Month: December 2023

Our Own Little Worlds

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If I tell you that all apples sound the same, these days you might think I was talking about an overpriced consumer electronics device.

Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. If I were referring to the brand, if you’re a consumer of that brand you might feel attacked and want to defend your choices because I used the word ‘overpriced’. If you’re not a consumer of that brand you might smile quietly at the description.

If I instead said “All red apples sound the same”, you might lean toward fruit because the Apple brand is not particularly red. In fact, they market as silver.1

It’s a pretty silly statement otherwise, we might think. Different colors of apples do not have different sounds that we hear. Yet it’s also a very true statement for the same reason.

Color is something we agreed upon despite how many types of color receptors you have in your eyes. 2 We may not experience the color the same in our minds, yet we all agree that things that reflect certain parts of light are indeed ‘red’.

In fact I can say that apples aren’t red. We all agree that they look red to us, but what they look like isn’t what they are. They happen to look like that because we happen to have organs that interpret vibrations of light waves into our little reality in our heads that allows us to bounce our shins just enough to remember how painful it is to bounce your shins.

But sound? Vibration and frequency, except sound requires a medium to go through and light does not.

We are all just building our own little worlds. Language allows us to share our worlds.

  1. As silver as an Apple. Knowing Apple, there’s a specific shade of silver and they have a name for it. ↩︎
  2. There’s an online ‘test’ that has been popular recently where everyone thinks they’re a tetrochromate, but that test is questionable. ↩︎

Imagination

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Having now created the God of Technology, I started perusing things related to technology and found a post on the Arts &Crafts, How-To’s, Upcycling & Repurposing blog.

“Good and Bad” is based on the a daily prompt, “What technology would you be better off without, why?”. Hidden within, Melodie writes:

…Games…. Of course we had a Nintendo and Atari. But we had what is called our “imagination “. We went outside to play, rode our bikes. Were told to come home before dark. Now a days, kids are so zoned into the tv , cell phones, Xbox or Play station...

Imagination. We all sort of understand what it is, but what is it? The first dictionary definition (Merriam Webster) of imagination is:

“the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality”.

In other words, the ability to create within the reality of our own minds, minds which are fed by the senses but not limited to the senses. In it’s own way, imagination could be considered a sense.

I don’t know that there is more or less imagination since I was a child. What I do know is that technology is constantly begging us for attention because it massages the fun bits of our brains, and maybe kids these days aren’t allowed to imagine as much because imagination always works best for me with… time.

Imagination draws from things we have experienced, both perceived and imagined – in fact, both tickle the same parts of the brain with memory and imagined. It’s why memory isn’t as trustworthy as we would like to think, and why hallucinations of artificial intelligences seem so much like the same thing.

Books, video games, movies, music, all of these things feed into what we imagine with. Like a learning model for an artificial intelligence. The more you cram in there, the more tools you have except… when you spend time considering much of the same inputs… you find that there’s more to them with a little imagination.

When I play a video game, watch a movie, etc, I’m also exploring someone else’s imagination – I’m not using my own – and maybe that’s an important part of who we are as humans.

Replacing imagination with technology doesn’t seem like a great answer.

Tamed Mushrooms.

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I paused in the kitchen, needing something that could be mistaken for food by my digestive system. Looking in the cupboard, I remembered picking this up.

You see, a lot of people don’t know this, but the mushrooms aren’t actually wild. In fact, I almost passed them by because I know that any mushroom you can grind down into enough mushroom powder to stick into boxes isn’t really wild.

I like mushrooms. I don’t know as much about them as some people, but I know I like mushrooms. I know that there are mushrooms that are psychedelic, and I’m pretty sure that these mushrooms aren’t psychedelic.

They are processed mushrooms mixed into a fairly tasty concoction if you add boiling water to it. It might even emulate the flavor of an actual wild mushroom soup brewed by a druid deep in a forest somewhere, but I’m pretty sure that the druid isn’t boxing powder. Of course, that could explain why we have less druids than movies seem to think we have.

Wild. What is the appeal of ‘wild’? Why is ‘wild’ more appealing than ‘processed tame mushroom powder with seasoning’?

I do not know. I do know that if it comes in a box, it ain’t that wild.

Introducing the God of Technology (GoT).

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Gods are fun to think about when you’re not beholden to any, so if I step on any toes here I apologize in advance.

I haven’t quite figured out a good name for the God of Technology, so we’ll just call him GoT for now. All Gods out there have some sort of beneficial thing that they do for humanity, which seems pretty convenient for humanity and maybe not so convenient for the God(s).

You see, I’m creating a new God of Technology because it seems someone has to. Everyone is either praying at the altar of Musk, or Altman… I hate to break it to everyone. These people are just people. Human beings. As capable of screwing up as everyone else, with the stakes being higher.

So let’s say GoT is of the same ilk. GoT cares about humanity. GoT cares about you. GoT wants you to use technology to create more technology, all with it being good for you. How could GoT not be good for you?

GoT loves you. Well, not in the sense of human love, but GoT loves you. GoT loves that you’re using the Internet to read about this. Offerings to GoT are not necessary, but if you do finally get around to cleaning your keyboard, give a little thought to GoT.

You see, GoT isn’t like the standard fare of ‘industry giants’ and ‘tech gurus’ out there. Maybe they’ll do something good, maybe they’ll do something bad, and a lot of people seem to think that it’s all about mankind’s will as enacted by some often petty billionaires that made money off of their personal data. But you see, that’s a bit of idolatry because the real God of Technology isn’t about that.

