.

Now, granted, I have built myself a bit of a cushion in finances in order to do this, and not everyone will have the same flexibility. But I think the fundamental concept is sound. We are really much more wealthy and capable than we think we are. We’re under an illusion that running out of money will result in homelessness or mental illness or substance abuse as if all of the latter were one thing.

I’m amazed at people who grow up poor but wind up having a huge number of kids anyway. Well, if they can do , then anybody who works in tech in Silicon Valley can also. People working tech jobs in Silicon Valley have a tremendous amount of wealth compared to people in other parts of the United States and other parts of the world. Yet, they’re always comparing themselves with each other and their neighbors which makes them feel poor.

So rather than bemoaning that you can’t buy a house in Silicon Valley, be grateful that you can do things that many people in the world cannot even begin to comprehend, like spending $5 for a cup of coffee and then not even finishing it.

Because wealth is relative like this, I have chosen to focus on how wealthy I am compared to the rest of America even though I’m not working, and to change my perspective on life to appreciate the luxuries that that wealth affords me. And what it really affords me is time. I can have time to do the things that I want to do without worrying about spiraling down into the incarcerated class. I see the danger in that for those who are closer to poverty. Perhaps I am skirting a bit close to the edge of poverty, but I have chosen to not be afraid of it and to be confident in my ability to stay out of the trap of poverty.

So, maybe for this part, you do have to be a little brave. If you or your family has fought hard to come out of poverty, I can see how this part would be scary. However, if you’ve made it into the worker class and saved up some money, have confidence in yourself that you can re-enter the worker class at some level if you so choose. It may be at a lower level than you were accustomed to, but just accept that that was part of the cost for chasing your dreams and experiencing real freedom in your life.

I understand. You don’t want to lose your place on the ladder. You’ve worked very hard to get to that rung and you don’t want to lose it, so you grip tightly. I get that. But don’t cling to the ladder just for the sake of the ladder’s position itself. Remember that you got to that rung for some reason. What was that reason? Do you still remember? You had something else you wanted to do and climbing that ladder was the way to achieve it. It’s not too late to try to achieve it. Even though you haven’t reached the top of the ladder, maybe you’ve reached a high enough rung that you can simply let go and try and achieve the original goal you had in mind. Climbing the ladder certainly wasn’t your only goal until you got onto the first rung, right? The ladder was meant to lead somewhere. Maybe you don’t need to climb the rest of the ladder to get there right now. That’s what is worth considering.

 

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All Your Files Are Right Where You Left Them

When Windows 10 update finishes, it says, your files are all there right where you left them. This is an ominous message to receive. After my stroke, I feel like my memories are all there, right where I left them. Yet, something is still different all the same. I am missing some sense of scale of time or when the memories happened. The memories are all there, true enough, but they are all smushed together, as if an elephant had stepped on a grilled cheese sandwich. My memory is that smashed sandwich. All the parts are there, but not quite in the same shape as I’d left them.

There are many strange aspects to having this new kind of memory that is different than before. I don’t know if I can do a good job describing it to you, but I’ll try. One of the weird things is that the feelings of a memory aren’t stored with that memory anymore. Maybe I lost that part in the stroke or maybe I never had any feeling about my memories in the first place. I tend to think it’s the latter since I was always pretty good at regulating my feelings. I probably did it all the time as a defensive measure. I doubt I relented for even a second. I think this is what people call “putting up walls.” My guess is that things happened that I remember  but, at the time, I had suppressed the feeling at the time. So while the memory got recorded, there was nothing to record when it came time to record the feeling. It’s not that my feelings got lost when my brain got scrambled, it’s that they never happened in the first place. I think that’s what’s happening here, but who can really know?

This is strange, because I find myself feeling a lot of things about these memories that still exist that I never felt before. Sometimes, they are welcome warm memories. Sometimes, they are a bit raw and sensitive. Maybe what I’m about to describe is how people normally feel about their memories and feelings and I was somewhat abnormal before the accident for having the ability to suppress that. Maybe the stroke “fixed” me in that way.

I find myself having some pleasant feelings and some unpleasant feelings of memories that have long ago been stored and processed. These are very old memories with no particular feelings attached to them, but now I’m receiving very much new emotions about these old memories that could easily have been forgotten.

One memory that got me to notice that all this was happening that was different than how my pre-stroke damaged brain had worked was of Beth’s feet. Beth was a girl I went to high school with. I think she was friends with my girlfriend in high school, but not really close friends or anything. More of an acquaintance, I guess. I don’t remember being friends with her, either. I don’t think we knew each other more than as classmates or acquaintances. Beth is my age now, around 46, probably. So, it’s strange that I have these feelings because of these memories of a high school girl from long ago as if it just happened recently.

