Reevaluation

I've been setting new records on the depth of pondering I've been engaged in. Topics like, "What is education?" or "Is our tendency to try to understand what a movie is about applied to our own lives erroneously?" or "If a person goes insane, then will he not distrust anyone who tells him he has gone insane? And if he believes them, then doesn't that also make him insane?"

This culminated this evening with a few essays. One essay was about a complicated theory that I appreciate involving the prediction of eventual artificial intelligence, and it becomes hostile a la The Terminator, and then invents a time machine to punish people today who were not enabling the eventual artificial intelligence. Follow me? Now, that scenario doesn't interest me as much as the theory I have that autistic misanthropes are currently controlling the path of mankind and it's happening irrevocably and nefariously. This whole notion occurred to me around 2003 when someone mentioned the memory capability of computers was increasing predictably and I thought, "How can that be predictable when it involves research? How can something like that be guaranteed?"
The answer is a generation of people who are the opposite of ponderous Oggy. Where I philosophize about the nature of memory, they are automatically researching data storage. Do they ponder their existence, or at least their chose course of study and development? It's a simple question. We have to accept they are indeed flesh and blood, and have free will, and even if they are high functioning autistic whose brains act like computers, they still have the facilities to ponder their existence and the ramifications of their acts. But my suspicion is that, no, they don't ponder anything except development of memory storage. Everything else is irrelevant. So, they are acting like a programmed T1000 from Skynet and polluted lakes in China are unavoidable, predestined. This is hard to swallow because my whole approach to teaching guitar initially involves programming...but that contradicts the goal which is free-form expression. Why not start with free-form expression?

More embroidery

Predestined. That's a big word that's easy to say. Predestined. Like a Bach Keyboard Invention. Predestined means that it can not be avoided, and attempts to avoid it act as catalysts to make sure it happens. Like in the movie 12 Monkeys; Bruce Willis goes back in time and becomes the person he remembers seeing as a young boy. Was it predestined? He had to go back in time in order to have the memory of seeing himself...so if he has the memory then he is guaranteed to go back in time. And if memory capacity has indeed doubled in a regular rate, and is predictable, then it will continue to double, and all the actions that are required to make it double were predestined. And everything that you do to prevent the memory capacity from doubling will end up being the reason memory capacity doubled. This is predestiny. We were predestined to have the Internet, so we're predestined to have whatever comes after the Internet.

I scare myself sometimes because I'm thinking my self-image may no longer be accurate reflection of reality, and that got me thinking of the past and if I've ever had a synchronized self-image. It's interesting but I have no conclusion to put myself at ease. I can only suspect that I may have gone insane, that no one is telling me I've gone insane, or that people are, in fact, telling me, but I'm ignoring them. Or that they are telling me I'm insane but I'm so insane that their language is being translated into gibberish about pop culture or the Antarctic Ice Shelf. This is the danger of self perception and delusion and that brought me to this website. "A celebration of self-delusion."
Seem's appropriate.

I play the guitar every day for hours, but I generally am listening to music while I play guitar. I think about experiences, I reflect, I ponder, I grieve, I tease the edge of sanity all while playing guitar. But when I write, I do none of these things. When I write, I write only, I exist in a sub dimension where there is no memory and no sanity, and no wild horses in the desert, and no guitar. When I play guitar, I ponder about the nature of writing, but when I write I do not ponder about the nature of guitar. So, by analysis, I've decided this is evidence that guitar is a hobby, and writing is a vocation. So, while an aspiring guitarist would be happy to practice the guitar as much as I do, I consider it procrastination because I lack inspiration. Procrastination brought me to another good website. Both of these websites, Lesswrong...and also youarenotsosmart have enough content to keep me pondering for many years. What's odd is that we are training kids to become better 'programmed'. School is essentially a software upload as we take 12 years to expunge any reflective and non-productive element from kids. And truly, school can only be excelled at if you do not question it. Once you question it then you will fall behind and the further you fall behind the more you will question it. Would you fall behind if you didn't question it? Probably not. But can you really acquiesce to society? But if you question conformity then you've already lost because you failed to conform. It's best to obey, conform, comply and don't question the path society sets for you. Digital memory capacity is a priority because those who developed digital memory have decreed that digital memory is a predestined priority.



