KARBYTES_JOURNAL_2023_ENTRY_158
I was having an argument with myself while walking in the dark by the marsh tonight about whether or not the sequence of events which I have apparently lived through in exactly one chronological order is inevitable. (I was also discussing with myself about the hypothetical phenomenon of human civilization reaching “peak uniqueness” in terms of artistic originality and repeatability of subjective experiences. I’ll get to those ideas after I elaborate on what I said in the first sentence of this journal entry body).
I have used the idiom “every person is doing the best it can with what it has at all times” as a way to minimize how much I engage in hostile or unproductive behavior (which apparently manifests as a result of me thinking that what I want is scarce and also wanted by some competitor human and that, if I do not fight with that human to acquire whatever that scarce coveted resource is before my competitor gets it, I will be deprived of that resource (or, in the case of “lose-lose”, I feel compelled to make a valiant effort to acquire some resource which my competitor does not want me to have even while that resource is abundant enough for both of us to have our “fair share” of simply because my competitor does not want me to attain that nicety before my competitor attains it)). Such an idiom is based on the premise that whatever has and is transpiring is inevitable (and that each person is equally devoid of free will at a physical level (but not necessarily at a “consensus reality” virtual level in which humans collectively and arbitrarily decide that some people have more agency than do other people as a consequence of there being socioeconomic hierarchies which restrict people’s behavior and enforce “favoritist” or “meritocratic” procedures such as “first come; first serve” (e.g. allowing people who have faster Internet speeds to buy the last item in stock from an online store before people with slower Internet speeds are able to buy that same item) and “strength in numbers” (e.g. giving scarce affordable housing to applicants who are married heterosexual couples with multiple biological offspring before giving that same housing unit to single childless adult applicants)).
I feel morally and intellectually obliged to uphold my idealized concept of myself as someone who is very responsible, independent, brave, and honest. Therefore, I feel compelled to admit the fact that I prefer to assume that everything I experience is fundamentally what I subconsciously and consciously most prefer to experience (and that includes me apparently preferring to inhabit exactly one universe whose constituent matter and energy is configured in exactly one way and such that apparently separate pieces of matter interact with each other according to what seem to be consistent rules of causality). If I am not happy, then I prefer to say that it is because I prefer not to be happy. (If I am not happy, then I presume it is because I consciously seem to prefer that certain conditions be met which appear to not be met according to what I am aware of in the present moment while recognizing that my idealized conditions are not congruent with the empirical data which is being rendered in my mind about how my encompassing universe is currently physically configured).
If what I said in the previous paragraph is true, then my primary task in life (as a non-omniscient information processing agent or conscious being) is to increase the scope of what I am aware because, the more awareness I have about what is causing my experience of reality to manifest exactly is it does, the more control I seem to have over my present and future experiences. If I do not seem to have any control over what happens and, instead, perceive that I am merely a puppet being forced to think, act, and perceive in ways which are not consciously preferred by me, then there is literally nothing for me to do because I seem to have no control over anything. If I am that much of a puppet without agency, then, in some cases, I feel like a prisoner in hell (while in other cases I feel like a happy movie goer in heaven).
I want to know why reality appears to be exactly one particular way for me to the exclusion of all other ways which I hypothesize to be possible. In other words, I want to know what causes me to filter out almost all phenomena which I think could be imagined or generated by universal ubiquitous consciousness such that only a small trickling of information is rendered inside of my personal frame of reference at any given instant inside of the space-time continuum which my personal frame of reference appears to be traversing and rendering. That is why I want to devote a lot of my remaining human life to studying physics and neuroscience (and doing psychedelics and deploying other mind-altering technologies and techniques).
To keep myself from “wasting” too many cognitive resources contemplating about whether or not agency exists and generating hypotheses about why things appear to be a certain way for me to exclusion of all other ways which I hypothesize to exist as potential alternatives, I will for now assume that what I fundamentally am is the whole of nature but what I am while rendering the human experience which is typing this journal entry is an infinitesimally small subset of that whole.
Anyway, I do think that humans are at a point in their evolution as a species and civilization where there appears to be a lot of redundancy in terms of “original” artistic output, scientific discoveries, philosophical musings, and cognitive-behavioral routines in general. Because there are so many humans cohabitating inside the same physical universe at this time (i.e. on Planet Earth) with the technological infrastructure to communicate relatively quickly inside of that cohabitation space (and to detect patterns within Internet-based information exchanges between multiple humans), I expect that artificial intelligence will soon be able to prove that humans hardly experience original ideas and often discover the same ideas in isolation from each other. (I remember watching a video about how patterns of verbal language in humans adheres to a mathematical pattern such that humans appear to be fundamentally deterministic in how they render ideas and use language to communicate those ideas amongst multiple humans. That phenomenon is known as Ziph’s Law). As far as I can currently discern, humans are very robotic and embarrassingly unoriginal and predictable. Therefore, I am trying not to make a big deal about being artistically original nor making myself out to be a “rare” personality. I would rather probe into how things work and try to manipulate them because doing so seems more fun than just settling for being more passive and uncurious than what my personal goals compel me to be. (Since I seem to have only a finite amount of cognitive resources per instant, I do not have time to be both a skilled humanitarian and a skilled scientist. Hence, I choose the latter over the former. In other words, my mission is more about finding out how nature works than it is about making other humans happy).
Related to what I said about humans lacking originality is how I intend to go about continuing to develop and publish small educational software applications on my primary website (Karlina Object dot WordPress dot Com) which demonstrate mathematical and epistemological concepts which I think are interesting and worth my time to “capture” in the form of technical documentation and executable code which myself and others can compile into software applications which behave in predictable ways according to my dictates as the original developer of that software. Some people may ask me why I do not bother just copying someone else’s completed code instead of attempting to re-invent it on my own. I decided that, if I need to learn how to achieve something in software development, I will copy other people’s code only as minimally as necessary while doing my best to analyze every line of the code I either copy or else conjure up on my own while heavily commenting that code using my own “brand” of commentary such that the application (as unoriginal as it may seem) feels like my own original discovery and creation and intellectual property (though I do publish all of my software as open source instead of as proprietary). That is why I do not expect to ever get paid to write software like I did while working as an intern at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory from 2012 to 2015 (by making Google Apps Script web applications for automating tasks such as email forwarding). I am afraid that writing software for someone else would prevent me from being able to devote as much time as I want to developing my own software using my own “industry standards” instead of someone else’s. I would rather write code which I think is aesthetically pleasing and intellectually satisfying than what I think is conducive to making money (because making money often seems to come at the cost of intellectual and ethical integrity). Then again, I might change my mind and become a paid software engineer someday. Until and unless that happens, I plan to keep working as an employee doing a job which I think is feasible for me having what I think is a minimally adequate lifestyle such that I have sufficient time and money to develop my own software and pursue a self-taught lifelong education.
I am not worried if other people end up copying my content and style. Instead, I prefer to focus on my own business and to avoid meddling in other people’s affairs. (What I do seem to incessantly worry about is my content being censored on the Internet such that what I publish and intend to be available to the general public is hidden from other people’s search results in a way which is not immediately obvious to me. Whether or not my content is censored, I intend to keep creating and publishing content in the hopes that many people will eventually discover my content).
This web page was last updated on 08_MARCH_2023. The content displayed on this web page is licensed as PUBLIC_DOMAIN intellectual property.
KARBYTES_FOR_LIFE_BLOG 