Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I have yet another disproof of Christianity. (I know, I know, I should really let go of this obsession – but a figure driven by Christianity still gatekeeps my dreams – a copy of my mother as she was when I was young – and I really have to get it and her entirely out of my mind, and I feel like coming up with arguments against it helps this process)

This one’s really simple, and is based on my experiences with $_PERSON.

If God loves us, Hell would also be a good place.

Love does not want the beloved to be unhappy if the beloved wants nothing to do with the one who loves. Love wants the beloved to be happy and healthy and have everything they want and need. Anything lesser is a misunderstanding of love. Part of what’s so upsetting about $_PERSON not wanting to talk to me is she might not be okay and I would never know and there would never be anything I could do to improve the situation. I cannot *fathom* a God of love choosing for someone to suffer because they didn’t want to be near said God. I also cannot fathom said God deleting such people, as some have suggested – the idea of $_PERSON ceasing to exist is inherently extremely painful.

To me, this is a obvious doomsday knell for Christianity. The one Christian I presented this too suggested God is goodness and that there can be no goodness without God. This shows a inadequate understanding of the data universe.

Good feelings, in us, come from good experiences. Love is inherently in our hardware so even if we are banished to another realm we are still going to love, and we are still going to try to give each other good experiences. Good experiences are *data*, and *God can’t make data become unavailable from the universe*. My example was God could decide to banish the number 2, but if a computer runs for($i=0;$i<10;$i++) $i is still going to contain 2 right after it contains 1. It's possible God could actively, via hostility, constantly erase such things from our memories, but there is no possible way you're going to claim that Loki-God is a God of Love.

In Anathem, Neil Stephenson speaks of a very important idea – he speaks of it as the Hylaean Theoretical World, or the HTW, and it’s where all the perfect abstract concepts live that we iterate through when we use our imaginations. It contains, for example, every possible set that can exist. Now, you can imagine a computer that has a portion that can work on countable infinities mated to a classical computer, and you can imagine that you could use such a computer to, for example, find and iterate through every data element that would be every possible hug from a particular person, for example. Of course, in the real world, we find these data members using much more clumsy but intuitive means, like hugging people, but the point is that the *experience* of a hug is a data experience to us – it’s a bunch of information being streamed to our brain from our body. And that dataset will be in hell – in fact if there are multiple Gods or multiple universes that data is in potentia available to all of them, because the HTW is *bigger than God*. It’s a different type of entity than God could ever be – and it’s certainly not all good. Those same datasets have every way you could ever be tortured, for example. But the point is, it’s not something God can make “go away” because it’s not a concrete manifestation. Just as God can’t change pi no matter how hard he tries, he can’t make any place lack goodness. So that argument also does not hold water.

So, after many years of not having any manic excursions at all – to the point that I thought I had my situation sorted out and I was all good – I had a really bad month involving my family having health problems, there being much doubt as to what was going on with my job and with the job of a friend of mine, and a fight with a coworker..

Anyway, so, said individual talked to me in a similar way to how my sister once did, and it ripped off a bunch of scars and suddenly I had PTSD. Random crying jags, random bursts of fear, random all kinds of stuff. And I took my eye off the ball, and I ended up manic.

Well, of course, even though I try my hardest to pretend it’s not there, the $_PERSON shaped hole is still there in my mind and always will be. I can’t stop missing her, or stop wishing I hadn’t broken the friendship, and now thanks to Amy’s death I’m aware of the fact that we might not speak again – or, if we do, it might be in whatever lifetime comes next. While my internal whatever-she-is $_PERSON is better than nothing, among other things, It really bothers me that $_PERSON thinks I could be any threat to her or her family. But, she clearly does.

On the other paw, we also might still be *here* 1000 years from now. Post the singularity my crystal ball cracks, and near as I can tell, if Moore’s law holds we’re 7 years from that. ALso, of course, it seems likely we are already *in* the singularity. Both topics I wish I could talk to $_PERSON about.

Anyway, when I’m sane, I won’t contact her, because she’s asked me not to. I wish she would rethink this, but wishing that is about all I can do.

When I’m not sane, I lose all my memories except the memory of loving and trusting her. And I head for her like a homing beacon. Except I can never get there. I always end up in a psych hospital instead. Usually because I realize about the time I’m almost there that I am nuts and/or some part of me remembers she doesn’t want to talk to me. This time I called 911 on myself.

It’s the biggest problem in my life at this point. And I am totally out of ideas for how to solve it, although a friend did suggest writing a letter. I wrote one while in the psych hospital, but there’s all kinds of things I wish I’d put in it. I’m going to write another one after talking to a trauma therapist about whatever what my sister did to me did to my mind. Hopefully I can remember to at least hit a few of the high points, including that *what she’s seeing is not a good representative sample of me*. It’s not in fact me at all – it’s portions of me, while other portions are islanded. When I go manic, I exceed the shannon limit for some of the longer axial connections in my brain. My theory here is the newer the memory, the longer the wire.

