This morning I had one of those moments where a long past memory jumps into recollection and lingers, hence this blog post.
Eight or nine years ago I attended a few bible studies at the Concord Church of Christ. There were about 12 people present, I was the only newcomer. If you've read a few of my previous posts then you know I am not religious in the slightest but at this time in my life I was actively seeking a greater sense of truth in the world.
The discussion revolved around the unique gifts and abilities instilled in each of us by our creator and how best to use them but also what, if anything, we wish that we had more of. Some of the others wanted better patience, understanding and all that jazz.
I said that I longed for Clarity.
After an initial mistaken impression that I wanted clairvoyance we cut to the heart of the matter. My problem with christianity at the time, one of many, was that knowing more about the consequences of your actions would essentially lead you to realize that you committed an ever greater number of sins.
This troubled me because I think its a little shitty that the most cognizant and introspective people of a faith should carry extra guilt as a consequence. However the issue, and the need for clarity goes something like this:
Any number of neutral actions or behaviors can have no apparent consequence for you directly but still lead to great good or great harm independently of any intention. For example if you accidentally drop a 20 dollar bill and don't remember where you lost it then the next person who finds it will have 20 dollars that came to them through no benefit or virtue of their own.
Whether it will be used for good or ill is impossible to know. A needy child might find it on the day his parents need money for medicine for a sick sibling. Another child might happen upon it at a time when he has unique access to something like drugs, or even fireworks or candy and that might negatively affect them.
There is no way to know how far the consequences of our actions, intentional and otherwise, will carry. Do the ripples reach the other side of the pond? This bothers me!! It still bothers me today.
My desire was to know, with absolute certainty, which of my actions, my mistakes and even my sins most heinous would lead to good or ill not just for me but for those who touched the ripples of my conscious mind.
In the light of greater understanding, having a college education, a few hundred more books and a near decade of experience to give perspective I now see what I lacked back then. I lack it still and will forever but it no longer troubles me so much.
The search for truth at some strange conflux of events has become a search for good information. I know I have rejected the need for truth many times because it is such a weird human contrivance and gives undue credit to certain bad ideas. Arbitrary social norms and ideals are held up for no reason other than the certainty that they are right according to some majority of active pushers and passive enablers.
Clarity will never come from wishing. It will never come, you have to go out and strangle it out of the wilderness or you will never find it. I know the whole 'life's a journey not a destination' cliche sticks in most people's throat but it fits this post so I use it.
What the cliche fails to make mention of is a simple and inescapable truth: People, left to their own devices, will often fail to seek adventure or enterprise if they are left in comfortable situations. Finding a comfortable groove and staying there seems as innate to the human spirit as the discontent that skips us out of it.
Our desires, our wanderlust and our weltzschmertz all fluctuate and so does the world around us. Its very easy to miss those opportunities that befall us. Its much harder for them to slip away when you put a knife in your teeth and pursue them into the night.
Or in the day...
Showing posts with label sins most heinous. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sins most heinous. Show all posts
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Continuity....
Call me a one-trick pony if you must, I've got at least three talents and I can apply two of them while sitting down with a pc (or a Mac if you throw in a barfbag.)
My biting atheistic tendencies are beginning to creep into other areas of my life and I find it worrisome. Seeing a picture of a terrible blister/tumor/pustule of some sort is disturbing but finding one sticking out of your own conscience...well that's different.
Something I have retained from my religious experience is a deep seated sense of worry that I am always just a few bad decisions away from that sinking realization that I have fucked up. It's an awful feeling when you realize that you've become guilty of a law you wrote *for yourself.*
Granted there is some redemption in the identification and correction of such missteps. However just assuming 'hey i am a good person so i'll do better' has proven demonstrably false. Enough caterwauling though, let me enumerate my sins most heinous.
It's so easy to forget that being right is ALWAYS a relative phenomenon. How often I have felt justified in some opinion or sentiment only to look back at a later date and realize how my opinion has drifted over time. Sadly my favorite example of this is a certain song from Warcraft II. You can listen to it here, its the second half (starts at 3:30)
If you know your history this game came out a long time ago. I mean like ten years ago or more. I remember playing it briefly at scott's house and thinking 'surely game graphics can't get much better' Starcraft two of course immolates that idea.
