Psychology – Page 16

Sell your soul for a glass of water?

“I sold out long before you ever even heard my name.“ ~Tool

I am beginning to understand why people of means are callous and ignorant, or at least act as though they are.

It’s primarily because I think that low cost (owing to information’s unique supply logistics) intellectual pleasures can’t compete with the gene subsidized sensual pleasures which, by and large, require resources to experience.

A good example is comparing the most boring hike in the woods with the best artistic depiction of a hike in the woods.

No writer, no painter, can truly compete with the pleasure channels accessible only via the senses.

Of course this line is blurring as various forms of simulation get more adept at fooling those senses and processes to give up their dopamine reward for simulated experience. Which is why games and movies are so popular. (And why advertisers own you like so much livestock.) They are dopaminergically speaking, close to the real thing. But sadly they cost resources as well, at least initially in terms of equipment purchase and constantly by way of feeding that equipment. Environment and content costs being the minimum.

Manipulating the brain’s built-in environment renderer is the ideal solution. As per lucid dreaming. But sadly, that’s a single-player exercise for the time being and such an option doesn’t exist for a wide range of minds, until such time as technology opens the door.

I say all this because I find myself in a situation where I am simply waiting for my body to motivate me. Sitting here writing about what I think in the meantime. Because I can’t afford to go do what I would do, resources permitting, and I’ve just about exhausted the acceptable (to this brain state) and available intellectual stimuli afforded me by my status and economic picture.

So here I sit, waiting until outside stimuli or bodily needs present a sensual opportunity with a profit margin in excess of writing about the wait.

That this is a viable solution speaks to my comments above because simple passing hunger or thirst, if nothing else, will in practically no time at all accomplish this goal. And when I am done feeding my pet body, my enteric nervous system will no doubt be affected, feeding back into my mood, which will become congruent with this new state, allowing for a different set of options. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until such time that this bodily need becomes sleep and I experience that disconcerting yet all-too-common time jump we all experience, and its fleeting glimpse into a world of infinite variability and vividness, which really utterly dwarfs reality in every positive subjective sense. At least for me. Maybe your dreams are hollow and dim.

Until such time as we can truly harness the gene to reflect the will of our memes, the gene will utterly dominate the lives of humanity. And those who have learned to (or lucked into the resources allowing them to) placate and manipulate those genes toward the end of influencing the memes will continue to rule humanity.

Oh, look! Bitterness and frustration. New(ish) mental states. I wonder how long till the desire for a simple glass of water will shut out my rage?

Sidethought: Is this why so many faiths include fasting and other forms of body denial? To drown out with their own hunger, thirst, lust and the cries of all those people they are praying for instead of actually helping? Could this be a factor in the many instances of religion seeming to inspire psychopathic behaviors?

“Power over a man’s subsistence amounts to power over his will.” ~Hamilton, Alexander

“You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” ~Norman Borlaug

StumbleUpon holding a grudge?

This is my attempt to get my old StumbleUpon account reactivated.

Here was the content of my message sent to: http://help.stumbleupon.com/customer/portal/emails/new (Which required a bit of Googling.)

Just seeing if you still hold a grudge. 🙂

I was the victim of a fairly organized smear campaign. The likes of which at the time had not become well known.

As with Digg and other social media, groups of people, thanks to economy of scale, have the ability to game any system of which they are cooperatively a part.

For a fairly recent example of this problem check out this skeptic blog. Groups within groups gain a kind of meta-power.

http://richardreed84.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/rebecca-watson-and-other-illustrate-a-problem-among-skeptic-feminists/

I would like my account unlocked. At least temporarily so I can archive my old writings and reestablish contact with some old readers. (You could also simply send me relevant database files as a compromise.)

I hope you’ll take into consideration the fact that I could easily just make another account rather than even attempt to communicate with you. That alone should show my honorability.

Either way thanks for your time.

P.S.

