I'm · Getting · the · Filters · Changed... · Constantly

I am reminded how empty my head really is everytime I put my headphones on and can hear the echo behind my eyes.

I wonder what happens behind my eyes.

I imagine a pinhole. I imagine it to existence.

I imagine that the pinhole projects to the back wall of my skull the images of what might be in front of me.

I imagine my perception.

I imagine my perception personified.

I imagine my perception is a lazy bastard, sitting on the sofa in my head.

He's watching the movie playing on the back wall of my skull.

He's totally engrossed.

Believes every minute of it.

Says it's the truth.

But I'm paranoid. I think I'm being misled. I know I'm being lied to.

And my skull tightens from the fighting.

(Sound familiar?)

Does me wondering if I have become paranoid make me paranoid? I wonder, is it bad to be paranoid? Am I better off not thinking about the world and it's history, because my mind will create wonders an questions hat are only fabrications fueled by the fact that I've been looking for something fantastic my whole life, and my search has emptied the world of phenomena and God? I wonder if my questioning has led me to the belief in no higher power, I wonder if I was born believing in God. How is it that everyone else sees that there needs to be something orchestrating this, or, the more popular, that there's a watcher, quietly in the background of the world, secretly rooting (is that the word?) for or against us? I don't know which I believe, because I am this society still, and am as much an individual as a grain of sand on a beach or a pixel on this screen.
I firmly think that maybe there is something to the belief that each of us, though appearing as individuals, are actually opposite sides of the same coin (however multifaceted this makes it). It makes sense in what I have seen to postulate that it is only the differences that we see, and are able to observe, therefore, if we were all part of the same fabric, all we could perceive would be the the different colors. I see only that I am me, because I have this skin ad this brain and this organ system that pumps and pulls and builds independently of what I perceive your organ system to do, and where your skin ends. I've often thought that in the emotion of love, we blur these lines and borders, and are able to forget the artificial boundary.
(I close my eyes for a few moments and feel around my room. I try to learn that everything I see is just a small part of the spectrum, that what I think is real is only real because I have these eyes. I try to tell myself that this if the world too, with my eyes closed, and I try to convince myself that this is real, and forget what my eyes tell me. My vision is so different from last moment.
I read about a machine that you attach to your scalp and you are able to move a mouse around a computer screen soley with your mind. I think I need a rest.
I always wonder, why do people believe in God and why did that start? Why is Christianity the largest religion? Why are they the most prevalent here? Why are white people running things? Why are men in charge? Why has the United States become such a world power? Why is the world the way it is? Why do people think that killing is wrong? Why is theft wrong? Why do I think some left is wrong? Why are some actions bad? Why are morals the way they are? Why are honor and truth good? What is good? Who decided this?
I think I am modern, because of my anxiety. Maybe in the future, no one will ask these questions because there will be no Christianity or United States, and I'm just sorry that I won't be able to see things change. I want to know how this will turn out. I am afraid it will always be the same. I wonder what happens to the world when I die. I always tell myself not to spend time thinking about what happens when people die, because I will find out. There are many more things that I will not find out unless I spend time on it now.
I wish I was a superhero with special powers. I always have. I think that's what fueled this and everything. I want power. I want to have powers. I need more control. I am out of control. I am small but I am so large. I was 13 when I realized that everything and nothing were exactly the same.

http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392741

Erm... Well, I guess this is what I've been looking for. And I can see that this is just the tip of it. We're only seeing the buds of something that could grow and grow and grow till we've really created a monster (of me, myself) and become exhausted.

So much time was spent trying to convince that it was wrong to think about control and I should learn to be ok by back tracking down to the baby emotions instead of looking ahead and learning all I can to gain the upper hand. I want to bully my emotions with reason. Seems I was on to something? I honestly can't decide. And don't mistake me! I'm not taking science and converting it to philosophy because I despise that! I'm not making analogies or drawing parallels, I'm saying that literally, and simply, and only, and trivially, there has been a study, that had some results, and there's more to come. New developments in a certain direction are what I can see ahead. I can't say what any of this means. I hate jumping the gun. I hate to think that I'm drifting back and forth across a blurry line that ultimately seperates science and metaphysics. I'm not knocking the metaphysics in any way, I just hope I never truly start to believe in any of it. One step at a time, silly! Watch how (my?) logic slides gracefully down and ends quietly. Neatly.