I was playing some Nat King Cole piano, working from a songbook of his hits. I Don't Know Why (I Just Do) is in the book and I'm working up an arrangement of it, but I'll walk you through the thought process in case you ever want to quit your job and devote yourself to a life pondering and Cole Porter music: I'll sit down at the piano and play the song...and that will launch the HMS Oggy Daydreams onto the Sea of Lost Loves. I'll sail that ocean for at least two hours and during that two hours I will play that one song over and over, sometimes singing, sometimes only plunking the keys to the first few words. I don't know for sure because I enter a trance that borders on transcendental. The rich experiences of Oggy's life are not lost forever. No, they live on during these times and might be editorialized. I say something different, I don't get drunk, I drop out of high school, I move to Mongolia. It's like a choose your own adventure except the truth is fairly adventurous, but peppered with moments of grief and regret and contemplative songs like the I Just Do. Yes, it's a good tune. Not as defeated as Hoagy's I Get Along Without You Very Well, nor as tasty as the mournful I Know How The Lonely Spend Their Time by Bobby Cole.

For instance, I saw an item about Marilyn Monroe and I was wondering if that was because I had manifested it, or was it random, or was it because of something I had written, or because of a web page I had visited. All of these are plausible, and that could mean it was predestined.

I've had this conversation with a scientist friend. Is it possible to think clearly, without restrictive preconceptions? So far, I've determined this involves a purging of everything that was programmed into you when you had no choice, your parents, your school, your pathological friends, etc. Then you have to also purge all your preconceptions you absorbed in the process of purging the primary level of preconceptions. See? And during that purge you will probably absorb some more. So, when exactly are you free of preconceptions? I think it's possible, but difficult, and since we are all reacting from a platform of preconceptions then our opinions generally have no relevance. They are based on junk science. The question then becomes if scientists themselves are free of preconceptions. That's debatable since they must make money and if they are not funded they don't eat, so their work must support those funding them. It's bought/compromised science which is as corrupt as preconceived opinions. The worst part, is when you get a preconceived opinion like, "Don't use Crystal Meth." Well, that happens to be great advice, but it still falls into the category of preconceived opinions, programmed dogma and, therefore, bullshit. It's good advice, but social programming in general is a bad idea. A father tells his kids not to use Crystal Meth, black people can't be trusted, Russians are filth, gay people are going to Hell, the Yankees are the best baseball team. See, it's all jumbled together in a mess so the kid either discards all of it, or picks and chooses which dogmatic belief is valid, or accept everything until overwhelming evidence forces him to change his mind. Which of these scenarios actually happens? My experience has been most people never fall far from the tree, never leave their place of origin, always seek confirmation of their dogma and ignore or contradict anything that would cause them to reflect. Reflection is a lost practice. I've met maybe 3 or 4 people who seriously reflect and self-evaluate with the brutality I think is required to do any good. They were all miserable people like me because in the process of purging their own preconceptions they began to realize how uncommon that is, and if it's uncommon then their purging merely further alienates themselves...but then they prefer to be alienated from a society that is obsessed with dogma worship...thus the misery. So, it's a process that I feel is very important yet I can not recommend it to anyone. Dogma is the coin of the realm today so only committed philosophers and seekers of truth should try to purge themselves and you might as well book your flight to Tibet right now because I can tell you the path is going to end up there eventually.

I think the resources are available to think clearly, or to be less dumb, but I have habits that reinforce avoiding the resources...and it's possible I have developed these habits specifically to avoid conformity because I can't trust conventional wisdom anymore. And it's possible conventional wisdom is actually more harmful than non-conformity, but the tradition is to conform so it's a process of choosing to either believe the conformation bias that I've only paid attention to experiences that reinforce my habit to avoid conformity and part of that non-conformity is to avoid experiences that would suggest I conform. But it can't be ruled out that conformity is a better option, even if my non-conformity is predestined.
There was a time when I believed this kind of ponderous reflection was research for the character I was writing about. Oggy is a character I needed to understand and it was important to think and act as he would think and act, so I could have accurate scenarios. This is the writer's craft take to an extreme because I also think the writing quality always reflects the depth of the author's understanding divided by the depth of the reader's gullibility. I wanted a true representation, honest, complete, multidimensional and I would achieve that with research. And now that research has curled back on itself and I wonder if the research was predestined to make me a non-conformist...and is all research a quest for predestiny?

Single Male: likes playing Cole Porter tunes in old age homes, likes Punch Pin embroidery.

I'm tired and my neck hurts and I think I have skin cancer on my nose.