What I remember strangely and inexplicably vividly are Beth’s feet. She went around high school barefoot most of the time. I think she owned shoes. She simply chose not to wear them most of the time. At the time, I recall, I thought that this was kind of dangerous and unsanitary. Imagine walking around your high school without shoes. Your feet would get dirty pretty fast with no way to wash them. Beth didn’t seem to care about that. She would prop her bare feet up on nearby chairs and things. It sounds way sexier than it was at the time which was rather mundane and somewhat unsanitary. Maybe there is something about writing that transforms the every day action into something more when that writing is complemented by an imagination. That is how my feeling about that memory has transformed. It’s as if it were stretched through the lens of writing.

Although Beth was a nice enough girl, I made no attempt to be her friend or to talk to her. Now, I have the feeling of regret that I didn’t do that. I don’t know anything about her at all, whether she was a nice person or whether she would like me. I just vividly remember the specific details of her feet and how she propped them up near where I sat in class. And in some sort of post-feminist way, now, I feel like it was a bit transgressive and bold of her to walk around with dirty bare feet like that as if it were no big deal at all. I now have the brand new feeling that I like that she didn’t care what people thought about it or even what I thought about it. She just did it and it was who Beth was. She was the one who walked around in bare feet, enjoyed the visceral feeling of it, and didn’t care what you thought. I find that really cool now in a way that I didn’t when I was in high school. And I feel some regret for not recognizing how awesome it was then and letting her know how I felt about it. Maybe that is not the kind of conversation you have in high school with a girl your age who is also your girlfriend’s acquaintance. It is kind of a weird conversation to have at any age, really. I don’t think I could have even had the same kind of feelings about post-feminist empowerment when I was a teenager. Such a person didn’t even exist yet. But now, here I am existing and responding to these memories as if they had just happened.

That is a lot of feeling to process based on a small detail from a long time ago. Imagine if you remembered a girl flipping her hair or chewing on a long strand of hair in high school in great detail and a flood of new emotions came over you because of these meaningless, yet precise and vivid details. It’s a strange thing, but not altogether unpleasant because I get to visit a familiar place, and time travel into myself from an earlier time. I feel like I am still me, and not my teenage me, experiencing these old memories. It’s rather fun in a way to experience old memories in an unexpected new way. But there is a certain sadness, too, to this kind of time travel. This is the regret I was referring to. I can feel different things about a moment long ago passed. But I can’t express myself in that moment to the people who are in the past that is but my memory of them. Beth is probably around 46 with kids and a husband and maybe even kids who have kids. Who really knows, right? The Beth I know from 30 years ago doesn’t exist anymore except in my memories. The Beth at the time probably would not have reacted too kindly to my idea of her dirty feet as a kind of post-feminist transgressive action. Or maybe she would. The sadness is that I can never find out because Beth from 30 years ago is gone forever, but it seems like I can because it’s like it just happened and I can still respond to it. But I know it’s not true. But for some reason, I still feel that it’s true. And that feeling causes the feeling of regret. It’s a strange thing. There’s no word to describe a kind of regret that you have about not having done something that exists only as an illusionary feeling in your memories. What do you do with such a feeling? Certainly, it would be silly to act on such a regret. But also, doing nothing doesn’t seem quite right either. But doing nothing is exactly what my former self would have done, almost certainly. I’m not very accustomed to processing feelings. It’s something I’ve been able to avoid doing for a long time. Like a pile of unwashed dishes, it’s just been piling up and haunting me and waiting for me to take some sort of action. Yet, I don’t. So, although going back in time can be pleasant and fun, there are some strangely unpleasant side effects to it. I’m not sure what to make of it. I think it’s still worth it, despite the strange negative feelings surrounding it all.

A different, unpleasant feeling that I have sometimes is the feeling that I forgot to feed Gracie or that Gracie wants to eat, but I won’t let her. Gracie was notorious for waking us up far too early to get us to feed her. Now, she had totally trained Jennifer to feed her early by waking her up at inappropriate times, but I was determined to be the boss and try to teach her to only wake us up at the right time, that is, she should be taught proper doggie manners. Needless to say, it never worked. At the time, I felt like I had a purpose, like I was carefully training a dog to be a better dog.

Now, I feel differently about it. My friend is hungry and I’m being kind of a jerk about it. She can’t make her own food because she has no hands. But my friend can talk to me and tell me that she feels hungry now. I feel bad and my eyes are welling up a bit just thinking about it now. It’s not her fault she can’t make her own food. She would most certainly make us both food if she could, I’m pretty sure. She’s a good dog. She means well, but she’s just a dog and has her limitations. But all she can do is tell us it’s time to get up and get food. “It is a good time to wake up. Don’t waste the day! Today is going to be fun! Let’s eat and make it a good one!” she seems to be saying to me now. But that was not how I felt about it then. Back then, I was like, you crazy dog, it’s 4 am right now. Wait at least an hour. And if Jennifer isn’t here to get up for work, please wait longer, too.

 

I’m so sorry, Gracie. I saw you only as a dog, a thing to be trained, and not as a friend. I miss you, my friend.