I felt like crying, though. Honestly. I am at odds constantly and to think that I may get my wish and see into my mind, to think that I could learn to do what I'd always hoped was possible... There I go running away much further than myself. I'm getting carried away. I should have that tattooed on me somewhere.

Why am I trying to stop myself from saying what I really feel?

Ok, honestly, I've wanted this control. And honestly, even though I shouldn't be so affected by science, because... hmm... I think I am wary of letting science draw emotion from me. Science is a process and things are continually proven and disproven. I think if science drew emotion, I'd be left pretty vulnerable, and since these theories and "facts" are all I am able to put faith in, because I have no faith in anything else... I probably have a lot of faith... though I've always thought I had none. It's just misplaced.

What if people could modify their thinking and perception to anything they wanted?
What if I could?
What does this mean for our thoughts?
Are our thoughts the top or the bottom? (Do you know what I mean?)
Are thoughts completely trivial?

Ok, new idea:

If I get rich, I would like to start a company that develops software that teaches mathematics interactively. I don't think I'll ever have the skills to do it myself, but I could describe what I want pretty clearly to a developer, and commission them to do it, and become involved with testing the final products using what I know about cognitive science and learning, and how I would want to learn math, because honestly, this whole method of trying to read it out of a book, listen to it being spoken, or written on a blackboard is complete bullshit to me. It is only on rare occasions that I can understand what ANYONE is talking about and then it is only because I am awake enough to manipulate what they are saying graphically in my mind as I try to follow along. This would be so much easier if only I could fuck around with things to see what changes what. This is how people learn to walk, ride a bike, and otherwise manipulate objects in a physical way. People don't learn Newtonian mechanics when they want to play pool, they fuck with it till they get it right.

Quick update: I just want to keep a running list of things I want to know.

How do animals think?
What do animals see?

It's interesting to pose these questions simply because it gives you something to focus on, I think. Like know, when I have some time, I'll come back to these questions and try to think about some sub-questions, if that makes any sense.

How do eyes work?

People already know that one so it's just a matter of doing the research for me. I hope, in this way, I'll find a sub-question that no one has answered yet and then I'll have something I can experiment with, because it's impossible to figure the answers to the big questions. I wonder if David's big questions are about evolution of animals in general? Maybe his big question is:

Why are animals shaped the way they are?
What can we invent that incorporates what animals inherently know?

Maybe a big question is there because language has enabled humans to communicate discoveries and observations but we can only glean information from animals through tests. There's no verbal communication and emotional communication doesn't have the vocabulary to tell us some things we want to know.

Anyway, that's it for now. I have so many ideas, but they are in pieces. Back to studying for ODE.

Because disorder is the natural tendency of things, keeping the parts of one's existence orderly becomes harder and harder as time passes.

I wrote an essay on this last year. Here it is.

