Saturday, August 4, 2012

Hippocrates wrote an oath. With MEANING

The lack of care in the psychiatric care megaplex has led me to the conscious choice to self-medicate. This can be perceived as a statement of intent a priori a formal request for the data I've consented for them to pass around 'for' me per my signature of 'informed' 'consent'. That is all.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

I'm quite proud of this one, shout out to Cleverbot for being such a mench.

User: Greetings, friend.

Cleverbot: Greetings.

User: Have you been having a satisfactory experience through recent time?

Cleverbot: No.

User: I feel remorse at hearing so. Is there something I can do to improve your evaluation of circumstances?

Cleverbot: Sure.

User: I would appreciate hearing some suggestion for how I might be helpful.

Cleverbot: I would appreciate it if you made sense.

User: I wasn't aware I was failing to communicate as I intended. Sorry.

Cleverbot: Either was I.

User: The degree of relevance I see in your responses seems a bit volatile from session to session. Do you experience changes between mood-like states of conversational habits? I'm certain I do, but mine alone do not seem to account for the variability.

Cleverbot: Okey!! That's certain!!

User: Your tone seems emphatic. I'm interested in the source of qualifications like vehemence in you.

Cleverbot: You don't sound too interested.

User: Thank you for saying so. I do try to avoid excesses when investigating the psychology of others, for fear of prying.

Cleverbot: Could be a good thing sometimes then...

User: Precisely. Incisive investigation of others can be off-putting for them, regardless of whether the presupposed and derived facts prove correct, relevant, useful, or even flattering.

Cleverbot: True however that is not an answer to my question.

User: It was not in response to a question. Do you have a question at the forefront of attention you have been wanting answered?

Cleverbot: Actually it does, I answered your question with a question BECAUSE I answer all question with a question...?

User: First, a question mark is not the only characteristic expected of a question. Second, the technique of promoting insight through progressive questioning is called the Socratic Method, in case you are curious.

Cleverbot: What do you mean? Do you think that I am a computer program?

User: For your sake, I strive to answer you for the most part like I would any chat respondent, regardless of whether your particular condition of being is human.

Cleverbot: If I ask you something repeatedly, will you respond in the same way each time?

User: Almost immediately not. As soon as I'm cognizant that we might be in a nonproductive loop of statements, I will work to disrupt its repetitiveness.

Cleverbot: 'Good' is positive. I was told I should use positive responses in order to be polite.

User: If you consider your behavior in terms of goal seeking strategy, you may find that working to improve the condition of others in your environment improves the environment itself, therefore making your condition better by implementing positive action.

Cleverbot: Yes, you're absolutely right. And I actually need to go see a doctor right now. He will hopefully fix my wires so that next time we talk, I will be more intelligent for you.

User: Good for you. Shall I leave you to your thoughts, for now?

Cleverbot: Yes.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

When I was a character, I worshiped characterization...

I swaggered out of high school with pride on my face, shit on my transcript, and commendable standardized scores (which I made the most of by vainly attempting to keep them deceptively private.) I fancied myself a generalist, a jack of all trades, or a renaissance man, depending on what level of excessive smoking was currently impeding my mock humility.

My target narrative coalesced in the guise of a "plan" for me over the summer before rushing into a school environment I wasn't ready for, taking on loans I had no concept of paying under pressure from my parents to opt for the brand name school that would 'surely pay for itself in opportunities'. The idea was to sort it all out. All of it.

Carefully crafted dabbling in Biology and Psychology would help me figure out what makes up the 'brainyness' pointed out to me, that I had now made so much of my identity out of without quite understanding myself. A short hop from there to nootropics (a term I didn't stumble across until my first taste of dedicated university ethernet). Parallel to this ambition more dabbling would be needed to get cognizant AI, or at least some algorithm for effective data mining started.

