Journal

Some people say that the reason that socialism won't ever work, in any context or on any scale, is that it provides no incentive for anyone to do more than the minimum and therefore people will produce so far below the quantity of which they are capable that they will hurt their competitive edge and basic sustainability all the way to their own complete annihilation. I think this is an error. I do think that people can live in an economy with common good put before individual good. The argument made is one of incentive. This is my real problem with it. When I do a good job at work it is not because I am eager to be paid more for doing that job, it is because I am passionate about what I do. I want to do it well. There is no amount of money that could make me honestly passionate about something about which I wasn't already. If our economy and society are based on using money as not only an incentive, but the only incentive, to do good work then they are flawed in the utmost.

The desire for money represents all that is wrong with the world. It is the root of all evil. To believe and preach that we as a people should be using that desire for good is morally bankrupt. No matter how attractive it is, an attempt to use evil for good will only result in more evil. At best it could supplant the current evil with another just as bad. There are people out there who worship the dollar, they are Capitalists. Here I don't speak of people who work for money and use it to make their way in the world, those are capitalists with a lower case "c". There is a phrase, "he would kill his own mother for a nickel." It means that someone is so despicable that they would commit the most heinous act for money. Most people wouldn't do such a thing for a nickel, only the lowest person would. In fact, a nickel is worth so little that probably no one would do such a thing for that amount. The difference between Capitalists and everyone else is that everyone else wouldn't do such a despicable thing for any price but every Capitalist has some dollar figure for which they would do anything.

If living in a society without such a free market means that acts committed by people who are motivated by money won't get done then I would say that it's a small price, and one which I am willing to pay, no matter the dollar figure it represents. If it means living in a world where everyone has fewer possessions but everything is done because the person doing is passionate about it being what's best for the world then I welcome it.

Show me great thinkers and scientists who have changed the face of science and mathematics and all of knowledge as we know it and I'll show you people to whom profits are trivial but who are motivated by passion and would have done what they did regardless of the amount of money they could eventually earn from it.

Compusing is a word for when computers are confusing.

The other day I overheard this phrase again and it made me think of this. Someone was saying, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing multiple times and expecting a different result." It's an easy way to make fun of someone who is trying to make something work and can't figure out how so they try something they've already tried and it still doesn't work. The phrase is meant to ask the rhetorical question "What did you think would happen?" I completely disagree with the phrase. In my opinion the phrase should be, "The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing more than once and expecting the same result every time." The way our universe is no one has the ability to do the exact same thing twice. This is why an acoustic instrument sounds more "real" than a synthesizer. If you have a guitar and you strum a chord and then wait a second and strum the same chord you have not produced the same sound. It would be ignorant to say you had. The each string has become looser for being strummed and your fingers may have shifted but have certainly become slightly more worn out than they were from the outset. In addition your other hand probably didn't pass over the strings at the exact same speed or with the same length intervals between each string. If you're a good guitarist then these differences are all minimized. But it becomes very apparent that they exist even in a good guitarist from one recitation of a song to the next.

This same phenomenon exists everywhere. We can't walk the same path twice because we can't step in the exact same places the second time, or guarantee the same weather conditions and in fact the path has been changed by our first trip down it. Living with so many machines (which do attempt to repeat tasks identically each time) we start to forget that that's impossible. Even computers are so complex at this point that sometimes a problem can be solved by trying something that you tried before with no success.

So the original phrase which I dislike is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, it just has absolutely no application in reality. I prefer my own phrase because to me it describes reality very well and dispels a common misconception about the age in which we live.

The ability to forgive is the understanding that you won't.

My favorite alarm clock of all time is my cell phone. I like the way it sounds when it goes off. It's something about the vibration and sound and lights altogether but none too loud that I like. I also like that I can hear it click on getting ready to go off a second before it does, this gives me a chance to push snooze before it goes off. The thing that I like most about it is when I push snooze the screen tells me "snooze on". This is a command that I can follow gladly when I'm tired.

Someone's going to have to pay for everything we're doing wrong. If the people who do wrong don't pay then their children must, and if their children don't then their children's children must and the debt is passed down successively like that, but eventually someone has to pay. That's why each generation has more people in it, it's interest. If it was enough for one person to pay in his own lifetime then it requires more to pay in subsequent lifetimes because the payment date has expired. Now the debt is so big that when it finally gets collected it will be the most violent and destructive event imaginable.