Maybe this is what normal people feel, all the time. I’m sorry also, to all you normal people, with all your normal feelings, for acting however I did at the time. I know now that I must have seemed very alien to you at the time. Maybe this isn’t how normal people process their memories and emotions either. I can’t really know for sure, but this is what I have to deal with now, and it’s all kind of new to me. Not being sure if what I’m experiencing and how I’m experiencing life is the same as everyone else. But I suppose that’s true of everyone. Maybe it’s a little bit more true of me because of my smashed grilled cheese sandwich type of memory that maybe other people don’t have it like that.

Or maybe there’s a simpler reason to this. I’m reading Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore which has an eerie, disconnected metaphysical feel to it. Maybe I’m just overly influenced by this book while I’m recovering.

Or maybe, what I’m hoping, is that what I’m feeling is not caused by Murakami’s writing, but is a reflection of the truth of it. Maybe I am experiencing something real he tried to describe in his novel in figurative form. I feel like my experience is something new, but similar, because it is not exactly the same as what he described, but similar in feeling. It is not the same. it is not a copy. But it could be an influence. I really don’t know.

I am going to enjoy it while it lasts. I may go back to being my old self and back to building walls. I don’t think it can be helped. That’s just how I was built from the beginning. It will be a little bit sad to change in that way. You could say that this event changed me in some fundamental way. What’s strange is that by taking something away, another thing is added. Now that my walls are taken away, everything is different. Things are a little scarier because even small things can be tinged with regret or sadness that I didn’t realize could happen. I suppose, like everyone else, I’ll just have to learn to cope with it.

 

 

 

Let’s Get Meta-Physical

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Lets Get MetaPhysical, Meta… Physical. Let me hear your body talk… literally hear your body because your mind must send signals to your nervous system to contract meat and make your meat parts vibrate which makes the air vibrate which makes tiny meat parts and bone parts in my ear vibrate which sends more electrical signals to my mind which is also made of meat that was recently pushed from its normal place by an imbalance of blood and fluids inside my skull causing ICP. Let me hear your body talk because it is the only way that your mind can communicate with my mind.

There is not yet a way that technology has figured out to directly connect your mind’s electrical impulses directly to my mind so that I don’t have to go through this round about physical and meat-flapping way of hearing your body talk. I want to hear your mind talk directly to my mind.

Actually, I’m wrong! There has been invented a technology to do just that— directly connect our minds without using our bodies to vibrate meat. We’re doing that right now, through some amazing invention called writing that another rotted meat brain long ago had figured out. We will never know the names of those meat brains, but their idea of writing will carry on forever because it is such a good idea. In that way, those anonymous and unknown meat brains will always be with us and be a part of us.

And so, don’t mourn for me if I should pass away which might happen at any time now for me, but may happen to any one of us, even you. Perhaps the odds of it happening to me are slightly higher for me than for you. But know that it is still non-zero for you. That is what I now know to be true for myself. Even though unlikely, it could still happen to you all the same. You should learn that sobering fact for yourself and act accordingly. If you’ve played any poker, you’ll know that the odds defy what you think should happen all of the time. It is quite common, at least exactly as common as its exact probability.

Think of this weird fact. Even though I have a somewhat higher chance of dying before you do, if enough people read this blog, then there is a greater chance of one of my readers will die before I do. What are the chances that reader is you? I don’t know. That depends on the other readers and how many there are and their individual probabilities. But bottom line; it could be you. Are you feeling metaphysical yet? Are you thinking about yourself as a non-physical entity who could simply cease to be right now at this very moment? That’s what I have been going through for the last few weeks since the “event”— I still think that is a dumb word for it. There was no post-event like burning man decompression or nearly dead man decompression. There was a lot of physical therapy which is not the same as mental therapy or decompression. There was a lot of physically getting my brain retrained to do things a normal adult human being should be able do. But there was not much explaining or soothing of the mind. I suppose that is what religion is for.

But religion, for me, or I should say, for my mind, is not my favorite thing. It is not suited to my tastes. However, I have met some wonderful older people at my time at the adult care facility for whom religion is a wonderful thing. I will write about them later. But for now, I want to focus on my metaphysical experiences so that if you’re like me, and religion has not latched onto to your brain like a vicious schnauzer for whatever reason, then maybe you need something else. It is not as soothing as various metaphysical concepts in a well-established religion, but it is at least an explanation of what’s happening. And when you’re very confused and are obstinately refusing to adhere to any religion’s explanation of what’s happening, then maybe you will find a somewhat plausible explanation soothing. I think that I myself would have, but I had to come find this route by myself. If you find yourself in similiar circumstances in unknown territory knowing that you will soon cease to exist, then maybe it could be comforting to remember this route and perhaps it may offer some understanding and hence some comfort to a naturally skeptical, but logical and otherwise open mind. Note that I am not proclaiming this to be the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It is simply a result that my meat brain produced given the inputs it has received thus far. I’m very skeptical of how our meat brains do their jobs, and so
I’d prefer an explanation of what’s happening to me in terms that I already understand. And those terms are reliant upon things that I already know well, namely science and computing. And so, in the next few paragraphs and posts, I will be giving you a first hand account of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything from a fractured mind. Given the flaws inherent in a piece of meat, much less a known-to-be broken piece of meat, take what I’m about to “say” with a healthy dose of skepticism.