When I left I had over 700 followers, and as of now I have over 1500 on Google plus and a blog with over 10,000 visitors a month. I would be a valuable (re?)addition to your community. If you don’t want my participation, fine, your loss. This is an open request and your response either way will be published: http://underlore.com/stumbleupon-holding-a-grudge/

First response: Automated. Email.

Type your response ABOVE THIS LINE to reply
Re: Other : StumbleUpon Account Request
StumbleUpon | APR 25, 2013 | 12:08PM UTC
Hello,

Thanks for contacting us.

We have received your request and are working on responding to you as soon as possible. If you have any additional information to add to this case, please reply to this email.

Thanks in advance for your patience and support.
This message was sent to (email) in reference to Case # (#)

Second response: Personal. Barry Conway. (Again) See also: http://underlore.com/innomen-now-banned-from-stumble-moves-to-reddit/ and http://underlore.com/stumble-sticky-blues/

On 4/25/2013 8:17 AM, StumbleUpon Support wrote:

Brandon M. Sergent
Subject: Other : StumbleUpon Account Request

APR 25, 2013 | 12:17PM UTC
Barry Conway replied:

We have nothing further to add to our previous emails on this matter.

The restriction on your account will remain in place for reasons that have been fully communicated to you, and we would remind you, again, that Please be reminded that our Terms of Service allow for only one account per member, and that you should not create further accounts on our service. Should you do so, they too will be suspended.

Please be advised that you DO NOT have our permission to make public this private communication.

Regards.

Barry
StumbleUpon Community Advocate

My reply was as follows:

Wow. Barry?

Are you SU’s only support person or am I your personal pet project? I don’t know which would be more sad.

Clearly this is still personal for you and that’s fine. The only reason I tried was because your system occasionally spams me still. (Which is how I know you still have my writing, now so hopelessly out of date I don’t actually care.) As I said, your community’s loss.

So in answer to my post’s question it’s not so much SU holding a grudge clearly as it is you personally holding one.

“We have nothing further to add to our previous emails on this matter.”

Is that the royal we? It’s clear to anyone who has read into the context of this, noting your response times if nothing else, that this is clearly personal. You banned me at 4am, and now you’re responding within minutes at 8am. So you can quit trying to pitch the hypothetical audience on the notion that this is official to any degree beyond your abuse of power and the typical fiefdom attitude all people on the Internet in a position to moderate are in danger of acquiring.

“Should you do so, they too will be suspended.”

That you couldn’t catch me or permanently stop me is my point. Welcome to the Internet. For all you know I have a dozen sock puppet accounts already registered with relayed, borrowed, or throw-away emails etc. Good luck proving I do or don’t. I’m official saying I don’t for reasons of ethics but then again that’s exactly what I would say even if I did.

“Please be advised that you DO NOT have our permission to make public this private communication.”

Your permission is irrelevant. For one, the state I live in is a one party state. It’s perfectly legal for me to make public any communication of which I am a part. For two, you’ve already locked my account and made it clear that nothing I say or do short of hiring a lawyer to re-acquire my content, (which you do not own actually) will change that.

Perhaps we could negotiate if you were willing, but clearly you aren’t. Making this exchange public serves my purposes, which includes shining light on your obviously shady behavior and increasing readership on my blog.

Feel free to sue me if you’re miffed enough about it. The publicity for me and my writing efforts such an action would garner would be of incalculable value. I can see it now on Slash dot and Digg and Wired. “Social media giant bullies amateur blogger into silence.”

Our future exchanges will be made public as I see fit. The link I provided is live, and will shortly include this email.

“Guilty men murmur. The innocent shout to the rafters.” ~Jim Williams, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, Film)

Good talking with you again Barry 🙂

Well that was fast. Oh well, worth a shot. 🙂

RTS=PRS

My beef in this context as with virtually all the other “realistic” rts games is the inflexibility. Snipers are a great example. In real life the reason you can’t make an army of snipers is not because some things are immune to snipers at the tactical level but because making them is expensive and takes a long time.