A thought doesn't belong to anyone. To say that I own a thought is ridiculous. Even to say that it's "my idea" or "I had a thought" I can't have a thought because there's no proof I could use to say that I was the first one to have it or that that's even a reason why it should "belong" to me. Instead (so as not to trample over the rights of thoughts themselves) I would like to start always saying, "a thought occured to me" or "an idea came to me" I think that that bestows upon ideas and thoughts and their ilk the status and recognition that they deserve in the process of inspiration.

For some reason I think about eras in terms of whether a generation has lived and died in them already. Sometimes I think, isn't it strange that people have been born and lived their entire lives with television and then died with it. To them reality is television, but to some television only happened midway through their lives. They know a completely different reality. The same thing applies to the internet. And there are already people whose entire lives are after the twin towers were bombed although most of those people are still very young and I like to imagine a long or at least average lifespan. Sometimes it seems like people do bad things but say to themselves, it's okay because someday we're going to stop doing it. But some people start doing it and then they get old and die, but whatever they were doing is still profitable so someone comes along to pick up the torch and toe the line. And this person lives and dies entirely within the span of this event and passes it on to their successor. It just baffles me how little impact peolpe really make sometimes. Members of PETA could look at the meat/fur industries this way. Sometimes I think about fossil fuels this way. I hope that I make more impact, at least in some ways.

Sometimes people get into relationships and they feel so caught up in the moment that they say they're in love. Then they move in together and it's great and after a few years they're still together and there's no problems. But people may feel bad in this situation. They may feel stagnant. These people are wrong. Some of them are wrong about being in love. But some of them are wrong about the love dying down. They don't see that there's such an incredible force holding that relationship together. They are inside it so they can't see it. But that relationship, that love, is hard. Love's not easy, that's why it's so worth it. The thing that they are overlooking is how every second that they're staying together they're creating that relationship, they're part of this incredibly powerful force. It's overlooked the same way that people overlook how miraculous every second of everyday life is. How amazing it is just to be here and be us. It's easy to overlook, and that's why love is hard.

Lately a lot of people have told me when they're talking to me that my opinion is wrong. Opinions are usually subjective so they can't really be wrong. But in these cases it's usually something specific like that I like or dislike a character in a movie. How can I be wrong about that? Sometimes I say something like, "I think this tastes good," or "This tastes good to me," and then people will tell me that I'm wrong.

This reinforces a point about language that I've tried to make before, which is that whenever anyone says anything they actually mean, "I think..." before what they say. For instance if it's hot outside and you say, "It's hot outside." you actually mean "I think it's hot outside." Because you always could be wrong. It's always a matter of your perceptions which are inherently imperfect. If you think it's hot out because the sun is out you could step outside and realize that it's sunny but windy and cold at the same time. You could be reading a thermometer which says it's hot and then realize the thermometer is broken. You could even be standing outside and think that it's hot because your skin feels hot, but you might later realize that it was because you were standing right under some kind of hot air duct for a building, or a doctor might tell you that you have a rare nerve condition which makes you feel hot when you're actually cold. Finally even if you are actually hot you might still not be hot because no matter how hot you feel someone else probably feels hotter so when you say, "It's hot outside." someone else could always respond by saying, "Not as hot as where I am," and since how hot something is is relative that would mean that it really isn't as hot where you are relatively. This just means that whenever you observe anything and report it it's a relative, subjective observation.

In short it really annoys me when I say, "This food tastes good to me." and someone tells me, "No, it tastes bad." Because they're telling me that my opinion is wrong and they're telling me that somehow the fact that it tastes bad to them means that it doesn't taste good to me, which is absurd.

I was thinking about war two days ago. I started from the following fact: If you are really good at something then you have to be passionate about it, therefore you must enjoy it. The second thing I decided to take as truth is: It is important to have people around, maybe not too many but at least some, who are "good" at war in case war comes to your country. This worried me because keeping around some people who are good at war means that you're keeping around people who enjoy war and that means that you'll be keeping around people who will start wars because they enjoy having them regardless of if the war itself is justified.

Something about my assumptions had to be changed. The way I realized my assumptions were flawed is they didn't specify what exactly being good at war is. I took for granted that being good at war is the same as being good at fighting therefore if you enjoy one you enjoy the other. But now I realize that being good at fighting is being good at combat and killing and all of those violent things. Being good at war is being good at peace. The thing which someone likes, when they like war, is resolving conflicts by killing as few people on both sides as possible.

Now my idea of what is important to help safety at large has become something new. Under the ideas that I've stated, we need some people in positions of power who are good at war and other people who have little to no power over more than their own actions who are good at fighting. The tricky part is that often being good at war requires being good at fighting. That's possibly why we confuse these roles so often, for instance, our current government seems good at fighting but bad at war.