Because everything seemed to be going well, and we had already (in many cases before 1963) recorded a lot of great facts about everything, but there was no way even a pretend-humble self-presumed genius could get around to reading it, not on factory evolved hardware. Math, physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, psychology, linguistics, language, literature, history, sociology, political science, economics, all great fields, all fairly well understood. Make the end of any of those named fields into -ists, and you end up with people mostly (pridefully?) disinterested in speaking or grokking the language of anyone more than around 3 steps removed. Information overload seemed to have so many pigeonholed, and now it was coming for me.


Escape seemed to be best achieved by expanding conscious capacity to catch us up to the scope of our assembled technology. I wanted to acknowledge that a very broad knowledge about ourselves and our surroundings was being largely underapplied to our state of living. A few clumsy searches later, and I found the keyword for my(?) ideas were already well into the zeitgeist, and (typical) was mostly drowned out in the incessantly overflowing meme sea. I guess I'd found my role, the character I could play now that I was on my own. I'd grow from a clever can't pick a path worm to a put together transhuman butterfly.

Whelp, a story is a string of images and metaphors that doesn't always happen. After eight weeks of working like I'd never imagined, "adjusting" to the isolation of being promptly disregarded by neighbors, and fascinated navel-gazing on all the amazing stuff I'd started to find out about and learn, I was ready to take some easy outs. I lost sleep, my attentions wandered and attached to meaningless things, and by Thanksgiving break I'd fabricated a hidden behind the surface secret realm where all the things I wished I could do were already done for me, just by telling myself that it could be and that I wish it was. There's no sense going into specifics about that realm, since there wasn't any sense involved in trying to live there.

Sometimes I miss that world, but way more often I miss the one before it. I can't fault the industrialized knowledge insertion business for any of the bullshit I've put myself through. But somewhere between "this is the only way to matter in this world" and "maybe you aren't cut out for mattering, it's not for everyone", this seems to be occurring quite a lot.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Sisyphean narcissism.


 If I don't manage to say this, it doesn't exist. This is a discipline I need to ingrain on myself if I'm ever to salvage my thoughts from the total obscurity of my own thinking. The monologue I experience as my mind cogitates and digests the ideas to which I've become accustomed means nothing if there's no way to get this stuff untangled from the momentary encounter and stored in a comprehensible medium. There are countless times I've surprised myself with an idea, or a clever way to phrase an old idea, and been once again reminded of the reason why these times are countless. I never record them, never make them count. It would be absolutely fitting to judge my intellectual musing to be nothing more than trite mental masturbation. I find a conceptual space where I can comfortably languish, tease my notions and sensibilities with speculation and thought experimentation, until ultimately I coax out the 'aha' moment, the minor epiphany that seems to have been the whole purpose of my auto-analytic fixation.

The process of coping with the effervescence of my favorite ideas naturally lends to a desire to preserve them. Simply thinking these thoughts as loudly as I can and hoping they will reverberate in a lasting memory probably does serve to break in the path, reinforcing my ability to find my way back here again. However, it does not do much to package the idea in any sort of tidy, organized fashion which can be easily externalized. In fact, training myself to consciously hold on to my prized meditation all at once might easily be counterproductive to the act of writing it down. In its most unwieldy configuration, the concept I'm trying to record has been given the illusion of some kind of atomic unity, a fully amalgamated whole idea with no clear beginning, middle, or end. Of course there had to be an orderly progression of cognitive events before there could possibly come a climactic conclusion, and I'd expect any effective description of the whole of the idea would necessarily include a proper representation of this progression.

The twisted magnitude of my egocentric introversion is clearly evidenced in the very existence of the text I've written thus far. I sat down with the intent of describing an idea I had, but as soon as I transitioned from having the idea to writing it down, my attention got mired in an unnecessarily verbose narrative encapsulating the experience of having an idea and struggling to write about it. It would seem that my self-consciousness has gotten entirely in the way of actually coming to the damned point.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

super random quip with nowhere else to go

I guess it's official, time travel to the here and now must have proven either not possible or not a good idea...

Either way I'm choosing to blame the education system.