From an organizational strategic perspective you get more bang for your buck just throwing rifles at a mob and then throwing that mob at a problem. (Infantry.)

In RTS terms this sucks because how it manifests tactically are units which appear magically immune to bullets.

In “Company of Heroes” Sniper versus motorcycles/jeeps are an excellent example. I’ll routinely see a jeep park, aim it’s machine gun at a building full of snipers and actually win (handily) because the game has hard coded jeeps and bikes to be virtually immune to sniper fire. (Paper vs rock.) Which is silly because in real life a sniper would decapitate the driver regardless of what “kind” of solider they are.

The problem is that real war isn’t economically balanced or remotely fair. In real war you don’t have to manage an economy or “grow” new troops because that’s the outside culture’s job. As a commander you are more or less handed resources and given an objective.

So in RTS games the PRS and ECON101 phenomenon are really when you get down to it just tricks to keep the game from boiling down to who can build snipers fastest, which would in turn boil down to input speed. (Korean RTS camps?)

The only way to really make that feel like anything other than a contrivance is to change the context such that arbitrary rules don’t seem completely stupid. And in RTS terms the best way to do that is the whole “magic tech” thing you can do in future or fantasy based rts games. (Warhammer/Supreme Commander)

In those contexts the “jeep” would be immune to the “snipers” because the “snipers” have anti-flesh zap rifles and the “jeeps” have “anti-zap” armor/shields or some such, so you arrive at the same PRS effect but it doesn’t feel completely stupid when you’re on the wrong end of it. You simply realize you’re paying the price of over specializing.

Also to make the game “fair” they create a situation where there is no simple winning strategy. The actual winning stratgey if it’s not boiled down to a case of “turtle vs rush” is a complex and fairly rigid build order, which is yet another RTS genre problem.

Basically this is why I don’t really play games generally much anymore beyond games that allow for meta, like diablo, which is not so much that I’m playing the game, as it is being useful to other humans in a fictional context. Second life is a setting purpose built for this I suspect, but because its purpose-built for meta, in a sense it stops being meta because everyone knows why everyone’s there and as a result the whole feel and “game” actually changes, creating a new meta-meta-game. (Make real money, or whatever other real life objectives were already there for the player.)

Bottomline: To correct the sniper/PRS problem, I’d have to hack the game or write a mod but in so doing I’d devalue my winning, and arrive at a different kind of fail/boredom point. Meaning make it so snipers can virtually kill anything just like irl, but get as bored with that as I got with emperor battle for dune once you can start making Fremen. Each had two types, anti vehicle and anti personnel.

_”Strange game… The only winning move is not to play.”_ ~WOPR/Joshua, Wargames

Thought ramble.

(Perspective disclaimer.)

Anyway… The human body is a space suit for the brain. A way for the brain to link to the world yes, but primarily a way to survive in said world.

There are three ways to expand your sphere of influence in this context. To adapt the environment to yourself, find an environment already suitable and travel there, or adapt yourself the environment. Everything that has meaning about a person is in the brain. I am firm on that point. I am not my arms or legs or liver, but I most definitely am my memories, my feelings, and my experience. The only reason my body is remotely me is because what is really me extends into those things. My nerves.

Ok so we can look at a person and we are so used to looking at people that we come to think that this is what people, which are brains as I just explained, look like. But what if another kind of brain evolved? What if other brains took different options? What would a brain in a suitable setting look like? What would a brain adapted for life on land look like? The answers are terrifying because these models of life aren’t fantastical or alien they are ubiquitous and completely disregarded at best or shamelessly exterminated or consumed by us.

Indeed I’m having the worry that intelligent feeling life on this planet might be more common than unfeeling life if you simply expand your scale a bit. I am not the first to have this idea. It’s in fiction everywhere. But this is the first time I thought about it from a purely anatomical perspective. If you hardened my neurons against the elements and made them more physically flexible, or maybe even blended them with muscle tissue so they could individually contract, what would that look like? A blob? A large moving mold? A jellyfish? And aspen grove? I’m looking around at my world from the brain’s perspective and I’m realize that half of what I see could be brains that have found various ways to dispense with their body.