Part of what frustrates me is it’s not like I become someone so different that I would force her to do anything, or wouldn’t go away if asked. I mean, heck, I will probably run away even if not asked from my feeling of rejection baked deep in my own mind. Definitely something I Need to fix

I recently read the four agreemnets and I am trying to use my word more positively. THis is harder than it sounds.

$_PERSON, I don’t suppose it matters to you that if there was one person in the world I could talk to, it would be you? In the extremely unlikely event that you’re reading this, tell me any conditions you will talk to me under again and I will honor them. I am not completely fixed, but I am much less broken than I was when Kayti broke me and I called you for help. A significant part of that, I will acknowledge, is a apparent copy of you residing with me who I talk to regularly. Not quite the same as talking to you and I’m intensely curious as to how the experience of having children, etc, has changed you. I also wonder if one of your children had my mental illness and was in my situation what you would advise them to do.

A very long time ago, you asked me who I would have on my island. I guess we know the answer now.

So, I found a major lack of documentation for Device::Hue, and chatGPT had some information that I would describe as whimsically wrong.

Here’s what I ended up doing to get a working perl setup controlling my hue lights:

1) Put a valid URL in /etc/environment for the key HUE_BRIDGE
2) Put a key in /etc/environment for the key HUE_KEY
3) The following code sets lights 17 and 19 to red:

my $bridge = Device::Hue->new();

$bridge->config();

foreach $light_id (17, 19) {

   my $light = $bridge->light($light_id);

   $light->set_state( { hue => 0, sat => 254 });

   $light->commit();

}

I never thought I would find myself writing this blog entry.

I am arguing that we should not punish Donald Trump.

Now, we should draw a hard boundary between him and the ballot box – not ever permit him to be president again. This is not a punishment, though. This is to prevent him from hurting us, and to prevent him from hurting himself.

I have come to believe that Trump is already in hell. He’s so deeply afraid he’ll fuck it all up that he can’t stop lying repeatedly out of fear, he’s so deeply convinced he’ll never be good enough that he causes mass havoc everywhere he goes trying to convince everyone he’s better than everyone else.

I suspect he’s locked in. I suspect he barely has any free will at all, but that there’s a hurting, self-aware, worthy person inside him. I think we should try and find ways to help him not hurt any more. I see nothing to be gained by punishing him – he’s already punished himself more than we ever could.

I agree he did a lot of damage, and got people killed. But hurting him because he hurt others just makes everyone worse off. A eye for a eye makes everyone blind.

I want to believe we can learn enough about biological neural networks to let him out of the jail he created in his mind. Certainly I am far less incarcerated than I was ten years ago. In the meantime, just declare him ineligable to run for office, and move on. And try to think of ways to release him from the fear.

MY best guess, at the moment, about what’s “going on” i.e. why are we here and why is stuff so broken, is as follows.

I believe that infinity and eternity would get awfully boring without a infinite number of entertaining and interesting things to do. One of those things I imagine is building new worlds. I think we are in a world in which the bodies we are wearing were designed using a evolutionary algorithm, as are the minds we are using to do our thinking. I think whatever we are, we can move between neural networks (and possibly other types of information processing systems) and bodies. We decided to build a world.

The world we’re currently working on is probably a very early alpha. It has serious playability problems, serious bugs, etc. But.. in the eternal perspective, that’s part of the joy. We’re the dev team. We’re trying to build memetics and bodies that are great to experience so the players can come in. Things have Gone Wrong, as they so often do when you’re developing software that people experience as reality, and we’re trying to sort it out.

All the world’s religions are a work in process. They’re supposed to enable specific ways of thinking and seeing the world. They’re all buggy, because this is a early beta or possibly they were also created using evolutionary algorithms.

We’re gonna do better in a future revision.

That’s my best guess.

I post this, because people seem to keep forgetting. We don’t put companies together to make money. We put companies together to meet the needs of the employees and customers. They do make money – I think I’ve mentioned that money as implemented is a fundamentally broken idea and should be scrapped – but if they ever become *all* about making money, they die shortly thereafter, although they can do horrible amounts of damage first.

I am wondering if we would think more reasonably about mental illness if we called it by what I think might be a more appropriate name – neural misconfiguration.

The vast majority of these are the results of either our current very stupid memetics (things like our current religions and our misunderstandings about the nature of life, love, and happiness) or abuse from others as a secondary effect of same.

side note: It is no kindness to let a friend hurt you. They will regret it later.

So, I recorded this cover with the quite talented Tamarisk, a friend of mine from childhood. My hope is eventually to record a entire album with her, but time will tell. Anyway, here is

Sheer Featuring Tamarisk – Time After Time

I rather liked it.

So, this one is a little alarming insofar as I am going to have to think very carefully if I ever find myself accusing anyone of anything – and I definitely have been known to accuse the odd work college of not caring at all about doing their job right, Dunning-Kruger, etc.

It seems likely that most of the time when people accuse someone else of something, they themselves are guilty of it. This may well fit into we are able to see our own faults best in other people. I mean, I’d noticed this in republicans, but lately I’m starting to notice that it’s more than just that.

As you can see, the genetic algorithm experiments are coming to a head. I have absurd amounts of computing power in my garage, and I’m starting to think about the data center.