The point of this is that I really liked the music but I hadn't listened to it in years and I realized that my mental recording was WRONG, and not just a little wrong, not just 'oh i forgot that part of the riff' wrong but whole swaths of the piece were just missing. It's quite disconcerting that even our 'long term' storage is apparently volatile. Now I have known that memory is statistically terrible since high school psych but being surprised by it so bluntly still came as a shock.
I remember when I was 18 thinking 'yeah that was ten years ago...ten years, holy crap i am so old.' And kiddies I am not going to say enjoy it while you can because you'll probably be a douche during college but I'm not going to stop anyone from making their own mistakes.
So taking the music metaphor (ignoring all that other crap) we apply the volatility clause to morality and find what...DECADENCE!!!
More accurately as I introspected I discovered that I have a tendency to drift towards two of the most vile poisons to human progress (and I don't mean bacon) Let's call them 'vengeance' and 'the curse of being smart enough to see clearly but not so smart as to be unassailable in my position.' The second one needs work I am sure.
Regarding vengeance: I believe that every human gets squinty-eyed and mean over some commonplace facet of other people's lives. Indoctrinating children happens to be one of my hot buttons. Seriously watching 'Jesus Camp' brought tears to my eyes. Then again the scene where the fat shit preacher lady is praying over the FUCKING POWERPOINT setup I was reminded of why rage dwells at the heart of any geek.
It's really fucking scary in its own right but it also clashes with one of my childhood idealisms. Sadly I grew up thinking that people would hip to the benefits and wonder of technology and science. Now before someone pulls out the very obvious bias we all get from the fundamental attribution error I will 'pretort' by saying that statistics will bear out my assertion. People don't have a fucking clue about the universe and its unforgivable.
Consider the following examples (the first is mainly shock value but don't let that corrupt your indignation)
Immoral Nanotech
Public Understanding of Science
Whenever someone does a survey or something about the knowledge of the public I am invariably prone to negativity because people don't know a lot of stuff. It's a little offensive to me that stuff I consider near and dear (like how the earth revolves around the sun, or the relative size of the solar system/galaxy/universe) is totally lost on the common person.
Fuck the laity!!
Lazy bastards won't bother to read a book or learn something outside the minimal requirements. And when I say minimal I mean SCANT.
This is where I fall prey to thoughts of vengeance and begin to entertain somewhat insane ideas. The other day I was thinking about torture of prisoners and wondering if it might be better for the world to just show them Nova videos and then quiz them. We might not get the best intel but at least we'd be injecting something other than the Koran into their medieval world views (this is for the islamic militants only but we should be educating the world not pissing down its collar)
Sometimes when I get upset at myself I try to imagine the world if my conscious brain was copied and shunted instantly into everyone else's brain. The consequences would no doubt be fascinating as well as the scariest event to afflict the human race, sorry people. Anyway the real joys in life are invariably fleeting and so we must find ever bigger, badder and deeper ways to satisfy them. At least in education we are given a nearly limitless barrel of monkeys to delve into for entertainment, as well as enrichment, purposes.
When I get angry at humanity I try to calm down by thinking of my old haunt at the NCSU library. On the northwest corner of the stacks there is partially open air hallway from the stairwell to the main stacks. If you are holed up for a long day/night of studying its an excellent place for a smoke break.
What I liked best about this hideout besides the nicotine reprieves was that at a certain time in the evening you could see the sunset through the gaps in the brick. Better yet if it was a still day you could build up enough smoke to capture an entire phalanx of light rays. Say what you will about lung cancer and fire hazards, it was a beautiful sight. Thus calmed I turn to my second vice.
As well-formed and logical as the internal network of my brain appears to me there is an obvious barrier to the outside world. It's a little heartbreaking going from ATM to token ring. How are we to remedy something like that? It's not that I am so smart that the English language cannot convey the nuance of being seth inside there's just too much overhead to channel it out in a valid and meaningful way.
I often joke about the USB plug into my head but its starting to look more and more like it will happen at some point in our lifetime. If nothing else maybe someone will develop 'ghetto telepathy' as described below.
If you're into wiki-based education consider this definition for telepathy: Telepathy, from the Greek τελε, tele meaning "distant" and πάθεια, patheia meaning "to be affected by",[2] describes the purported transfer of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals by means other than the five classical senses (See Psi). [3][1]
You usually see this in the context of someone who can read minds, have visions, predict the future and other ESP related shit-cock brain phlegm. However with a few handy devices we should be able to achieve transparent, non-vocal communication between two people over distances that are purely speculative. Here's what you'll need to complete the process.
