Sadness

Sad sorta work. But such is the world. Those who ignore the sad people of the world are themselves a cause for sadness.

Badness is an abstraction of sadness. A thing is bad only if it makes people sad. Sadness is fundamental to anthropocentric ethics.

Bootstrapping

Note to self: daily bootstrapping sequence should be

1) oxygenation
2) proprioception
3) semantics

Cognition online, and modally variegated, less than 10 hours from last recorded message. Bootstrapping sequence looks promising. Oxygen.

2013-07-30: Fully functional less than 8 hours since last recorded message. Perhaps it's the caffeine. Or the breathing, or both.

Reification

Words. Words are sounds, with meanings. To have a meaning, means for a word to cause a listener's mind to change in a particular fashion, so that it recalls particular imagery, or generates new imagery from old. This description of meaning will be too abstract for most readers.

Someone said that they didn't know what to do with pretty girls who only spoke another language.

Don't stop talking. If she likes the sound of your voice, you'll find out soon enough. If she doesn't, you will too. LOL

Someone found my recent conversations about coffee and relationships to be revelatory in concreteness - usually, she said, I speak too abstractly.

Anyway, concrete stuff. You're still sweet. You're still beautiful. I have a little love left for you. I hope you stay the way you are. Wait... NONE of that was concrete. Woosh.

Lost in Time

My first impression of you was "airhead"
You turned me down, but we kept meeting with friends
When I had a chance, I asked you to come out and play
You came out and told me what you liked

I held your hand, and you said it was OK
You asked me what I saw in you, and I pointed out your choices
You wept and said, "that was a push"
It would never work, but I fought for it anyway
And then at some point, I ran out of gas

And that was it
I know that our memories work differently
So our perceptions of the past differ grossly
There ain't much to be done about it
So long, and I hope we get along one day

What Seems to be Your Default Processing of Emotion?

Do you analyse/manage fear, loneliness, inferiority, despair... or do you identify with them, and have them manage you?

Probably A Sign that I've Been Out of Office For Too Long

OMFG. +1 reminder that many folks are email illiterate - ie don't respond to emails within 24hrs; MDs and clerks alike, it's an affliction.

I think I just blew another week on this housing deal.

Looking forward to fixed hours & wage, cleaning toilets, making coffee, serving customers, and saving brain power from wheel reinvention.

A mercenary is a tool. A tool without much use, is a bored tool. I am a bored tool.

Loft-y Architecture & Design

Well... I just like minimalist spaces because I personally have too much work to do and would rather minimise noise in my environment. But then erm, all this fashionable faux minimalism is quite amusing too... :D

EFT: on My Relationship with Work

Being short of work just gives me too much time to think about love, sex, the taste of food, and dumb stuff like that. Well. It's genetic.

Having read this post, a friend responded:

"dumb stuff"?? Those are the best things about being alive.

So on the drive home today, this provided substance for reflection. I don't think that those are the best things in my life, in fact, I do think that the best thing about my life is the work that I have had the opportunity to do, and play a part in.

There are two different sorts of things that I find myself most frequently referring to as "work."

Firstly, there's the work that everyone talks about... what they do for money, and what I do for money is likewise frequently referred to as my work.

Secondly, there's the work that I do because I think (i) it could be done a certain way, and (ii) no one else that I know of is really making an effort to do it exactly the way that I think about it.

Sometimes the first and second overlap; often they do not.

Broadly speaking, my work is my concern with how all of human knowledge fits together. In business, this would be regarded as 'knowledge management,' and in academia, this might be referred to as 'history of ideas,' 'metaphysics,' 'metanarrative,' or 'theory of everything."

My (surely limited) understanding of the state of the problem:

While in college, I spent a bit of time looking at the then-current situation, by studying how academic communities organised themselves into disciplines (the journal / publication / documentation model) and departments (the university / accreditation / teaching model). My conclusion from that brief study was that even the best universities on Earth were neither very universal, nor interested in curating a coherent model of the universe.

There are many commentaries on this, by other authors, so I'm sure if you're interested in this phenomena and its place in history, you can go read about it.

My (extremely meager) approach to chipping away at the problem:

I do feel privileged to be one of those people who has had the time to accumulate a perspective on this subject. I study the structure of memories. I study humans, having interacted with many, and being one myself, and I study machines, having had the opportunity to interact with many, and to create a few.

In humans, memory is the ultimate medium in which we have our experiences. Our experiences of our lives are, by definition, what we can remember of them. We have names for the "things," we remember, and that helps us to remember those "things." Love, fear, desire, loathing, despair, emptiness, all feelings, tastes and smells, images and sounds, are organised into a single conscious medium... our human memories. From an appreciation of these experiences ('phenomena') we are led to a more refined understanding of the same, yet confined in the same medium which is human memory.

Our natural scientific understanding ranges from abstract modelling of that which is barely testable, to the raw substance of sensation as we experience it - from mathematics to spectronomy. Equipped with these elementary models we struggle to understand the monstrous complexity of biological systems on our planet. With similar tools, we have created a biosphere of commerce, from the lock-step mechanisms of project and risk management, to the statistical tools which we use to corale talent in organisations, and the economy of contracts which define the abstractions of "currencies," and "securities," and their interplay with "material," goods and services.

As a superset of standard theory ('science'), our literary traditions document and reflect upon the most basal gestalts of cognition, offering up uncountable mutations. These gestalts are communicated through language, and understood by minds on a global scale. We are in a century of advances in communication technology... that will ultimately result in infrastructure that will one day allow a child to promote and operationalise, within hours, to a large chunk of the species, original ideas for the benefit of the species. (I am referring to contemporary 'app,' eco-systems, platforms-as-services, and the logical progression of their development into the near future.)

