Yeah. That’s me. Lame. Why? Burnt out a bit. Perhaps I’m thinking too much. Perhaps I’m just lazy. I’ve been working pretty hard on a project for work and that’s eating up a lot of time. TV’s been cutting into my ‘creative time’ as well. Stupid TV. Turn off the brain, listen to what we say, believe what we want you to believe. I want to do more with my blog but I don’t know what, I want to do more with my life but I can’t make a decision. So I wait. Maybe I’m waiting for coincidences. Maybe I’m waiting for a sign. Maybe I’m waiting for the sake of waiting. Maybe I’m waiting for nothing at all. I feel like I’m in a rut, like I’m spinning my wheels too fast in the snow and going nowhere. It’s a slippery time right now, these ‘times of change’. The world is changing, forces seem to be realigning themselves. Freedom and Democracy are being packaged, shipped and sold at discount prices in your local Walmart. Truth is relative to the perception of the individual. There are no black and whites, everything is grey. Is that idea now becoming too simple? Are there any absolute truths anymore or is it all in the eye of the beholder? I don’t know anymore. I used to think I knew all the answers but now I doubt everything I’ve ever thought. Not for any particular reason, just an overwhelming sense of uselessness. What can one person really do if they can’t change just one other person’s mind?
For me, that’s where this is all coming from. If I can’t change just one persons mind, what is the point of it all? Do I even have a right to do that? Do any of us? What gives any of us the right to change a persons mind about any subject at all? Isn’t it a form of rape, of domination? A battle of the wills? A contest in depth of belief? Instead of a higher form of truth all that is emerging is a victor. That isn’t Truth, that is someone’s perception of the truth. If there are no gauges for truth then the aspiration of a higher truth becomes warfare between wills.
I can’t abide by it. It doesn’t seem right or fair that there is no absolute truth, and yet everything that I’ve read on the Internet tells me that every single one of us out there has a unique perception of the Truth and many of these perceptions are diametrically opposed to each other. Who’s right then? Whoever has the stronger will, the greater belief? It’s a circular loop. Truth is defined by the strongest will. The strongest will is based on the deepest belief. The deepest belief is learned from the dominating perception of the Truth. It never stops, it never starts. Yet this cycle seems closer to finding an answer then when the first homo sapiens huddled around a fire grunting the truths about the universe around them. Somehow in our endless domination of each other we’ve evolved societally and mentally to the point where we are today, with all our fucked up problems, with our nukes and global warming, with our religious disharmony, with our obesity and energy addictions.
If all of this truely is an experiment, if there is some god up there looking down on his children, I would surmise that he/she considers this grand experiment one great big colossal failure, a massive SNAFU of biblical proportions. I hope, I dream for humanity to remove their collective heads from their collective asses to wake up and understand the impact our lifestyle is having on our future lifestyles. The future lifestyles of our children, and their children. Many think it’s too late, many don’t care, many are waiting for Rapture to wisk them away to a fantasyland heaven and out of the hell we’ve created. Sitting around on computers debating it endlessly isn’t going to solve the world’s problems, but then what should we do? How do we stop this massively destructive, endlessly polluting, and terrifyingly brutal world from continuing on it’s ravaging course? I just don’t know. I don’t know what to do. And so I wait. Maybe I’m waiting for coincidences. Maybe I’m waiting for a sign. Maybe I’m waiting for the sake of waiting. Maybe I’m waiting for nothing at all.
New Technologies
This idea is only going to get better and better with time: Radio Vox Populi. Really, the only way to explain it is to just check it out. It’s a little rough around the edges but like I said, it’ll just get better.
Consciousness
Here’s my foray into the art of meta-blogging. I found motime linking to me in my referral logs today, and at first I wasn’t overly impressed. Yet another blogging company, I thought. Looking a little deeper though I found a nice little newbie service for blogging. I figure this is a good thing because we do need more people blogging. I know a lot of people think there’s too many blogging out there as it is but I figure that when this phenomenon takes off – and I believe it will – there will be fundamental shifts in the global consciousness. As you may or may not know I am a firm believer in a global consciousness. I believe that if complexity leads to consciousness, then increasing that complexity leads to increased consciousness.
But then what is consciousness?
I’ve started to read an interesting “Research Paper Abstract” by a Mr. Chris King entitled Fractal Neurodyamics and Quantum Chaos : Resolving the Mind-Brain Paradox Through Novel Biophysics. This paper (courtesy of Wally) was written in 1996 and although it is extremely technical and I barely understand it, there are parts coming through that resonate with some of the things I’ve been saying. In particular this stood out (emphasis added):
2.2.1 Complexity : Consciousness as a property of complex computational systems. One common idea about the emergence of mind is that it is somehow a product of the very complexity of the brain. However neither computer circuits nor artificial neural nets are ascribed to possess the attribute of mind in addition to their functioning at any given level of numerical complexity.
Complexity is the root of consciousness. All else is just levels.