What if the skull has cut us off? I don’t like where this is going.

As I’ve realized before the only thing special about us in this context materially is the ability to exit our biosphere completely. But what if that’s only because our condition leaves us totally blind to a far superior method of escape? What if the answer to the Fermi paradox is that radio is completely crappy as a communications tool, and that space ships or physical travel is an equally crappy travel mechanism? What if they are watching us for resurgence? Would you bother talking to an anthill? What if the thickness of the skull prevents reception? What if that’s why ancient cultures cut holes in their skulls and did other gruesome things to their heads? What if that is the real purpose of a crown? What if that is the source of power and divine right? What if that is how warriors came to be rulers again and again not because of the fighting but because of the head injury?

I’m tempted to not share these things since each would be a story idea maybe and I’m not supposed to share and I’m so powerfully broke. But whatever, I love writing and I love talking and fate has kept me alive so far. Failure to gain is not the same as loss. Maybe someone will help me.

Why study consciousness?

Inspired by:

(I could do a post on virtually every statement and question in this video but my writing doesn’t profit me, and the world you’ve created requires that I seek profit. You people don’t even comment. So if you want more than the bare minimum I write to keep myself sane and entertained, help me to profit from my work, or share your profits with me.)

There are subjective answers and such but for me the best practical answer is that consciousness informs ethics. We don’t care about sawing a rock in half because we all agree it has no experience, no consciousness, no qualia. We care about sawing a kitten in half because it is not like a rock in this way, and a brief look at human monstrosity and the actions of sadistic psychopathy depends intrinsically it would seem on a situation where the object of torment is somehow down graded in only one universal way: Being less conscious. Being less human. Being more animal, or being more false.

So not only is the study of consciousness important, it is in what one might call the hierarchy of endeavors actually paramount.

For there are two axiomatic features to existence which give it “meaning” or “value” universally and those features are existence, and enjoyability, neither of which are possible without consciousness.

Assuming a rock doesn’t have an internal experience, then in a way that rock doesn’t exist. There is no experience/consciousness for “Mr. Rock” therefor there can be no existence and no enjoyment/suffering.

It’s a popular idea well explored in fiction that one must consider two things of any action, and one is axiomatically more important than the other: can we do a thing and should we do a thing. Understanding consciousness is the very foundation of how we determine what should be done.

One could very easily argue that the core problem with the world today is a pandemic lack of empathy, and what is empathy but the recognition of consciousness in others coupled with value for it? And could it not also be argued that this recognition is linked to degree of similarity assessment. Such as is lacking with the cliche racist idea (or with how we treat arbitrarily selected animal species) “well they don’t feel pain the way we(I) do.”

I think a system wind fascination with this idea is part of our fascination with zombies. Zombies are humans minus experience, freeing us from all constraint that awareness of secondary experience bounds us to.

So to sum up the study of consciousness is the very core of what it means to be human if you define human in the same sort of sense as you define what it is to be humane.

See also: https://plus.google.com/+BrandonSergent/posts/GyYMZ4wLZN4

Why I’m a crappy writer.

Bits lifted from here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103840576618549598514/posts/R374FkRcZ4y?cfem=1

First off, these debates help me stress test and sharpen my code so to speak. Thank you. I’m aware of the effort it takes on your part and I appreciate it. This is Always true of every debate I have. I just get tired of saying it even if I’ve never said it to you before.

Sidenote: I’m not repeating myself, I’m shining light on multiple touches or points of overlap from a single truth. Think venn diagrams. It’s like fixing a watch, one missing gear can ruin 30 adjacent systems. When I link to the same thing over and over, that’s because I’m trying to insert the missing part that addresses those 30 adjacent systems, not repeating myself 30 times. Savvy?

“Way to take the whole argument out of context.”