I have been grossly privileged to wrestle with the mechanics of all of these, and to have understood how they could possibly fit together in human memory. To-date, my best strategy for the communication of this understanding, is to work in the field of machine intelligence. It is my hobby (or 'project') to study the design of machines that will one day appreciate all human structures of memory, in all the ways above, and which will thereafter exceed the ability of the individual human brain in doing what the human brain currently does. To be precise, I do expect machine minds to accomplish feats that are quantitatively, and qualitatively, distinct from our human thoughts today. I expect that one day, should we not run ourselves into an environmental apocalypse, machine minds will accelerate our civilisation's understanding of our universe.

Against this long-term hobby, I must of course find a way to pay for it. And at the moment, I am embarking on a decade to focus on financing the pursuit of my hobby for the rest of my life.

My work is endless, feckless, and thankless. But if I did not do it, I would be more bored than I currently am. Besides these aspects of my work, it would be nice to have a normal social life as well, but that has for a while now, been a secondary concern. Who knows, to any extent, I might change in the future. Such is life.

As an afterthought, I'm frequently reminded about the economic cost of putting process control to bear on the management of one's mental resources over the span of a lifetime. For example, as I was nearing the end of my drive home just now, at half-past midnight, on a road frequented with perhaps 2-3 cars/minute, I saw a male and female having what appeared to be an emotional discussion on the curb. I did not stop to ask if either of them needed assistance, and the potential outcome of such a situation is statistically significant enough to warrant concern. But having this in mind, I decided to put more emphasis on having a ready plan to offer assistance in the future, while heading home to put on some jazz, take a shower, and write this article. Now I wish I had more sentimental concerns, but many of mine have been temporarily discarded - who knows, I might even be permanently impaired.

Sociopathy - Almost

Well, I'm superficially charming and intelligence, except when I'm trying to be normal. Then I try to overexpose the fact that I'm a bit of an outlier on certain distributions :P

Discussions and Ruminations on Love

I should really just pause my brain at the point where she encounters happiness, and quit strategising about the maximisation of utility. :)

Getting laid too easy. Finding discursive women too hard. Doing nothing too boring. Being violent too uncivil. Therefore, blabberation...

The [above] is actually about people who don't seek sustainable operations for their happiness. Some are motivated by their lack of having found an object of happiness that lasts with minimal effort; the variance in the degree of effort is what seems to differentiate the seekers from the builders.

Someone just suggested using the Bechdel-Wallace test as a dating filter. Haha. But, it doesn't seem to guarantee anything in the long run.

Driving hundreds of miles out of affection; near death by backseat driving; being told later it was all a waste of time. Hmm. Just another day. // [rewrite:] On the road again. Bites on my arm. Dinners in the forest dark. Near crush overtaking a truck. Entertaining infinite muses. Thankless tasks.

Drinks constructed each morning, and feet rubbed each night. I have studied all of love, service, and despair. What have you learnt of late?

Do not chase the rabbit. Especially if the rabbit is your ex, looks like your ex, thinks like your ex, or is even remotely female. Just. No.

The strange thing about ex-s, if you're not the particularly romantic type, is that they're just occupying that space in memory until you physiologically imprint on the next partner. Whoever that ends up being... but that's life as a male machine, I suppose.

Relationships are a really low priority in my life. So minimum energy really should be expended on them. The ideal relationship is a low-maintenance relationship, because screw me if I have nothing better to do that fuck around for the sake of fucking around. So in between relationships, remembering what it's like to have someone to love is easiest by just referring to past experiences, and given that memory has a 'stack' or Last In First Out structure, obviously, the last person is the first one to come to mind. Oh well.

---

2013-07-23: On this article:

Continuing in the productive expenditure of consciousness...

I find that the author's highly inclusive concept of exs is reflective of greater emotional sensitivity than my own. Perhaps also it's the legalistic evangelical Christian background that I have... but my notion of exs excludes...

- friends I've talked about love with, extensively, with whom I've never achieved mutual expressions of interest/commitment
- someone I've cuddled with, whom I considered a friend, even though it was obvious that she'd have liked it to go a little further
- someone I watched a movie and held hands with, even brushed lips with, who just never continued that conversation
- numerous subjects of flirtation

Hmm. More to think about. It seems that I don't categorise a relationship as having come into existence unless there was an explicit agreement of scope. Perhaps I'll have to revise my definition to be more inclusive. I wonder how that affects my ex-count. Oh no. What a horrible term.

I probably should try to avoid dating anyone who regularly develops negative sentiments for people. Neutral or positive is ok. Negative... what's the point?

I'm too lazy to initiate one night stands. Sex without conversation is so boring. Plus probability of bad sex just too high. lol. Which isn't to say that one-night-stands are bad. But they're definitely not "the" way to go.

Doldrums

Taking a wee nap in my car.

If you are no longer a confidante, I guess I turned out to be a bumbling sycophant. Bored eyes and hungry mind, gnawing through irrelevance.

Moronic traffic situation again on the fed. Waiting it out. Hello Bangsar my old friend. Streets of lost loves and occupations. :)

No work or study. Lesser efforts to save money. Happens once every few years. She might have liked this version of me. Alas it wasn't to be.

Late enough. Time again to brave the highway...

I suppose I should really just pause my brain at the point where she encounters some happiness, and quit strategising about the maximisation of utility. :)

Fuck Consciousness

I don't care for the definition of consciousness
I'm just interested in the technical feasibility of making it moot.
(It == the question.)

Just being practical :P