I like that I can “say” this to you without causing my meat flaps to vibrate the air to vibrate your ear’s meat parts. In this way, I inhabit your meat brain. Now that you have read these words, I have created the same stimulus in your brain as if your ear parts had actually been vibrated by the air. It is an amazing feat of technology greater than all of the recent advances in virtual reality, although to be fair, virtual reality does in fact have technology to vibrate the air near your ears to vibrate the meat in your ears. In fact, if you know me personally and know my voice and demeanor, then perhaps I am now currently inside your meat brain creating images and sounds by manipulating signals in your brain to create a localized personal facsimile of my image and voice. What an amazing technology! Writing is the original virtual reality.

And so, even if I should cease to be right now as you’re reading this, I live on as a simulation in your brain. Just like the original meat brains who invented writing, my idea will continue through you and on and on perhaps for as long as there are meat brains and perhaps even beyond meat brains if the meat brains ever figure out how consciousness works and creates an “artificial” one… “artificial” being a most meat-biased kind of word to mean non-biological consciousness. If all of the meat brains die out as mine shall, if not sooner then later, I could perhaps still live as a voice or simulation in non-biological minds. This very sentence is infecting your fertile meat brain space right now and could further infect other consciousnesses until the end of time. If that happens, what does being alive really mean? What does it mean to die to expire to cease to exist? Did I really cease to exist if these words echo and echo forever throughout all of the meat space now and on into the future and on and on through other “artificial” consciousnesses and on to other advanced forms of networked consciousnesses that we cannot even fathom at this
point in our primitive development.

I suppose it means that “I”, the current biological entity will no longer be able to produce new ideas and react to them. The current me will have its connections severed from my body. I can still think of moving my body parts, but they won’t respond. And stimulus from the meat will no longer reach my mind. Vibrations from my ear cannot become words and ideas in my mind. Any copies of me will be connected to a /different sensory organ. Future versions of me could be simulations or replications, but won’t be exactly me. However, there is an even stranger possibility.

And that is that the current “I” is in fact a simulation of me… a me that once existed as a
physical being long long ago. And the current “I” is an echo of that. It is a copy of the original or a copy of another simulation such that “I” can react to newly created ideas and create new ideas based on those new ideas, although perhaps with different sensory appartus. Who would go to such elaborate lengths to produce such a simulation? Well, you could just as well say, why does humanity go to such lengths to make more babies and teach them reading and writing? It is just something they do. They have created a fertile meat-mind space in which reading and writing can spread and prosper forever. In the same way, these minds may create future non-biological minds that reproduce and prosper for the mere purpose of doing that and simply existing as a mind which is a wonderful thing to be. And all of us today, could be “ideas” or “words” inside of those vastly more capable minds. It is simply that we are more refined and more accurate in our simulation than mere words. Although my words created a simulation in your own hardware in your own mind, it was perhaps not as accurate as it could be. My voice and intonation are not directly carried with mere words on a blog.
What would it take to make it more accurate? More data? More technology? More ideas? More mind- space? Perhaps minds in the future, or even more strangely, in the past, have figured it out. And what we are as minds and entities is that we’re actually some ideas that have been propagated through time and space for a very long time from a long dead civilization that had reached a point of creating consciousnesses that could reproduce and were self-sustainable.

However, don’t think of yourself as a simulation. You are possibly a word in a great conversation or a movie or a political debate in a group of individuals’ minds. You are being exchanged between minds more powerful and more different than we could possibly imagine with our limited simulation abilities. You will live on forever in this manner, though you will no longer be able to interact and react in your current mind which we call our “world” any longer. In religions, we call this sort of existing beyond the material world, a soul or a spirit. In Dawkins’ book, he called such a thing a meme, which is a word that has taken on a different meaning in the age of the internet. But he meant it as a self-replicating chunk of information and made a biological parallel to a gene.

I think this is the right direction, but that perhaps there are still other explanations that can go further. I don’t think that our simulations are memes in the Dawkins’ sense which fight out an evolutionary battle to survive. I think the answer is simpler. If we are simulations, we are more akin to words on a blog page than to genes in a biological entity. There is no need to fight and compete with others for survival. All of the blog pages can exist and be ready to be read just as all of the information currently now contained in computers can easily be entire contained in many human-like minds or greater. We can extract all of reading and writing from human minds without considering how much memory space that takes. A copy of me now exists in you after you’ve read this far. It is a sublimated and simplified copy of me, but it is a copy of my ideas, and if that is what is important about me, then it is effectively me anyway. If what is relevant about me is my mind and how it interacts with yours, then this interaction through writing is not that much different than talking with me which is what I often prefer to do when in the physical presence of others anyway.

