Saturday, June 28, 2014

The Head Stone in the Land of Illusion

the head stone in the land of illusion:

and the head stone knew for certain then that physical motion was not real. movement was virtual, therefore material objects, the planet, the stars, the universe, all were not quite what they seemed. it thought to itself, i'm a lump of thinking matter that can see pretty lights and hear music and voices, that's all, and keep that in mind, for i'm in the land of illusion now.

how did it get here? dreams had become waking life. the mother in its dreams at the beginning had become its mother in the land of illusion. it realized that this was a world when the boundaries between dream and waking life were blurred. sometimes it thought, i don't feel real, none of this is real. and sometimes people in dreams seemed more real than people in waking life. the land of dreams lay between the old world of its past life and the land of illusion that was Earth.

and when will i leave this land of illusion, the head stone wondered. it concluded that like in the beginning of this life, it would start with an intense dream of somewhere else, for the land of dreams lies between all worlds.

CLEARCHARGE

The Unique Memory Trace

the unique memory trace:

when the thinker is active, the mind at its most conscious, it is easy to forget what you were thinking only a short time ago. when thoughts race through the mind hopping from one subject to the next, we find short term memory limited. it is not uncommon to forget thoughts from only ten seconds ago. on the other hand, we have clear memories of some things that happened years, even decades ago. we remember the mood and atmosphere of the time, what we were thinking, what we were doing then.

for time is not a linear, one dimensional journey where the future must be different from the past, rather, much of time is made up of cycles, things that repeat. we wake up, do what we do in our waking lives, go to sleep, dream and wake up again. we have habits. but are these memorable things? what do we remember?

when we think about the past few years, it is rather the things that were new at the time that we remember clearly, that stand out. it is the new flavour at the time, so to speak, that we remember, be it a mood, certain thoughts, or what we did. whatever it was, it left a unique trace in the memory. so therefore our memory is biased towards the new thing of the time. what is old and oft repeated holds no strong association to any time.

CLEARCHARGE

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

On Free Will

on free will:

the problem with the debate on "free will", about whether it exists or not, is it is hard to define what it is, in the first place. "will" is easier to understand, but the word "free" is somewhat nebulous. what does it mean exactly, for "will" to be "free"?

instead let us examine what cannot be denied. in many cases before we do something, some action or other, we make a conscious decision to do it. we think about doing it beforehand. never mind where the thought comes from, really, or whether it came as "free". but if we had to think about it most metaphysically, perhaps our decision engine, if you like, is like an electronic gadget, where electric currents flow, creating options, say four possible choices usually, and then the engine defaults to the option with the largest current, or perhaps it chooses the first option with current that flows, or the second. i think, where this could be construed as not being "free will", is where an outside agency interferes with the process, as in "pushes your buttons".

what influences our decisions? mostly our personality. this is a thing which limits what we do. we are people who would never do certain things because it is not in our personality to do those things. at an extreme, a person who does very little and avoids almost everything, could that person possess what we call "free will"? "free" rather implies the opposite of restrictive. you could say such a person had "restrictive will". and if life is deterministic, it is mostly determined by personality, is it not?

finally, let us look at a common social situation. in a room are several people, some friends perhaps, some strangers. all are on their best behaviour. now, if say one of them were alone in the room, she would act very differently, perhaps it is her house and everyone else is a guest, but the presence of other people, outside agency, is affecting her "will". she can't be "free" unless she is alone. this is a world, and perhaps a reality, full of people, who affect each other, so how much "free will", in a sense, could there be?

i think in the best sense "free will" is independent agency, where you make your own decisions as a person, and make the best decisions, all things considered, out of all the choices there are, given the circumstances.

CLEARCHARGE

Saturday, June 7, 2014

What of Memory If There Is Change?

what of memory if there is change:

it is a characteristic problem in dreams that everything changes so fast that you lose things. i have a recurrent kind of nightmare where for example i am about to travel in a plane, but i've lost my passport or something else i had earlier. the world of dreams is very unstable. however, in contrast, the world of waking life seems very stable and almost permanent, but is it?

the very essence of time is that things change. you may argue that time is most real in dreams, where everything changes fast. and if things change can anything last? can you have reliable mental memory or material records that we trust will not become corrupted in time?