No, when you argue at this scale of social policy there is more context than what is apparently intuitive. You are missing that in the same way you are missing the meaning of scale. What is possible for a handful of people can be perfectly impossible for the species/culture as a whole or put another way, at the scale level above. That is where this debate must be had and that’s where I’m having it.

The policy that works in your back yard is not by definition viable for all back yards.

“it’s about the net force of the state, in respect to its citizens .”

You don’t get to just arbitrarily exclude non-citizens from the discussion when you’re talking about national, let alone global, policy.

I’m talking about the state plus those it interacts with et al. Not some hyper specific game theory scenario with highly constrained sets of participants.

“+Brandon Sergent’s writing is way too unfocused…”

By design. The point isn’t pithy bumper stickers, the point is to borrow a phrase “The accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment.“

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me ‘Bob’ 🙂

If you want to datamine my work for pithy one liners be my guest.

Anything can be argued no matter how absurd. That’s why critical thinking and debate are skills that must be learned. Your ability to argue (as opposed to debate) with me doesn’t demonstrate anything.

“When I said he’s not a good writer, I mean he skips around a lot.”

That’s an illusion caused by unspoken context. I assure you there is logical connection and flow to my thoughts, it’s just that the hyper linear nature of language sometimes betrays that when applied to the fuzzy, massively parallel, and non-linear nature of reality.

Plus I’m a bastard who is a little insane with a fairly short temper. 🙂 But I balance that with not holding grudges and being ultra-willing to reconsider my views in the face of evidence. It’s easy to make peace with me so long as you have intellectual spine. (Not even ability, just courage. I’m not an ivory tower dweller.)

“…when it’s conveyed linearly, and avoids repeating or rehashing points.”

Agreed, but again that’s a PR/stylistic concern. If you would like to paraphrase/datamine my work, I would be more than pleased. I’ve heard that kind of admonition my whole life. My goal is not to persuade (though I admit that was the initial hope) but to inform.

Think of me as the raw data, and what you’re talking about is a tidy chart. One which I lack the skill to create because if I had a brain conducive to said skill I would lose the ability to produce the data in the first place. They are I suspect mutually exclusive.

“My comparison to Nietzsche was for this reason– while Nietzsche’s writing is world famous and the subject of a great deal of analysis and debate, it’s also notorious for being difficult to read, understand, and interpret.”

I accept that backhanded compliment in the spirit in which it was given. 🙂 I completely agree (about the difficulty.) My work is a chainsaw, not a scalpel. But then again I’m aiming it at redwoods, not blades of grass. 🙂

“…indeed, longer than I ever thought possible.” (http://underlore.com/an-argument-in-favor-of-the-state/)

Over 37,000 words when you include the quoted bits. Believe me, I’m aware of that problem.

“…express it in such a way that is dramatically more concise and elegant. I don’t want to read +/- 50 pages worth of writing just to appreciate (and respond to) what could have been 5+ pages of material.”

Data vs charts man, data vs charts. You’re right, but it’s also not my problem, more or less. Give me staff, and then see what I can do. I’m ineffectual because of divide and conquer. I’ve been isolated and then the consequences of my isolation are paraded as reasons for it.

It’s a catch 22. you’re asking for the product of a PR man, but if I was a PR man I’d have long ago been tricked into being someone with money’s tool. If you want Truth (or Underlore) this is the form it comes in.

http://vimeo.com/20861423

“It would also be immensely useful to combine only the most essential parts of both your writing into some text to link to.”

So again, go for it. I can’t change the world alone, that’s exactly why my enemies have seen fit to de-fund and isolate me. I’m a specialist with no support in this context.

I’m disabled even irl by my mind. Not to come off as arrogant, just honestly trying to convey my situation, I’m like hawking without the chair.

Yeah it would be great if I could get to meetings and speak clearly, but if I could do that shit I wouldn’t have had the time to sit and figure out hawking radiation now would I?

The world demands the impossible from me. If you want that shit, you’re going to have to wheel my ass to the table and fit me with a voice box, or in this case help me refine the ore of my work into some useful exotic metal.