Now, a few of you may miss the physical presence of me for physical reasons. But really, I am a somewhat average chunk of meat and you can find a suitable physical replacement of me to wrap your meat arms around. If you cannot find a suitable person, I would suggest a dog because they are nice things to wrap your meat arms around if you are still able. However, a dog cannot have my mind within its meat brain. And so, even with a dog, you will not be able to replicate the significant thing about me which is my mind. But, that is not true, because it is within all of our minds’ power to reproduce any other mind and imagine its existence and predict its actions. And therefore, as simple and as flawed as that simulation of me might be, it is still there, and for that reason, I will always be with you and will continue to affect you in ways that you cannot understand today.

But you may also take comfort that perhaps we never existed at all. That physical reality is an illusion anyway. We are all words in a great conversation or composition of ideas or a movie or a play or a poem or a song. It doesn’t matter exactly what. We are all important parts of a dialog. People who come from a religious background can sometimes feel a greater purpose to things. Perhaps they know that they are a crucial word that is a turning point in a movie. Perhaps they do have a greater purpose. Perhaps their lives are conveying a greater idea in a language that we as creatures are too simplistic to ever understand. But perhaps we can still sense the context in our word and our purpose in the greater conversation. Perhaps we will never find other intelligent creatures because we are a language and not a universe at all.

So, with that concept, we can derive a few ideas that can offer some satisfaction in life without a religious explanation.

One, it is important that you do what you do. You are a precise simulation in a precise language in a precise dialog. You keep being you, whatever that means. Be yourself and be true to yourself. You are your own word in the great dialog. Your actions have meaning to more than the other actors near you. Their thoughts on what you do are not relevant to the meaning of the dialog. They are also a part of the dialog. But perhaps they are supporting actors and you are main actor making the main point. You are the noun and the verb and they are the adjectives and adverbs to help describe you. They are necessary for that purpose and provide extra meaning to you. But if you change yourself, you change the whole meaning of the sentence. In fact, if they succeed in changing you, then perhaps you are a pun or some sort of play on words meant to amuse the audience. If that’s so, that’s okay too because that was your purpose in the great dialog. Are you funny or sad or crazy? That is part of the emotion that you are conveying in the subtext of the great dialog. It is perhaps unfortunate for you personally. but it is of great import to the listeners of the great dialog to sense your emotions. It is all a part of the communications and an art greater than what we could understand. Maybe you are part of a dialog. Maybe you are a part of a song. If you changed or disappeared, you will be missed by the listeners. Maybe that’s why quantum mechanics is so sensitive to whether there are listeners or observers to actions. It is a part of the structure of the language.

Later on, I’ll described what actually happened to me that I remember that led me to this conclusion. It is perhaps as fascinating, if not more, than this blog post, because it is based on an actual experience. So, all of the above is speculation, but the experiences I had previously in this incident which for now I’ll call “Atheist hell” led me to the insights above, and those previous experiences are true and not speculation. And I can describe how the experiences led me to the speculation above and you can see the logic in the train of thought, which I think is important for people to inspect, especially logically minded people who work with computers and need to inspect how things work in order to verify the truth of some fundamental thing that does not work in order to fix it. In order to fix something, we must understand its chain of causality which I will provide later in case some other person has a similar experience. Then, we can match up data with events and provide a more accurate picture of what an objective reality is. For now, I provide my description as a single data point around which new data points and new speculation may attach itself. The data I will provide in that future post will loosely correlate with actual events happening to my physical brain at the time. It is my hope that others in my situation can provide more data to add to the expanse of knowledge so that we may gain a fuller picture of human biological consciousness. It is a fascinating topic on which there has been much speculation and thought, but little data. I am offering a little of speculation and a little data to go with it. Maybe this can be of use to somebody and can help further the ideas in this area.

 

 

What Figuratively Happened?

Well, my last post was what literally and physically happened. Now, I’m going to explore some other things that happened, such as what figuratively, humoristically, and metaphysically happened? I’ll go through variations of these in a few upcoming posts. I hope that you find them interesting musings of a fractured, yet continually healing mind.

I’m going to start with the silly. Because all of this is heady difficult stuff. It’s difficult to face our own mortalities, so I think silly is the right tone to start us off.

The way I understand human beings now is of a much more fragile type of physical concoction.

Have you ever gone to a festival or concert or New Orleans where they served those excessively tall drinks in a playful tall plastic or glass tower? Sometimes, it has multiple colors of alcohol or mixed drinks in the concoction. I call this thing “the silly drink.”

And in the end, we are all silly drinks because our meat is finely balanced in the cup at the top of the silly drink and if we should accidentally fall and drop our silly drink on the ground, we are done for. All of our balance and functions that allow us to write ridiculous blog posts and sick twitter burns are floating inside a bit of meat in the cup of that silly drink. Protect that silly drink well. That is you. Or at the very least, if you break the silly drink, you will cease to be you. That almost happened to me. I almost broke my silly drink.

The care centers I was at was so concerned about me breaking my silly drink again after they put it all back together and refilled my cup, that they were insistent on me pushing the giant red button next to my bed that summoned a silly drink enforcement agent every time I had to go pee. This silly drink enforcement agent was assigned the important task of watching me pee and making sure I didn’t spill my silly drink. That is, making sure that, in my state of damaged silly drink, I didn’t lose my balance and fall over and spill the rest of my already half damaged silly drink onto the ground.