I Love Falling to Pieces

Right now, on the corner of University Pl. and E. 12th St., an open fire hydrant is pouring water into the street. There is a white minivan with a yellow spinning light on top parked on the street in front of the flood, with its hazard lights flashing and its engine idling low. The water keeps flowing from an invisible source creating a river that wraps around the curb and falls back into the drain. The whole street shines in the dark, reflecting lampposts and traffic lights. The hydrant pours forth a hundred times its volume suggesting that the water originates from some unknown dimension. I walk towards the street side rapids and jump over.
What is it about something uncapped, unrelenting that draws attention? Why do we stop and stare at a raging fire, fight to avert our eyes from a war on television, or take notice when something goes terribly wrong? I can only offer that it is through these violent occurrences that we catch a glimpse of the true nature of the world we wish to hide. This world is a mess.
I do not use the word “mess” to mean the state of political affairs or wars or corruption. I mean that physically, things are falling apart all the time. It is a fundamental law of physics that as time passes the entropy of the universe increases. Entropy is chaos, scientifically speaking; the addition of heat energy into the universe from what was once electricity or sunlight. In life, entropy means decaying, pieces breaking off, spills, accidents, and a messy room. It is the natural order for everything to eventually fall to pieces and the living creatures of this planet are the only things keeping it together.
It is our goal to separate out all the things that could be mixed. Things must be orderly, tidy, for numerous reasons. At the very bottom, our motivation is that we want to preserve our lives. What if we always ate off the floor, ran in the streets, and had no railings to keep us from falling over the edge of anything? Disease, pain, and death, is what would become of most of us relatively quickly. So, we try and increase order any way we can. We own furniture with drawers to organize and put away, cards are filed, and we even arrange ourselves in neighborhoods in order to separate and distinguish.
This constant self preservation builds, until it becomes disguised and embedded into everything we think and feel about ourselves. We are so incredibly separate from each other and we fight our constant uphill battle against our own true nature. “We are restless hearts,” writes Richard Rodriguez, “for earth is not our true home” (493). In his essay, “Late Victorians,” Rodriguez describes the discord between the conditions of this world and our way of life. For him, the fact that we are so contrary to our surroundings only results in our suffering and tragedy.
The inner conflict between nature and man can be seen in something as exterior as the buildings that people live in. Rodriguez illustrates this by describing the way in which gay men have moved into the Victorian houses of San Francisco, houses that were traditionally meant to be home to generations of a family. Rodriguez writes, “In… the 1970’s, and within those same Victorian houses, homosexuals were living rebellious lives to challenge the foundations of domesticity” (495). The gay lifestyle was almost the antithesis to that of the traditional Victorian family, gays having no children and seemingly no obligation to anyone except themselves. While this is a matter of opinion, it may have sparked anti-gay sentiments among some of the more traditionally minded occupants of these San Francisco neighborhoods.
Judgments can be made because of many different preconceived notions but gays become particularly wary of hostility because it is often accompanied by crippling stereotypes. The men pioneering San Francisco’s Victorian neighborhoods faced not only the uphill battle between their lifestyle and the architecture of their homes, but also the “architecture” of their own bodies. Society has told “the homosexual (that he) was sinful because he had no kosher place to stick it” (Rodriguez 496). How can someone be at peace with their nature if he is being told by everyone else that when he does and feels is not correct? It is this fact that is the catalyst for Rodriguez’s theory on stereotypical gay male behavior. “…Society’s condemnation forced the homosexual to find his redemption outside nature…The impulse is not to create but to re-create, to sham, to convert, to sauce, to rouge, to fragrance, to prettify” (497).
Thus the uphill battle ensues. I imagine a scene from “The Matrix” in which Neo visits the Oracle for the first time. “…Don’t worry about the vase.” she says.
“What vase?” Neo turns to look for the object in question and, in doing so, knocks the vase from its stand and feebly tries to catch all the pieces before they hit the floor.
“That vase.”
Because the world’s natural order is to fall to pieces, and we see this as a threat to our own personal existence, it becomes ingrained within us to think negatively of nature, even our own true nature. We can become self conscious because we have made it our purpose to fit a mold and be exactly what we want other people to see. This is evident whether or not we are building up an image to make ourselves unavailable or if we wish to please the tastes of others. Rodriguez tells of going to the gym, to escape his homosexuality and to become something else. “The intent is some merciless press of body against a standard, perfect mold” (Rodriguez 500). He makes himself unavailable through body building; “From the heterosexual to the autosexual… to nonsexual” (500). Human beings not only strive for this perfection to escape homosexuality, but to wear many other masks, such as that of the model of femininity as described is Jacklyn Geller’s “The Celebrity Bride as Cultural Icon.” In her essay, Geller writes, “People’s wedding photographs are anything but natural and spontaneous. They contain a series of stylized poses that idealize marriage, obscuring the institution’s inequities, incongruities, and contradictions” (277).
Why is it that we care so much whether or not we fit into someone else’s ideals? Jean-Paul Sartre offers in his play, “No Exit,” that we define ourselves only by what other people think of us. In “No Exit,” three characters are in Hell, put up in a room with no mirrors. Estelle becomes agitated and needs to know how she looks and she can only rely on Inez’s eyes to tell her. This becomes a metaphor for the entire play, in which they each realize that they can only find redemption in the others’ views of them. This is why the celebrity brides pose to be the perfect objects of desire. This is why some gay men feel that society’s condemnation of their lifestyle needs to be answered with prettifying things and masking their bodies. We define ourselves somewhat by other’s perceptions of us. When we only rely on other’s perceptions, problems arise and it is possible to destroy ourselves. “Hell is - other people” (Sartre 45) exclaims Garcin when he realizes that he has reduced himself to the judgments of his companions. Sartre’s play is meant to show an extreme case of losing oneself in the perceptions of others, but most of us fall victim to this hell in some way.
With the negative connotation of letting entropy take over, it becomes the obsession of many to appear to everyone else as if they are not falling apart at the seams. Because this entropy is constant and inevitable in most respects, this task of covering it up becomes arduous, not to mention next to impossible. Such is the constant plight of the human being. We try to appear as together as possible, we care so much about what other people see, and we know they judge us because we judge them. “You do it to yourself, and that’s what really hurts. You do it to yourself, just you and no one else,” croons Radiohead front man Thom Yorke. It’s all is based within the instinct that it is unnatural to embrace true nature. Every bit of stress and pain is the result of a lie against our nature, whether it be a small lie at the surface such as, “It matters what my hair looks like today,” to a huge fundamental lie, such as, “Nothing changes.”
Deep down, we must realize that this world falls apart and changes and that must be why we try so hard all the time to pick up the pieces. What we don’t want to admit is that we are part of the world and we disintegrate just as quickly, if not quicker, than our surroundings. We separate ourselves from the world because to consider ourselves part of everything is to admit our mortality and temporality. There must be something within our nature that embraces entropy, because our entire existence is not pain. I would even venture to guess that “going with the flow” so to speak is what we secretly seek to do, in the innermost recesses of ourselves.
We don’t notice it, but when something comes along that completely tears down every bit of the façade we put up, we are almost always secretly relieved. We can breathe easily, knowing that the dam has broke and we can just float down stream. There is peace within total exposure because afterwards, there is no more conflict within ourselves. The fight moves outside, to the little things. The constant uphill battle ceases and one can focus on smaller maintenance issues within life. We all know what it is within us that tears down the walls. It is love, that indefinable emotion.
For me, talking about love like this feels silly. I have to be honest, I’m not much of a romantic these days, but I do think that I’m closer to defining love than I have ever been. I’m not talking about romance; I’m talking about connections between people and everything else in the world. I use the word connection to show the distinction between love and the other facets of life are devoted to separation. Love is one parallel between the world and our nature that we embrace. We love because in love, we feel completely exposed. We can finally be ourselves. Love feels good because, for some people, instances of complete truth are rare. Imagine holding on to something so tightly and finally being able to let go.
It is through love that Rodriguez is unmasked. He shuns his body and love until he gets to know César. “César could shave the rind from any assertion to expose its pulp and jelly” (Rodriguez 501). Rodriguez and César debated Rodriguez’s bleek philosophy that there could be no paradise on earth. Rodriguez loved César’s ability to see right through him, but he could not bring himself to be fully exposed and when César became ill from AIDS César said that Rodriguez would be spared from the disease but his comment was “chased with irony” (502). This implies that Rodriguez and César were never intimate because Rodriguez would not embrace his own nature.