As with most people, when I was very young I learned what sensations meant. I felt something and learned to associate that feeling with a particular need or desire or effect. The feeling of hunger, of needing to go to the bathroom, the feeling of falling down, the feeling of being tired and needing to sleep, etc. I can remember being a certain age when I didn't know what any of these things meant, I filed them all away in a pile of things that would eventually make sense the more I felt them. The curious thing is that there are still some things in that pile, sensations which make no sense. Three things come to mind: the tactile sensation of running my fingertips across a wet bar of soap with a very thin chain embedded in the surface of it, a very slight high-pitched ringing in my ears, the feeling of looking extremely closely at something in particular the carpet, seeing it up so close that each fiber is huge and feeling like it's as close to my eye as it can be then suddenly pulling back so that I can barely see it at all. This third sensation is the most difficult to describe, it also reminds me of the feeling of someone whispering quietly and gently then bursting into a loud and angry yell.

Every now and then in my life I've felt these sensations. There've been times when I was young when I even asked other people if they could feel them as well, in general and in particular when I was feeling them myself. No one seemed to be able to help me understand what was going on but now I think I may have some insight.

I've been thinking a lot about epilepsy lately. It fascinates me. When people are about to have epilectic seizures they are aware ahead of time of what's coming. Usually they have a certain feeling which precedes a seizure. The feeling is different from one person to the next but will be similar from one seizure to the next. Sometimes there can be more than one possible feeling, but they are specific things that the epileptic can learn to notice and associate with the feeling of being about to have a seizure. The reason that the feeling is the same is because the part of the brain causing the seizures is attached to some other part of the brain which is responsible for these sensations. The warning sensations can be thought of as the "nerves" of the brain. A person can "feel" activity around a certain area in their brain like they would feel something moving across their skin.

The connection I see here is that the sensations which I feel, which no one including myself was able to explain to me, may be me "feeling" particular brain activity either about to happen or happening. The thing left to be understood is what activity these feelings are associated with.

They say that no man is an island. I think this isn't true. Everyone is an island. When you think about how relative reality is you realize that the most you can ever hope for is a brief connection with someone. The isolation of being an island is due to the fact that no one can ever know how anyone else really feels. The best we can do is use language and art and the like to try to show and tell people how we feel. Most of the time it's pretty easy to see that the people we show and tell to don't really understand what we're saying, even after clarification and understanding there's still a lack of deeper appreciation which can only occur when that person has truly felt the same way at one time.

Let's entertain the notion that some people do make the rare connection with another person through whatever means or over whatever subject. Even if someone feels like they have that connection the best they can do is have faith that they have shared such a thing. There is no way to know for sure. There's no way to test it. Maybe that's what makes it special, but that's beside the point. You can ask the person who you feel you've shared this experience with and they may even agree with you about it, but that's still not good enough. Anyone who has ever been really in love with someone, I mean deeply in love, only to be dumped by them knows that a testimony from the other person still leaves you on separate islands.

Interestingly enough I also think that each person is like an island in another, more uplifting way.

Two islands, like the ones pictured above, are separate because they are roundish shapes of land with water between them, they look flat upon the surface of the earth. Two people are separate because they are two bodies with space between them in three dimensions. The interesting thing that I see when I look at the separate islands is that below the water they are not separate at all. When we look at the same situation from a three dimensional perspective we see that they are connected.

Since we gain this connection by looking up higher in dimensions it's reasonable to think that even though we can't see in higher dimensions like we can in the first three there is a possible connection between two people which is only visible when we look "beneath" the first three dimensions.

During finals week a topic which comes up in my mind is stress. I usually don't get very stressed out but it's times like this that can bring it out in the best of us. I was handling the whole situation fairly evenly and then all of a sudden I noticed that I felt like my life was in ruins. I spent about an hour feeling worried in the back of my mind, then I decided to think about what was really worrying me. I realized that I was mostly finished with my finals and that I really didn't have that much work to do before vacation, I could go to bed early tonight or do whatever I wanted. Why was I stressed? Other people around me were stressed, people had called me to tell me that they were anxious and worried and their anxiety made me anxious too.

It gave me the feeling that in order to solve this problem of becoming stressed I really should just detach myself from other people. If I felt no empathy then I wouldn't have more stress than my own life demanded. But really that seems like the worst way out. That's running from my problems instead of solving them. So now I'm back where I was, not so stressed anymore, but still contemplating how to both care about other people and not feel awful when I don't have to.