Wi-Fi
Good news for any of my fellow Canadians that want seamless Wi-Fi access because it looks like the major wireless carriers have agreed on common standards for roaming and interoperability. What this means is that anybody signing up for any of those carriers will be able to use any hotspot that’s available. Ubiquitous wireless internet! Of course this lends weight back to the purchae of a Laptop as discussed in my previous entry, because the thought of accessing broadband internet anywhere I go is positively titilating. I am, after all, an unadulterated self confirmed Net Junky.
Still, it’s good to see that the national carriers were able to come to an equitable agreement so quickly. Wi-Fi and other high speed wireless services will be The Next Big Thing because just like the original phone, it’s much better when there’s no wires attached. We can only hope that the rollout of this service will be trouble free and not prohibitively expensive. Make no mistake, Canadians are notoriously cheap.
Computers
I bought my current computer in January of 1999. The only thing I’ve done besides getting a new harddrive was upgrading from the Celeron 300A to a Pentium III 500 when the overclocking didn’t work. Otherwise this is the same system that I hacked away at in my glory days as a Nortel Intern. It’s become glaringly obvious that it’s time for a new computer. For the last week I’ve been agonizing over the decision of a replacement, and I’m torn between a higher end laptop (which will be a definate performance increase) verus a virutal gaming demi-god desktop. I love video games, and this is a big decision for me, one of ‘life altering’ proportions. 😉 If I choose the mobility of a laptop then I’m betting on my writing and ‘business’ orientation for the future me. If I choose the gaming demi-god then I’ll feeding my addiction but at the same time using a computer that is fantastically powerful. After 4 years it will be a big step up. So I’m torn and looking for any thoughts. I never like making decisions and now the internet allows others to make decisions for me. 😛
Goodbye Grey
Bye bye grey blog. It was nice for a change but now it’s back to green. I’d say that the protest was overall a smashing success, however the fallout has yet to be fully digested. We’ll see if anything positive or negative comes out of this demonstration.
In other news, check out this ‘deer in headlights video’ of the commander in chief of the U.S. of A. answering straightforward questions with his usual grace and style. Notice his eyes, his stance, his general defensive posture. Very enlightening.
Finally a bit of meta news – Wally has finished remastering the last of our audio conversations. We start off talking about Waking Life and meander through many subjects from google to a bottle of whiteout. This was recorded sometime in October of 2003 I believe, although I could be wrong. It’s not a bad one, but we do come off as pompous pricks so be warned.
The link
Here’s the Grey Album bitTorrent link if you’re interested. If you don’t have bitTorrent I suggest you get it. It’s pretty neat, and it comes bundled in with Shareaza which is all in all a superior P2P software package. BitTorrent works by forcing you to upload as you download – no leeching here! This alleviates the strain of hosting large files on individual servers – the bandwidth costs get spread amongst all those who download it. Very communistic and very back to the roots of what the Internet is all about.
Grey Tuesday
Tomorrow, a form of digital disobedience will occur. Many sites are participating in a protest called Grey Tuesday to take a stand on musical rights. Many of you may not appreciate remixed music or hip hop, but they are incrediblly influential and beautiful as forms of musical art.
DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z’s the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z’s record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone (“an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time”) and the Boston Globe (which called it the “most creatively captivating” album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album.
So this site, along with many others will host links to the complete album and turn our colours grey in protest. Join the fight for musical rights! Break the chains the bind us and participate in digital disobedience!
Time
There is never enough time in this world. There are so many things I want to do and ideas I want to explore that I get lost in a sea of choices and end up wasting away my precious time on this earth. At this point I have to come to some decisions about where my life is taking me, whether I should be planning to travel or preparing to go back to University, whether I should be starting a new business or exploring more meditative pursuits. I’m lost in a sea of choices and I’m looking for a sail, or at least a compass to guide me in the right direction. I’m afraid if I don’t make a decision then I’ll live to regret my indecision. I don’t know where the sense of urgency is coming from but I still feel it. As always, I’m looking for suggestions.
Futurology
Wally sent me this link about Futurology and how they believe they can use physics to explain the behaviour of the masses. Kind of like psychohistory in Asimov’s Foundation series.
“we sometimes act en masse as though we are a collection of atoms interacting with one another through forces of attraction and repulsion. This doesn’t mean that everyone does the same thing, but it can mean that our quirks get submerged beneath averages and mass movements. It doesn’t mean that we lack free will, but it does suggest that we might not be as free as we’d like to believe.”
If we assume that at all levels of complexity entities make value choices, then it would be easy to infer that they all follow the same rules of probabilities when making them. What we see as fact in the interaction of matter at the subatomic level could really just be highly predictable value choices by the matter at that level. However, this allows for the possibility of matter to interact and choose a different unpredicted path, however improbable. I guess that’s why in string theory there exists the probability that you will walk through that wall as opposed to hitting it, despite the overwhelming odds against it.
Likewise, it would allow for more complex entities like ourselves to follow and interact based on the same rules of probabilities as the sub atomic partices. You have to keep zooming out and believe that the rules work at all levels. Then our choices become probabilities, and it’s up to us to fight against the odds when it comes time to roll the dice. Perhaps thats what life is, taking the chance and going the road less followed, but in the end making all the difference.