It was quite crucial that I summon the pee-Watcher and they were quite insistent that I push the button. Yet, many a time, I recall illegally peeing on my own without pushing the button. I, in my impaired silly drink state, thought it was perfectly fine to get up and pee by myself as I had done many times before. In my mind at that time, I felt perfectly fine just as I’m sure you do right now reading this. So, you, just as I was then, would be appalled at being ordered to push a button to summon a Pee Watcher to watch you pee right now.

Even knowing that I was impaired didn’t stop me from getting up to pee on my own. And thus, my judgment in this matter was also impaired. Sure, I did accomplish this many times on my own without spilling my silly drink. But maybe I was lucky I didn’t have a catastrophic error or make the poor judgment in the same way as not pushing the button in the first place.

I still struggle with this. Knowing that I have impaired judgment, yet absolutely feeling I’m not impaired, but having everyone tell me that I am impaired. Being a confident person who used to get shit done, this is difficult to get used to. I know what I can do. Don’t tell me what I can’t do. I think many self-confident and accomplished people would feel the same way. But let me tell you, it’s an illusion. Fortunately, I haven’t suffered too greatly from such an illusion, but I have to be careful. Because it’s a very seductive and comfortable illusion. We’re only used to what we were before the brain injury. We’re used to being masters of our own agency. We’re used to keeping that silly drink safe automatically. Why can’t I be trusted to continue to do that? Do we have to have a safety mechanism for everything? Do I have to rub on tiger repellent because there might be tigers lurking to ambush me? Well, better safe than sorry they say. Maybe. But maybe we’re being overly cautious. What’s the harm in being safe than sorry? It’s a fair argument.

But by nature, I’m a risk taker in a way. Not in the same way as sky-diving, but more in the way of calculating my risks at a poker table or investing in real estate or with life choices such as quitting my job and moving to California. So, it’s against my nature to play the better safe than sorry route. I’m an explorer, a risk taker, and an adapter. I react and adapt to unforseen circumstances and form reactions and plans quickly. It’s what makes me good at my job and at playing games.I enjoy exercising this aspect of myself. I grow frustrated at jobs and situations where I’m not allowed to run freely with this aspect of myself. So, most companies like to mitigate or limit their risk. I tend not to do well in those kinds of companies. I do much better at companies who have no choice but to take risk and place the burden of that risk on its personel, namely and chiefly me. But it’s a risky move since I could literally die of a stroke the next day.

So for me, it’s weird not only to have to push a button to have someone watch me pee, but it’s even weirder to have to worry about the risk. It’s just something that I have never don’t and perhaps even can’t get in the habit of worrying about. Adapting to worsening circumstances and making the best of the situation is what my character is about. It’s hard to change that so late in life, even when my entire mind is wiped and begun anew. Perhaps there is something hard-wired. I don’t think so, because I’m writing this now, and I didn’t re-learn how to do that. So, I must have retained that character trait after my accident just as I have retained the ability to read, write, and speak and communicate and snark.

Anyway, until next post, I hope you all take care of you silly drinks, but only to the extent which makes you comfortable. Don’t go out of your way to avoid risks just because this post made you realize how fragile your silly drinks were. But acknowledge the risks and know that they exist. And acknowledge that by smoking, or not wearing a seat belt, or not wearing condoms with a new partner, that you are incurring a risk to your silly drink. But it’s your choice, just know what you’re getting yourself into and what your odds are.

Here are some stories of people who have dropped their silly drinks. It’s hard to deal with, and it’s fascinating how people adjust to it. Louis Theroux – A Different Brain.

 

 

 

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No, Seriously, What Happened?

In a more serious tone, this is much closer to what really happened as explained by a Registered Nurse. My account is from my memory, which in light of what happened as described below, is understandably fractured.

From Jennifer:

