The Algorithm

 I was never super into the content algorithm. The continuous feed. The attempt by the various social media companies to find the things that would keep me engaged. And as such I think I may have underestimated the experience of it. Like, right now, I cannot for the life of me understand why a right thinking human would remain on X/Twitter. Or, frankly, Facebook. Facebook I understand a little -- there are a lot of my demographic and older humans on it and for them it is a labor saving device for a thing they would otherwise spend a lot of labor on (keeping in touch with distant friends and relatives). But X/Twitter I do not. It is a cesspool. 

But I've come to understand the pull of the Continuous Feed a little because of Substack. And I've seen why you'd hang on to the thing that gave that to you for awhile (e.g. X/Twitter or Facebook) even once it stopped giving you that, especially if you'd become bound up in it as an economic force. And I'm pretty impressed, frankly, because the algorithm has understood me pretty well. It has given me what I want. And what I want is to find the writing of other enlightened beings. And it is doing that. For those people are out there, writing. 

 There are lots of examples. There's the guy writing the guide on meditation in exactly the kind of language I would use -- or perhaps used to use -- to describe the shape of things. There's the academic trying to analytically and robustly describe Shape (have I blogged about Shape? Or Space? I don't think I've done either). 

 And there are guys who I can tell have never been in Pain the way most humans are in Pain. They correctly describe correct breathing or feeling their alignment or meditating and you can tell that they have either never been distracted by Pain, or if they have, have somehow forgotten what it's like. (And is there a third possiblity?) They say, "Oh, well, just do these things" and they speak and don't understand that people can't hear them because those people are Hurting. 

 But there they are, their writing delivered by the algorithm. And they do seem to be actual humans -- I've tried, but I cannot find this pattern in ChatGPT, so I don't think this is content generated by bots. While I can't discount the possibility that Large Language Models have also melted my brain such that I can't tell their writing from actual human writing, I am still speaking to actual high-level humans in the world on a day-to-day basis and they aren't indicating that this has happened to me. 

Am I surprised that the algorithm is this good? I guess I am. Or am not. I cannot tell. 

 

 

"This will hurt so much it's gonna kill you."

 I have of late, and wherefore I know not, been having some horrific nightmares. They follow a pretty distinct pattern -- threats of terrible bodily violence and pain, but directed at someone that I'm detached from. The above quote was the wake-up scare of a dream where I was following the character of Walter White in Breaking Bad, being threatened with torture. So my subconscious detached me from the threats -- they were being made to a person I was ostensibly watching on television, rather than me. Walter White had been captured by the men with whom he associated, the manifestation of his morally compromised soul, and they were threatening him with torture. The line above was spoken by a man in full asbestos, his face covered with a breathing mask, holding a blow torch in his hand, looking straight at me -- Walter White was no longer there. And then I woke up.

 Everyone has their opinions on what dreams mean. And everyone will rush to assure you that nightmares aren't portents of anything bad, they are manifestations of your subconscious working through its fears. Suffice it to say, then, that I am a lot more...communicative...with my subconscious than the average person. We say a lot to each other. A thing you might generally be aware of (because, you know, dreams exist) is that your subconscious generally isn't good with words -- it can't actually, you know, speak to you. What it can do, what it does do, is trigger things -- memories, emotions, whatever patterns are there available to be triggered into consciousness (I should say that this is my own experience with my own mind/body duality, and your mileage may vary. This applies to most everything I write. I have no idea amongst all of the things are true for me are either 1. only true for me versus 2. more universally true, but other humans have yet to interpret or understand them). Essentially the subconscious speaks to us via metaphors. "Remember that thing that happened to you that one time? This is like that," it might say. 

I have written some, and will write more some day, about my body's relationship to pain. I was, for most of my adult life, in a lot of it, and a lot of it that I couldn't understand. It manifested as physical pain (my legs burned) but it wasn't until I identified the core issue (a missing hip-stabilizing muscle on my back right-hand side) that I was able to even get to pain that I could understand (i.e. I could tell that specific muscles were torn or warped and that my entire body was torqued into a horrific state because my right hip couldn't support me properly). I was, as Ida P Rolf has called it, at war with gravity. 

I have come to understand that some parts of my body are in terrible pain that I can't feel, even now. Imagine a muscle tear that doesn't heal. Eventually the nerves at the source of the injury aren't firing any longer, and you are no longer receiving pain signals. You might get pain signals from other parts of the body that were once supported by this set of torn, never-to-recover muscle, but you will get no signals to your consciousness....oh fuck me nerves are conscious signals. Holy fucking what fuck. They are signals that can be heard by the conscious mind. Fuck me fuck me fuck me that means something what does it mean? 

Okay, sorry about that. I write as an exercise, as one does, to find out what I know. You know, like whichever Greek philosopher said that. Sometimes I come to know it really abruptly as I'm writing, and above was one of those cases. The thought that occurred to me (the nerves being a conduit from the physical to the conscious) needs much sorting through. What I was trying there was a technique that I have derived from the body: when something is first discovered, it is twisted up and its true form is undiscernable. So far all I have discovered is that it exists. So I try various techniques to pull it out. I've committed to this one, which you might call "wiggling." It's taken me all over the room over the past 20 minutes or so. I feel like I got some good stuff out of this one. Obviously, probably the superior technique here would be meditation. Probably that's always the good technique.

 Anyway.

 It's possible we've reached the point my subconscious was after with this dream. It's also possible we've not -- and interesting question that is raised here: is this how I communicate back my subconscious that I've heard you and tried to understand/understood you? i.e. is writing that method? What I did want to record, just in case I'm wrong about any of this, is that it was a strong message and it was also fairly painful to receive. It feels very much like a portent and a threat. That is how a conscious human would receive that thought. It was very dark, and I did not like it. If you need to tell me dark things, that is not the way. 

 

On Love and Art

Our Second Thoughts about love and art are, it strikes me, exactly reversed. We think art should be easy and effortless and flow through us and out into the world. But in fact it takes work and is hard. And we think that love, adult love, is hard and that relationships take work when, in fact, love is easy.

Two immediate notes: almost nobody will challenge me, I think, on the first thing. If art is easy, you're doing it wrong. It is especially of note now that we have thinking machines to make art for us if we want (which absolutely defeats the purpose. It is also, whether or not you can sell it, not art). I don't think anybody's going to @ me for saying this. 

Lots of people are going to @ me saying the second thing (or they would if anybody read this, which nobody does). All the hypothetical @'ers  they will all have incredibly valid points. I will say for starters that it's really difficult to love easily if you can't do it without ego, and it's really hard to do things without ego if your basic needs (in a Maslow's Hierarchical sense) aren't met. And it's not possible to love easily somebody who isn't willing to love you back. You know, like your teenager (well, not my teenager. But, I hear tell, other teenagers).

And it's probably really difficult to love if you are missing other elements of Maslow's Hierarchy, both above and below the "belonging" level (which I guess is where you'd put love? You'd also be perfectly right to put it with self-actualization). It is difficult to love if you are lacking food, or shelter. It is difficult to love if you are lacking esteem. Those are things that trigger ego responses, and an active ego makes love difficult.

This falls into a set of categories of my own belief that are, at best, problematic. Like, basically I'm saying you're not going to have true love if you're very poor. But maybe I'm just saying it's difficult, in the same way that it's difficult to have true love if you're very rich (though, obviously, for different reasons).