i actually don't think i've talked much about the realization i came to in the mid-00s regarding the futility of existence, and the rabbit hole i went down with it. i'm not sure why...

i say that as i deny being a philosopher. i guess that, if i have a philosophy, and i suppose we all do, this is it. i won't do this every day...

so, the futility of existence is some kind of existentialism, in the sisyphean sense - all of that stuff about pushing boulders up hills. i got out of school, and that's all i could find, anywhere i looked: boulders to push up hills every day. my parents (and my sister, and my ex-girlfriend) wanted me to put the boulder on my shoulders instead, but i didn't have the interest; they told me when i was a kid that i was a natural leader, and, being the first born genetic male, my family actually looked up to me in ways i thoroughly resented, but leadership is a funny thing, right? i spent a lot of time flailing against this - i didn't want to be a leader, and i think it's partly what attracted me to anarchism, this idea of a world without leaders; if we lived in a world without leaders, nobody would look to me for leadership anymore. so, i shrugged that boulder off years ago, and nobody seemed to notice: the only boulder i saw around me was the one i had to push up the hill every day. and, maybe i could lead people out of that to freedom...

and, isn't that real leadership? gandhi & moses were true leaders; steve jobs & john galt were really not.

to me, though, the futility lies primarily in the finiteness of it. i mean, what's the point, when it just abruptly stops, someday? was i merely coming to terms with my mortality at the age of 25? dour, i know, but there's something to it - i get out of school, i'm faced with tremendous existential dread and i decide it's a farce.

i looked at occupation after occupation and i just couldn't find emancipation in anything. why bother studying math, when you'll only take a bite out of it? why bother saving lives when everybody dies, anyways? the only thing that seemed valuable was art, but that was an algorithm for an early grave, as art eventually runs out. eventually....

but, what if there was a way to escape mortality? then knowledge regains it's value. lives become worth saving. and, art can reclaim it's value as expression beyond vocation, beyond purpose.

escape mortality? what?

well, i don't think it's such a hard problem, really. consciousness is chemical - it's all in your head. literally. whatever it is is in there, and it's not necessary to fully understand it in order to emulate it. so, we can sidestep these philosophical concerns; shapeshifting shouldn't be that hard of a problem at all. we just need to...

1) download ourselves to disk

2) create a clone - perhaps a gender modified clone. if you see where i'm going with this. if i could shapeshift, i'd shapeshift into an xx body.

3) reupload ourselves to the clone

that's not hard, in principle, at all. we just need to figure out the physics....

it would help to keep a backup in a safe place so that we can regenerate in case of an accident; maybe we could do that when we sleep. if we pick up cancer or aids or something, regeneration is the easy way to beat it - we can just compost our old hosts.

people tried to argue with me about the plausibility of such a thing, but their arguments tended to be very strange. i had one person convinced that the turing thesis disproved this (i don't think the turing thesis says anything about this at all, but humans are complicated quantum computers, we're not turing machines - and that is fundamental, here. i actually think the person was interpreting the clone as a robot, which is weird.). i remain convinced that this idea is possible in theory - if we can figure out the physics of our brain (not that hard.), find enough storage to store it in (getting harder) and build a computer fast enough to download & upload it (that's a little tougher).

i realized it would require some effort. but, the futility of existence is an oppressive truth...

so, what i did was make a pascal's wager with myself - if i spend the rest of my life seeking immortality and fail, i've lost nothing. but, if i do nothing, and evade a potential solution, i've lost everything. i consequently must abandon everything else in life and strictly chase this algorithm for immortality - it's the only way to reverse the futility, the only way to salvage any meaning or purpose. otherwise, mortality is inevitable, and existence is futile.

i took a course in complexity theory at some point, and while the p=np thing was not new to me, when i sat down and worked out the bounds i became truly distraught. the amount of data that physicists require to document trivialities is immense - they have giant processing centres to document events that last fractions of a second.

so, what kind of data centre is required to store a human brain? we can imagine there might be symbolic shortcuts or compression algorithms, but the answer is absolutely tremendous. and, if p is not np, these calculations are going to be incredibly time consuming....

my pascal's wager was that it didn't matter - you need to shift into a different host, or you will die, so you'd might as well die trying; you've lost nothing by failing. but, this requires a non-zero probability that there's an answer, in the end. i eventually convinced myself otherwise, and the pascal's wager flipped over - existence became paramount. the futility must be embraced. go have fun...

so, how could i find an approximation of communism, then, in this world of capitalist decay? and, i've gotten pretty close, i think.

if you could point me to an advance that reverses my complexity calculations, i might change my analysis. but, i just can't see these advances existing before 2050, which is my exit point, my upper bound.

i will only live once.

even if millions now living will never die.

so, the last time i was getting stomach aches, i wondered if i was having an allergic reaction. 

right now, i'm noticing what look like hives on my arms.

i'm almost certain it's that garlic salt.....

i ended up living in the loeb building, like matt damon, in goodwill hunting.

when i look back at the situation, there is no defense for her behaviour.

at all.