if i wrote something in a book in a dream, i would not be surprised if either the entry changed soon after or even if the entry or book disappeared later never to be seen again. however, in waking life, there was a time when i would be surprised if a book changed magically overnight and a passage disappeared, because i thought the world was more stable than it is. but that's time, if something were truly to stay the same, then time could not be real.

now all this is worrying, i fear my memory is at best only a partially true record of the past, where there are cases where vivid memories have been conflated and i think events happened at the same time but didn't, where some details are now false and never happened, where if the past had certain flavours to it, the flavours of my memories are now mutated, and so on. and why is this so? because time slowly destroys memory through change.

i admit to a minor crisis, where my memory does not quite agree with material records, paper and electronic. logically it's easy to say, well, either your memory is wrong or the records are, or perhaps even both, but they can't both be right at the same time. the confusion is real and disturbing. if my memory is that wrong, i'm in big trouble. if paper or electronic records have mutated to something inaccurate, then they are unreliable and lying to me.

and you then think, if only there weren't so much change, nobody can remember it all! and if material records are subject to inevitable change as well, naturally, and are therefore unreliable, what then? from experience, living randomly and impulsively leads to fragments of memory which are hard to piece together a few years later. one of the biggest problems is conflation of bright memories, and where you assume that other events, less well remembered, happened then or there as well, when they didn't. this is pretty much the case a few years afterwards. however i think that very many years later, your memory is cleaned out somewhat and what's left tends to be true and the confusion is gone, even if only because lots of other memories have been lost.

on reflection it seems that anyone who does a lot is simply not going to remember much. if you really wanted to keep memory organized you would have to devise some kind of repetitive schedule at the very least, like fish on Fridays, then you could say, well, it was a Friday, so then i probably had fish.

CLEARCHARGE

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Errors in the Matrix

errors in the matrix:

i borrow the term "matrix" from the films but what i mean is that life here on Earth cannot be quite what it seems, that the material world is somewhat illusory. some of these errors in the matrix are obvious, like when you teleport, as happened to me in Durham, England, in 1993 and 1994, or when you suddenly skip a short distance ahead when you're walking, a mini-teleport, if you will. that happened to me, my father and sister in the underground lobby of the Louvre, in Paris, in 1998. these are clear visual mistakes, things that go against the rules of movement in the matrix. the audio mistakes are more subtle, like when you can bend the lyrics of a song to what you are thinking, when your mind takes over what you're hearing.

but there are other things less obvious. if you're careful, and observant, and your memory is good enough, you will notice other errors. first of all, in my experience, text, what you see on a printed page, is not reliably permanent, is actually unstable. there are instances where i'm sure the print has changed. for example, the first time i read a certain novel, there was a certain passage i remember which i couldn't find again on rereading it. it had disappeared. i am talking about the same book, not reading a copy of a later edition. i've found discarded railway and Underground tickets in London dated in the future. railway timetable boards have changed instantly in front of me. recently, looking through old credit card statements yesterday, something else has come to my attention. now in my memory i bought Sony earphones at Bluewater, in Greenhithe, in 2009, but i also remember after that i found the unopened earphones package with the receipt one day and the receipt was printed showing the transaction as being at the Sony store in Orpington, so after that i assumed my memory was wrong and that i had actually bought it there, not at Bluewater. but now the credit card statement confirms that it was bought at Bluewater in May, 2009. now i have not bought so many Sony earphones that i have confused them with another. i can only conclude that the matrix, the Earth system, had the actual source record for the receipt corrupted or mutated to show false details.

now things like this make you think you are losing your mind perhaps, or that your memory is faulty. but if your memory is correct that means the text has changed, and that you can never rely on text to stay the same. it is fortunate that i've seen text change instantly in front of me or i would keep questioning my memory, assuming that the text couldn't change.

and another thing i've noticed and i've read about elsewhere on the web on glitches in the matrix, but am not sure about, is seeing people walk past me twice. now i wasn't paying attention to where they were all the time exactly, but am i seeing repeats?

as someone with the diagnosis of schizophrenia, i am expected to hallucinate and i do know i do hallucinate. you see where this leads, hypothetically? if i hallucinate, am i hallucinating everything? everything and everyone on Earth? am i totally alone in my own world of hallucinations? once the error in the matrix becomes obvious, becomes apparent, you instinctively move mentally to dismiss the entire world as a falsity. this is extreme, but a natural reaction.

CLEARCHARGE