i'm tired and feel like puking. i want to shut off the wants of the world around me. i want my way. pot or alcohol dont deal with the problems that make me feel like this, but they can ease the symptoms so soothingly...
i always forget that i probably only need a few minutes with a distraction, not focusing so much on my disomfort, and i'm much better :)
thats my theory on how pot and alcohol do their magic - they "dilute" the chemicals in the brain that let me think, making me a little less efficient, because less focused, and/or perhaps its the screening process - thoughts which are not driven by a high priority impulse are not weeded out as efficiently anymore - i get distracted, derailed from an obsessive train of thought. the priority loses its priority. tension dissipates. the realisation seeps thru that life can be beautiful.
i wonder if everybody is downer-driven. things have to be at the very least bi-polar - we must be motivated by bad things to avoid those bad things, and by good things to seek more of those good things. pretty blind process. i think we give ourselves too much credit when it comes to free will. the brain is just a convenient mutation of the nervous system. a complication of it, a turbo-charger on an engine inevitably bound for self-destruction. we'll just get there faster. we're a pest colony thats just too greedy for its own good. we keep inventing ways of taking more. and the less there is to take, the more aggressive it'll get. a healthy degree of aggresion in the individual will be more and more often the ticket. i wonder if society will wind tighter and tighter, the more docile portion of the population continuously being fucked out of existence. the ratio of competition versus co-operation will keep growing... but on the other hand, i wonder if we're actually heading in completely the opposite direction. the solitary, ultra-aggressive alpha-male is every now and then beaten by one who has a different trait, or set of traits to make up for his somewhat more mediocre aggression - smarts of some sort, charisma, pheromones, killer smile - whatever it is that makes other people like him. he harnesses the power of many "lesser" individuals - he's the politician. i guess there has to be some kinda balance between the push and the pull, the stick and the carrot - kiss babies, kill the competition. but nothing is static. things keep moving around and changing - until a new way of being for a system is found. all the different ways that people on earth can and have lived circumscribe the limits of how the human can live, as limited by the environment. and we have an impact on our environment - like any self-respecting life form would :)
but even that environment has limits on how much it can be changed, and although we can probably reach this limit - i dont think we would survive it. Terence McKenna pulled out from somewhere this theory that the earth is like some sort of embryo or otherwise a somewhat alive in a fringy sense "organism", and part of its "growing" or "becoming" (conscious or not) was the ocurrence of life-supporting if not outright life-spawning conditions, where all the life that has sprouted up since, is but a subsystem, not unlike all the friendly bacteria we have living inside our bodies, doing whatever it is they do, with the end result of us functioning well. its symbiosis at best. u lose some of them or have an imbalance - u might get diarrhea for a bit. but one of you survives, while their population is decimated. or maybe this is not nearly the end of the road yet. maybe all the flora and fauna is but the base of a huge pyramid-like support system for us... so we can make something really worthwhile and produce and network enough electronics and gather enough data, until we have wrought an "artificial" super-intelligence out of the earth's minerals. we've been messing around with what the earth is made of forever - working the earth, farming, mining, refining, building, shaping - that was just practice. we're starting to get better at it, so we can do finer work with it, until we build the earth a brain out of itself, out of its minerals. we might not recognize it for what it is until its too late. look at the internet. are we just blindly performing our function? here we are, thinking we're the shizznit. in the meantime we're a horde of blind slaves pushing huge rocks around, not realising we're being made to build a pyramid.
time for beddy - its 12:48
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
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2 comments:
Dude, killer post. I have a neurologist friend who is trying to disprove freewill from a biological perspective. He believes that when we are presented with choices, our decisions are made reflexively before our conscious mind even realizes that a choice exists. By the time we say, "Hey, I can either do X or do Y," our brain has already decided upon one or the other.
i guess i agree with ur neuro-buddy. i imagine that upon the input of a stimulus, many of the info bits stored in the brain, that seem related to the stimulus become somewhat "energised". it would make sense that info related to each other would be stored physically close to each other, so that just exciting a general area would get all those bad boys firing. so when thinking in terms of whether something is 'Good' or 'Bad', i think the brain might just spit out an "average reading" of all the things related to the different attributes of the object, each with probably different degrees of intensity or "weights". for example, a friend invites u out to a restaurant, they put a plate in front of u and u take it in: intense greens and reds, kinda look like peppers, probably spicy, so use caution, but sour cream on the side - you like, some bread-looking stuff - beingn, u kinda like trying new things, so thats a plus, but 3 days ago you nearly lost your colon in the toilet, probably due to that cheap indian food, so that just overrides everything - ding! "no man, lemme see that menu, maybe i'll have some veggies..."
when i think about how i think, i think more or less already relevant ideas pop up, leading me to believe there's a more "mechanical", non-perceivable screening process going on. it seems to me that the only thing i sorta control is the time spent waiting to churn up the best possible answer. but even that is probably an average between conditioned behaviour and biological mandate. that's why i think praising people for ther skills is almost pointless. you are what you are. there is little effort in genius - its just natural, they didnt even see the answer coming until it popped into their head. but maybe its not completely pointless. it may serve as a stimulus - praise is good, you want more of it, you figure out how to improve the part of you that probably came up with the answer. you get more info from this field, you practice for faster retrieval times.
i guess i'm a bit of a determinist.
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