1) Embedded human-nerve signal detector attached somewhere convenient (like the brainstem) plus power source.
1) Embedded nerve impulse hardware codec
1-2) Transmitters. (More on that soon)
The idea is that when we internalize vocal thoughts part of the brain is being activated to do this. By passively capturing the nerve signals controlling vocalization we can channel this information not towards the vocal cords but to the implanted hardware codec where they can be analyzed and transmitted via the electromagnetic spectrum.
Early models will probably be shortrange, hell they might even use bluetooth or something from the Personal Area Network clade to transmit raw signal to an external device. If the bandwidth isn't there see a future post about fiber augmented human nervous system. Anyway it can't take TOO much info or energy to wiggle out vocal cords to produce meaningful sound so if the body can do it you bet your sweet bipedal ass that a computer can do it.
Transmit via local signal or TOIP (Telepathy over IP, makes VOIP look totally GLame) and decode at the recipient.
If we can develop some sweet internal control interface for dialing up people or selecting strangers within...(mindshot?)... well then the possibilities are just fucking wild. Of course there's always TOIP spam and mental phishing but until Quantum Linux hits the market there's nothing that 4096 bit encryption can't keep secret.
And if all else fails maybe IPv8 will be able to address internal brain signal routing as well as interplanetary ansible communication. Buck up boys and girls, the future waits for no one!
My biting atheistic tendencies are beginning to creep into other areas of my life and I find it worrisome. Seeing a picture of a terrible blister/tumor/pustule of some sort is disturbing but finding one sticking out of your own conscience...well that's different.
Something I have retained from my religious experience is a deep seated sense of worry that I am always just a few bad decisions away from that sinking realization that I have fucked up. It's an awful feeling when you realize that you've become guilty of a law you wrote *for yourself.*
Granted there is some redemption in the identification and correction of such missteps. However just assuming 'hey i am a good person so i'll do better' has proven demonstrably false. Enough caterwauling though, let me enumerate my sins most heinous.
It's so easy to forget that being right is ALWAYS a relative phenomenon. How often I have felt justified in some opinion or sentiment only to look back at a later date and realize how my opinion has drifted over time. Sadly my favorite example of this is a certain song from Warcraft II. You can listen to it here, its the second half (starts at 3:30)
If you know your history this game came out a long time ago. I mean like ten years ago or more. I remember playing it briefly at scott's house and thinking 'surely game graphics can't get much better' Starcraft two of course immolates that idea.
The point of this is that I really liked the music but I hadn't listened to it in years and I realized that my mental recording was WRONG, and not just a little wrong, not just 'oh i forgot that part of the riff' wrong but whole swaths of the piece were just missing. It's quite disconcerting that even our 'long term' storage is apparently volatile. Now I have known that memory is statistically terrible since high school psych but being surprised by it so bluntly still came as a shock.
I remember when I was 18 thinking 'yeah that was ten years ago...ten years, holy crap i am so old.' And kiddies I am not going to say enjoy it while you can because you'll probably be a douche during college but I'm not going to stop anyone from making their own mistakes.
So taking the music metaphor (ignoring all that other crap) we apply the volatility clause to morality and find what...DECADENCE!!!
More accurately as I introspected I discovered that I have a tendency to drift towards two of the most vile poisons to human progress (and I don't mean bacon) Let's call them 'vengeance' and 'the curse of being smart enough to see clearly but not so smart as to be unassailable in my position.' The second one needs work I am sure.
Regarding vengeance: I believe that every human gets squinty-eyed and mean over some commonplace facet of other people's lives. Indoctrinating children happens to be one of my hot buttons. Seriously watching 'Jesus Camp' brought tears to my eyes. Then again the scene where the fat shit preacher lady is praying over the FUCKING POWERPOINT setup I was reminded of why rage dwells at the heart of any geek.
It's really fucking scary in its own right but it also clashes with one of my childhood idealisms. Sadly I grew up thinking that people would hip to the benefits and wonder of technology and science. Now before someone pulls out the very obvious bias we all get from the fundamental attribution error I will 'pretort' by saying that statistics will bear out my assertion. People don't have a fucking clue about the universe and its unforgivable.