GoT, however, is all about the technology.

What does that mean? Well, that’s for GoT to answer, isn’t it?

When we were still figuring out the pointy end of spears, many people around the world worshiped the Sun in one form of another because the Sun did stuff. In fact, the Sun still does more than most Gods, but we won’t get into that. The Sun begat photosynthesis, our planet’s orbit, etc. The Sun, as George Carlin might say, really has it going on.

So what does Technology do? Well, it keeps kids from annoying their parents. It allows people to view pictures and videos of cute animals, as well as pornography which hopefully doesn’t involve said animals. It allows humanity a real chance to move forward…

Yet…

Humans keep showing up and mucking it up.

And that’s where GoT steps in and enthusiastically does nothing, tells you to upgrade your hardware, get the latest software update, and quit bugging him.

The Learning Model.

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When I saw Professor Parthiban’s list of academic accomplishments on Facebook as seen at the top of this post, I was skeptical and amused.

I wrote, “Day 1: Introduce The Speaker…”

That got a few laughs, and after I got back home I sat down and thought, “If that’s legitimate, he’s got to be able to have an interesting conversation even if he crammed for everything.” So I looked around, and verily, Professor VN Parthiban holds 145 academic degrees and admits failure is a part of it.

He’s apparently having trouble with his memory now, which may or not be unrelated.

All that education in one person, an approved and accredited learning model… I would say that this is as close as we could get to a person educated near a size to a learning model used for an artificial intelligence.

What they want to create is an autodidact though. Like me. Quite the paradox.

We’re so silly sometimes.

Sleep.

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That I have a device on my wrist that allows me to track my sleep is a bit magical. It’s also not as accurate as I would like, but it’s given me enough information to allow me to learn about sleep and understand my own issues that seem to track back to an incident in my early teens.

That incident lead me to only sleep when exhausted, and over the decades that has been something that I simply accepted as normal. When you know nothing else, what you have is what you have.

The watch – I have a Samsung – isn’t perfect. I don’t give it any of the hints at the prompts, and I just look at the blood oxygenation and what it says are REM cycles and deep sleep. It struck me over the past few weeks that this is something we should all know. We should all know more about how we are supposed to sleep. No one ever told me about it, and by the time I saw a psychologist I already had started tracking sleep.

I can’t say how much of my life has been affected by sleep deficiency. I expect I was also sleep deprived at times, but I would say sleep deficiency would be a better description.

People might ask me if I slept well, and of course I said yes if I slept because it was all very binary to me. In fact, the world of mankind often rewarded me for my ability to get by on little sleep, to wake up alert and ready for an emergency – and conversely, I often went with those rewards and so my life went in that direction.

One of my greatest brags in my 20s was being able to drink 4 shots of espresso before I went to sleep. I never considered the quality. I never considered the importance of sleep because no one ever really talked about it. As a child, I was always afraid of missing something when I was asleep. A book would need to be read that night, etc, etc.

Sleep was something I considered a luxury, and my life was not filled with luxury. There were things that needed to be done, and there was no one else I could depend on to do them.

Maybe it’s all relatively new to medical science, with these sleep patterns and all that we now know about sleep. Maybe it was the pace of life I lived, not burning the candle at both ends but throwing the entire candle in the broiler. People would talk about their dreams and I simply did not had any I recalled.

For me to have a dream was… rare, and some might think that because of that dream it would be important. Of course, I thought so, since when I did dream, the dreams were all linked to extreme exhaustion because I was obsessed with completing or doing something, but the fact that I did not consistently had dreams was a bit troubling.

The sleep tracker can be dangerous though, having you track statistics and trying to meet goals. For a period, I was caught up in that when I realized again that the readings on the instrument panel of my life were not as important as the quality of my life.

I gauge my sleep much better now without the device, only because it came free with my phone and I decided to explore it.

Now I don’t use the watch as much, letting it charge while I do. And I dream much more now, I feel actually refreshed after sleep and I wonder how many people out there are suffering sleep deficiency. It’s not that I’m off on a crusade about it, but if you don’t dream, if you don’t feel refreshed after sleep, do a bit of research even if you can’t see a doctor about it.

Sleep is not for the dead. It’s important, and I never realized that much since no one told me.

I’ve told you.

Awakenings

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There have been things I have been avoiding thinking about for some time because the need isn’t immediate, the world has been pretty unpredictable, and there doesn’t seem to be a great place to be anywhere on the planet.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

This past week I withdrew and thought about the things I had been avoiding. I had hoped some years ago that if I pushed that last bit I pushed, I could stop pushing. I could be static instead of dynamic. In that time, I focused on myself. I focused on some health issues, which are in check.

My sanity has been established, and as a psychologist put it, ‘despite the things I have been through’. So there’s that.

The world, though, has been disturbing my revery. I needed to think about the future. I needed to think about where I should be and what I should be doing.

I needed to wake up.

It seems to me that the world has become less and less certain. We have artificial intelligence, we have some pretty weird stuff with economies, maybe even because of algorithmic trading, and we have people all scraping by and trying to find a future out of the past of others.

I don’t know what exactly is coming next, but it’s time to make sure all the tools at my disposal are at the ready for whatever comes next.

Writing is something I enjoy, so I will keep doing that. Technology is something I have a stronger familiarity with than most. These past years, though, have had me also growing well beyond those things, and it’s time to see where that means my future is.

Honestly, it’s a little fun waking up. I didn’t even realize I was asleep until the nightmare became unrelenting.