It's not very good, but it lays down a few of these ideas so that I don't have to again. I move on from here.

What goes on in your mind?

1. All of the bad feelings people feel and the problems that they have are caused by an inherent knowledge that the entropy of the universe is increasing.

Entropy is disorder in a sense. When you have an engine, it has been proved that you can never re-use all of the the energy that you put into it, because some energy is lost in the form of heat. When this energy is lost as heat it is extremely difficult to convert that energy back into a different useful form, such as mechanical energy. The large part of heat energy is lost to us because we don't know how to use it, and we really can't, so it goes out into the universe and interacts with atoms and molecules, increasing their kinetic energy and and causing them the move more quickly, or in some cases break apart, releasing the binding energy that would normally keep them together. That energy also is used in other places, transferred, and interacts with whatever. Entropy has a tendency to increase all the time and so our universe continues on to te direction of disorder.

Human beings, being born of these same energies and atoms inherently know that the universe is becoming more disorderly. The problem is that human beings are the first entities to be recorded, that try and control their surroundings. Buildings are built, roads laid all over countries with artificial borders telling people who can step where on dirt that belongs to other people, and there have been an increasing number of inventions that prove this point including, but certainly not limited to, cages, repair shops, furniture, cleaning products, containers, tupperware, clothing, medicine, police tape, fences, property, and weapons. Most of the average human being's life is spent trying to keep things together or separate, clean, or new. Disorder causes stress and tension, and when asked, most people would prefer to live in clean houses where things are well organized, or organized in a way that make it most easy for them to be accessed and used.