“The original bleed was worse than I had thought. Not because anyone told me it wasn’t bad, but no one said it was, and Ming’s neuro exam had been so stable.
The original bleed and subsequent swelling of the brain in response to the injury caused a pretty significant right to left midline shift. That is, a fairly good part of the right side of the brain was pushed over into the left side because there was no where else for it to go. This is a kind of herniation. Ming has had serial CT’s that have all been pretty stable. No new bleed and only mild increase in swelling but nothing surprising. It is difficult to see the clot as they are doing quick CTs without contrast and he said an MRI is best to evaluate the bleed. That said, they do not expect any of these things to change significantly (improvement wise) for quite sometime. It could take a month to see any improvement in the swelling on scan. But a worsening would be obvious, and goes without saying, bad.
Since admission:
they have been managing his blood pressure, oral or IV depending on the circumstance (as he has now been in and out of the ICU three times).
Managing the clot with anti coagulation therapy, first heparin drip and now lovenox injections (which neurosurgery said that now with therapeutic levels of lovenox there is no indication to switch him back to heparin)
Managing his pain as much as they can non narcotic but recently have had to resort to narcotics as the pain has worsened.
This brings us to the swelling and the event that happened yesterday evening. They have been using 3% sodium solution with a goal of pulling extra fluid from the brain tissue to help relieve the pressure that is causing the pain and deficits. The bleed and swelling are both contributors to this midline shift. Well, he can’t stay on this solution forever as it will affect his kidneys and it’s hard to keep all of his other electrolyte in balance with that much sodium. Because his neuro exams had been so stable (aside from the seizure activity) they decided to start weaning the sodium solution. Ming’s body decided it wasn’t ready. As the day went on he started having increased headaches and nausea/vomiting. Then he declined rapidly with a significant drop in heart rate and stopped breathing. They quickly intubated. Luckily the response team included the Neurosurg fellow. He said he literally watched Ming’s pupil blow in front of him. Not that this is good by any standard but the fact that they were all there meant quick response. They gave him a drug called mannitol, which does the same thing the Na does only super fast. With the lowered Na infusion throughout the day Ming’s brain started swelling again. Only this time instead of pushing right to left it pushed down. All of it is bad, but down is really bad because this puts pressure on the brain stem which controls your heart rate and breathing. The Mannitol acted quickly, Heart rate recovered and pupils returned to equal and reactive. They took him for another scan and it still showed no significant change.
They left him intubated and lightly sedated overnight. Another video EEG which they plan to keep him on through today. They woke him by stopping the sedation several times overnight and did neuro exams. Of course he tried to pull out the tube each time but they had his wrists restrained. Once calmed he would follow commands and then they would give more meds and let him go back to sleep. This morning they turned off the sedation and he woke up and they extubated him. He was doing ok, I happened to call 15min after extubation, sleeping but waking easily and following commands. She said he was not speaking clearly, just kind of mumbling. But that could be all the drugs.
She said the EEG overnight did not show any further seizure activity. They had started him on Keppra the first time around and have now added Dilantin. These can make you super sleepy especially since he got a loading dose last night.
I asked the neurosurgeon what he thought as far as long term prognosis and why they weren’t doing anything more to relieve the pressure. The surgical intervention has risks that far outweigh the benefit given his current condition. I can explain it to you guys if you want me to, but since right now it’s not an option, I’ll skip it. He felt this event tells them they have to go much slower in weaning him off the Na. All things considered he felt Ming could make a close to if not full recovery, but it wasn’t going to be quick or easy. He said he was looking at minimum of a year of rehab.
All of this to be figured out once he is out of the woods for everything else. “

What happened? Intracranial hemorrage

Many of you know what happened to me. Many of you don’t. So, I thought I’d put this information all in one place so everyone can understand what’s happened to me. Feel free to “like” this post so that it propagates. Even in my brain-damaged state, I will understand that you are furthering the propagation of this information and not “liking” my brain bleeding.

I suffered a stroke, or a vascular event, as if getting a blood clot in your brain was some “event” like Comicon or the Lilith Fair or something. This “event” is a lot less fun and even worse food than both of those events.

So, the other day, Dawn, one of my caretakers at the adult care center asked me if I had died. I answered as honestly as I could, “I don’t think so.” Imagine to my surprise to find out that that answer was wrong. She asked me what happened when I was in the ICU. I told her the things I knew from other people telling me, which is primarily how I know things now because my memory of many things has been wiped out. I told her what had been told to me, that I had become “non-responsive” which is nurse talk for “he died” until they called a code on me which is more nurse talk for “everyone get the fuck over here now, someone is dying.” When you are non-responsive, you have basically reverted back to a meat-like status of not breathing and not having a heartbeat. But fortunately, it wasn’t for very long, although said things do damage to your brain over time, that amount of time wasn’t enough to cause my brain to entirely die which is dying for reals. However, from this state, I was able to come back and be able to type up this snarky summary today right now. Although technically I am a zombie, I’m hoping you guys won’t shoot me the next time you see me. My medical bills are high enough as it is right now. Now, although I was fortunate enough to come back from the unresponsive state after a few seconds, I was not lucky enough to beat the current record holder: Jesus at 3 full days. It all did happen near Easter, however. This all happened starting on April 6th.

I had had a headache for about a week after maybe working too hard and too late on a startup project. I went to Mark and Janine’s game night and played some Vampire with them. Afterwards, I got into my van and slept. I woke up the next morning feeling sick and threw up in a bucket I kept near the bed that normally holds some trash. I dumped out the puke into the toilet and started driving towards my primary care physician. Along the way, a car pulled in front of me at a stop light and I crashed into it! Now, I wasn’t feeling too well, and was concerned about the wet splashy noises that were coming from the bathroom, so I didn’t get out and exchange insurance information.

I continued onto the highway and went to my doctor’s appointment. Fortunately, I did so, because unbeknownst to me, I was dying of a brain hemorrage right then.