Consider the following examples (the first is mainly shock value but don't let that corrupt your indignation)
Immoral Nanotech
Public Understanding of Science
Whenever someone does a survey or something about the knowledge of the public I am invariably prone to negativity because people don't know a lot of stuff. It's a little offensive to me that stuff I consider near and dear (like how the earth revolves around the sun, or the relative size of the solar system/galaxy/universe) is totally lost on the common person.
Fuck the laity!!
Lazy bastards won't bother to read a book or learn something outside the minimal requirements. And when I say minimal I mean SCANT.
This is where I fall prey to thoughts of vengeance and begin to entertain somewhat insane ideas. The other day I was thinking about torture of prisoners and wondering if it might be better for the world to just show them Nova videos and then quiz them. We might not get the best intel but at least we'd be injecting something other than the Koran into their medieval world views (this is for the islamic militants only but we should be educating the world not pissing down its collar)
Sometimes when I get upset at myself I try to imagine the world if my conscious brain was copied and shunted instantly into everyone else's brain. The consequences would no doubt be fascinating as well as the scariest event to afflict the human race, sorry people. Anyway the real joys in life are invariably fleeting and so we must find ever bigger, badder and deeper ways to satisfy them. At least in education we are given a nearly limitless barrel of monkeys to delve into for entertainment, as well as enrichment, purposes.
When I get angry at humanity I try to calm down by thinking of my old haunt at the NCSU library. On the northwest corner of the stacks there is partially open air hallway from the stairwell to the main stacks. If you are holed up for a long day/night of studying its an excellent place for a smoke break.
What I liked best about this hideout besides the nicotine reprieves was that at a certain time in the evening you could see the sunset through the gaps in the brick. Better yet if it was a still day you could build up enough smoke to capture an entire phalanx of light rays. Say what you will about lung cancer and fire hazards, it was a beautiful sight. Thus calmed I turn to my second vice.
As well-formed and logical as the internal network of my brain appears to me there is an obvious barrier to the outside world. It's a little heartbreaking going from ATM to token ring. How are we to remedy something like that? It's not that I am so smart that the English language cannot convey the nuance of being seth inside there's just too much overhead to channel it out in a valid and meaningful way.
I often joke about the USB plug into my head but its starting to look more and more like it will happen at some point in our lifetime. If nothing else maybe someone will develop 'ghetto telepathy' as described below.
If you're into wiki-based education consider this definition for telepathy: Telepathy, from the Greek τελε, tele meaning "distant" and πάθεια, patheia meaning "to be affected by",[2] describes the purported transfer of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals by means other than the five classical senses (See Psi). [3][1]
You usually see this in the context of someone who can read minds, have visions, predict the future and other ESP related shit-cock brain phlegm. However with a few handy devices we should be able to achieve transparent, non-vocal communication between two people over distances that are purely speculative. Here's what you'll need to complete the process.
1) Embedded human-nerve signal detector attached somewhere convenient (like the brainstem) plus power source.
1) Embedded nerve impulse hardware codec
1-2) Transmitters. (More on that soon)
The idea is that when we internalize vocal thoughts part of the brain is being activated to do this. By passively capturing the nerve signals controlling vocalization we can channel this information not towards the vocal cords but to the implanted hardware codec where they can be analyzed and transmitted via the electromagnetic spectrum.
Early models will probably be shortrange, hell they might even use bluetooth or something from the Personal Area Network clade to transmit raw signal to an external device. If the bandwidth isn't there see a future post about fiber augmented human nervous system. Anyway it can't take TOO much info or energy to wiggle out vocal cords to produce meaningful sound so if the body can do it you bet your sweet bipedal ass that a computer can do it.
Transmit via local signal or TOIP (Telepathy over IP, makes VOIP look totally GLame) and decode at the recipient.
If we can develop some sweet internal control interface for dialing up people or selecting strangers within...(mindshot?)... well then the possibilities are just fucking wild. Of course there's always TOIP spam and mental phishing but until Quantum Linux hits the market there's nothing that 4096 bit encryption can't keep secret.
And if all else fails maybe IPv8 will be able to address internal brain signal routing as well as interplanetary ansible communication. Buck up boys and girls, the future waits for no one!
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