I've been thinking about a few things lately, putting some outlines together. This is what I have so far:

• All actions are precipitated by desire.
• All desire is precipitated by pleasure.
• Pleasure is defined for the purposes of this discussion as anything greater than or equal to avoiding the opposite of pleasure. (where it's recognized that everyone has their own definition of what pleases them)
• Pleasure
  • Physical:
    • Chemical
  • Conceptual:
    • Control
    • Charity, Compassion, etc.

What does this mean? Well it's saying to me a few things, mostly it's getting my thoughts in order for me to say a few things. When I look at it I see that the only type of pleasure which is a positive motivating force is the one at the very bottom, "Charity, compassion, etc." I think that when people are being pleased by "Control" it is at the expense of someone else. When they are pleasured in a "Chemical" sense it is either a bodily instinctual obligation like eating, having sex, sleeping, which all feel good to do, but don't accomplish much or can provide a real negative downside in-and-of themselves or it is a more unnatural chemical pleasure. This last thing would basically make up drug use, but could also cover other similar ineffectual, mind-altering experiences. I say ineffectual not because the experiences have no effect on a person, but because in order to fit in this category they have to not really have a useful application other than pleasure.

The other thing that I observe is that since pleasure is anything greater than or equal to avoiding the opposite of pleasure, what we will call "pain" for the purposes of discussion, when one is in a circumstance where pleasure is strictly equal to avoiding pain it's a bad thing. Some situations which come to mind are drug addiction and slavery. In drug addiction one gets to the point where one is using drugs not to feel good, but to prevent themselves from feeling bad, and that seems to me like it's gotten to the point where it must be called addiction when that happens. In slavery (such as slavery in America before the civil war) one does work and obeys commands because if one doesn't do that then one is tortured. Slaves are dehumanized and stripped of basic rights and freedoms to the point where if a master were to give a slave something that we consider a basic freedom, like the right to walk down the road to visit their parents the slave would consider it a great gift, or even if the master chose not to beat a slave for doing something like learning how to read. To a slave the absence of that beating would seem like a gift, when to us outside of that mindset, for whom pleasure is more than the absence of pain, it doesn't seem that way at all. If I told someone that for their birthday I wouldn't hit them and that would be my present I don't think anyone would take me seriously.

So I think this shows me that I want to try to have my actions motivated as much by the category of "Charity, Compassion, etc." as possible because it's the category which motivates actions with positive results and in addition to that I want to keep myself out of situations in which my idea of pleasure is limited to avoiding pain.

People are essentially pattern-finding machines. Animals in general, but people are probably some of the best animals at finding patterns since we can think about the processes we use and refine them in addition to using technology to aid us. The biggest reason that really sets us above animals in terms of finding patterns is that we seem more curious about them.

When someone is walking down the street they have to see a whole array of different colors and words, lights and moving objects but they've learned which ones mean which things, which ones apply to them and which they should basically ignore such as observing which traffic lights apply to them. We can pattern match a person's face or a person's handwriting both to the person and to the words that they're trying to express. Sight is useless without having a fairly advanced ability to look at a complicated image and notice that certain parts hold a specific pattern and thus should be noted. For instance, when in the forest we see that the leaves are leaves because they all look vaguely similar. But when we see something that sets it apart from the leaves, either by movement or color we have to be able to pattern match very quickly to either kill and eat it or get away so it won't kill us if it is either an animal we need to eat to survive or an animal that wants to eat us to survive.

But matching patterns in what we see is just the beginning. Being able to match patterns in abstract concepts is even more advanced and more important for the advancement of things such as technology. If a person can look at addition and subtraction and realize that they relate to one another in the same way that multiplication and division do then they've taken this abstract notion and matched it to another pattern that they've seen. Being able to make these connections is vitally important to understanding anything; from language to science to driving to playing games or doing math. They all require people to realize things like that this word is going to mean something we mutually agree on to us from now on or that planets move around the sun in elipses or that a point in a game, while pointless, represents the notion of accomplishment.

The part of this all that I find fascinating is that not only is it important to be able to generate all this data and parse through it to be intelligent, but it's important that these concepts be ambiguous. The fact that these models and comparisons are removed from the things they seek to represent is what makes them useful and the more ambiguous and removed metaphors are the more easily they can be mis-interpreted but the more power they can possibly have to teach someone something or convey information. If we all spoke in simple sentences with limits such as one verb per sentence then we'd have very little ambiguity, but we'd have to use many more simple, unexpressive sentences to convey thoughts which adult people are able to parse out of a more complicated and ambiguous sentence which we actually use.