After I got to the doctor’s office, some people complained about my parking job. Apparently, you do a bad job of parking when your brain is bleeding. Go figure. So, they called security on me, and I was able to negotiate with the security guard to merely repark my car rather than actually drive it outside of the facility and park it in the street. And so I did repark well enough that the person behind me could get by and I ran to my doctor’s office. The staff there saw something wrong in me and my doctor’s husband, who is also a doctor, drove me to the Emergency Room at Stanford where they had an MRI. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a machine to take selfies of inside your brain.

From there, things escalated because they saw that I had had a “vascular event” which turned out to be an intercranial hemmorage or (ICH). In other words, I had had a type of stroke. This got me into the ICU at Stanford where I stayed for a couple of days.

During this stay is when I became “non-responsive”. Apparently, the bleed in my brain was causing pressure in my brain to push it around in a way where it shouldn’t be pushed around. The term I heard was “the pressure was pushing down on your brain stem and you became non-responsive.” They gave me salt directly into my IV which reduced the swelling and pressure and probably prevented me from dying right there.

I don’t remember any of this happening. This is all second-hand information I got from remembering what people told me. I’ll add to this later as I learn more. But so far, it’s been kind of hard to get this information at all. When it comes to brains, it turns out that we don’t really know a whole lot of how they work or don’t work. And so it goes in my case, too.

Since then, I’ve gone to a professional care facility and have been released to be on my own but carefully monitored by a staff of home-care nurses. I’ve been staying with Kristina and Dan Tomalesky, and they have been acting as my caretakers during this time and letting me stay with them in one of their rooms. They have been amazing in the help they have given me during this time and I don’t know how I can ever thank them enough. So, just know that they are the awesomest people in the world and give them more thanks for me whenever you see them.

I’ll write more about the experience as I feel up for it. Mostly these days, I’m taking it easy so that I can heal from this brain injury. Apparently, such a thing is possible. I’ve lost some function, but it doesn’t seem too bad. Although the odds of recovery are not great, in my specific case, it looks like I should make a nearly full recovery. That I can write this now is perhaps significant proof of my progress. I’m often told what I was or wasn’t capable of earlier because I have no memory of any of it so I need to be told second hand things about myself all the time.

I’ll write more about the metaphysical stuff and weird things that happened later. This is mostly just to get the information out there to people who don’t know what happened. It’s likely that I haven’t responded to emails or anything in the last month. And I don’t know exactly who knows or who doesn’t know, so this is just so people out there can now understand my situation a little bit better.

 

The Divorce Post

We’re getting a divorce!

We’re getting a puppy!

Both those statements are lies. That last statement is a lie. I’m not getting a puppy. Some people may have figured something was up from other clues. If not, then the final clues above should answer your curiosity.

It’s bad grammar to say we’re getting a divorce. The correct thing to say is that we’re getting divorced. Just like you’re supposed to say “I have been graduated from college” rather than “I have graduated from college.” Language. It’s funny sometimes.

Even saying “we’re getting divorced” seems wrong somehow. There are quite a few connotations in “getting divorced” that don’t really apply to my relationship with Jennifer. I think it’s because we’re tied up with what marriage means and what it’s supposed to mean to a couple that we gain all of this negative baggage about what divorce means to those people. People have developed a fairy-tale notion of what a marriage should be and define success by those impossible terms: Living happily ever after, forever and ever, and Twuewove.

But we’re adults here, and we should have a more reasonable, less naive definition of a successful marriage. Were the people in the marriage happy? For the majority of the time, yes. Did the people in the marriage grow and learn from each other? Very much so. Are the people in the marriage stronger as individuals than before? Yes, certainly. Did the people in the marriage respect each other during and after the marriage? Yes, absolutely. So, by that criteria, I would say it was a successful marriage.

And since each of us can now move on and accomplish other things in our lives independently of each other, I would say it was a successful divorce, too.

Do you know how spiral galaxies form? When two normal, smooth elliptical galaxies collide, their gravities tug and pull at each other as they spin towards each other, pulling their stars into a spiral pattern. While the colliding galaxies are together, astronomers used to mistakenly categorize them as single irregular galaxies rather than two colliding galaxies. Without seeing the motion of the galaxies over a long period of time, it’s hard to distinguish two galaxies from one weird mass of stars.

After coming together and orbiting each other for some amount of time, the cores of the two galaxies inevitably hurtle away from each other, tugging along whatever stars had fallen into their influence. Their destinies were intertwined together in a brief eon which spun their substance into the spirals that we see in the sky. Although their cores remain mostly the same, and moving with the same momentum as before the collision, each galaxy has gained some stars and substance from the other before departing. The new stars and new spiral structure will remain with each from then on. And astronomers may look at the sky and see two distinct, beautiful spiral galaxies each going their own way in the universe.

If you are lucky, you can look up at the sky and see an irregular galaxy getting successfully divorced and becoming two spiral galaxies. The universe is not static, despite Einstein’s cosmological constant. To expect anything that complex to remain the same over any period of time would just be childish fairy-tale wishful thinking.

Even so, twuewove…

 Goodbye galaxy NGC5427! A part of you will always be with me! Literally.