and, if she ends up in a homeless shelter, it's just karma.

my stepmother is legitimately psychotic - the story i heard was that she watched her younger sister get fatally hit by a car, in fact totally annihilated by it, and within a foot of her face, when she was a preteen (after her mother asked her to keep an eye on her...) and the trauma left her horribly damaged...

but, if you knew her, you knew she was addicted to the medication, and it was the drugs that were the cause of her outbursts.

so, she'd randomly break things. she'd yell at you for no reason. she'd ruin your stuff, or throw it in the trash. she was consistently irrational - borderline insane. she had frequent psychotic fantasies, was prone to conspiracy theories....and, in the end, became a born-again christian. obviously, right?

she was legit bonkers.

so, i called her delusional once, and maybe that wasn't nice, but is it grounds to get thrown out of the house? i called her a lunatic and suffered the same fate. i don't remember the third offence, but it was no more substantive.

and, these accusations were substantive - she was acting like a child.

would you throw your kid that is in the third year of a difficult math program out of the house for calling you a lunatic, after you did some irrational thing or made some irrational claim to justify it?

and, it's easy enough to get conspiratorial myself, but the truth is that this was just base stupidity on her behalf.

and, all he could do in response was feed me 20s and hope it worked out....

it wasn't one semester they ruined, either.

it was three.

the idiots kept at it, convinced to completely destroy my academic career, as best they could.

and, then they pleaded with me to go back after. 

idiots.

my step-mother would be more like 68 or so. i don't know exactly how old she is...

i haven't spoken to her since the funeral, or know if she's even still alive.

but, if she's running out of money right about now, i'm not of much use to her after she ruined my transcript, am i?

derrrrrp.

i mean, my father's dead.

but, if he was alive today, he'd be entering retirement, soon - he'd be almost 64.

i've made specific choices to avoid concerning myself with finances - i'm a struggling artist, and i decided that i wanted to be that. but, you could imagine a situation where he needs support from his kids about now, and i wouldn't be of much use to him after he ruined my transcript, would i?

derrrrrrrrp.

the lesson i learned from how they acted was that they were complete idiots.

my total gpa over all the years i was there when i left in mid-2013 was roughly 11.

that's 11/12.

my marks in university are best described as "inconsistent". i actually should have held off on graduating, because i ended up with this strong b+ that put me directly on the cusp of everything.

but, if you look through my transcript, you see these dramatic differences between semesters - i'd get 5 As one semester, then 5 Ds the next, and if you didn't know the story it would just look like i was all over the place...

so, they offered me a qualifying year, but i didn't see the point. all i could do with a masters degree was get a job i didn't want, which was the situation i was in with the bachelor's degree in the first place.

the reason my marks were all over the place is that my parents were assholes - they kept throwing me out of the house for stupid reasons to try to teach me backwards lessons. it was all about adhering to authority, which is the wrong thing to teach your children, and a bizarre thing to try to push down on an adult in their early 20s. and, the stupidity of their behaviour completely destroyed my transcript.

when i went back in 2008, they couldn't render me homeless anymore because i didn't live with them. and, my marks weren't just straight As but straight 99s. i just breezed through that comp sci degree like it was nothing, until they forced me to interact with the other students - and i just fell apart on the spot. i breezed through the curriculum, but i couldn't function in the social component. 

i couldn't do anything about the situation at the time, either - i had nowhere else to go.

the reality is that the fact that i was able to cobble together a strong b+ under the circumstances i was in was actually exceedingly impressive. most people would have had little choice but to drop out...but i undid what they left me with as best as i could, and turned it around just enough.

if i had stayed for another semester, i would have pulled my gpa up that extra two percent and it wouldn't have been an issue. but, it wouldn't have made me more interested in the topic, or more convinced it was worth my time.

hey catholics.

i've got an idea for something you can give up on lent.

your faith.

so, i seem to be doing paprika wrong, but i don't want to heat it because it'll just kill the vitamins...

i don't know what i expected it to taste like, but it doesn't taste like much. the thing is that i'm getting the same thing from the mustard, and i'm concluding it might be the source.

regardless, i might be better off just buying a fresh cayenne pepper, and boosting the amount of actual red pepper.

like i say, i need to try a few things...but i think the paprika is likely to get struck out, at least.

that frustrating stomach ache is back, and only after the pasta meal, again.

i think it's the garlic salt, this time. and it may just be old. it was just a pinch, too. i'll avoid it next time...

i did the tablespoon of paprika, and added just a bit of cayenne. i dunno, yet - it's not bad, but not really what i want. let me try it a bit longer...

if i take the salt out next time and the stomach ache goes away, great. if it doesn't, i'll need to strip it down, again.

why hasn't anybody bridged a dialectic between analytic & continental philosophy, anyways?

zizek's understanding of anarchism is the kind of thing you hear from a first year student with a circle-A hat that they bought at a corporate rock concert, or hot topic or something. or, it's like rooted in the term "anarchy in production" or something. yikes.

it's every stupid mistake you'd find on a reddit message board.

the difference, in context, is just whether you let the state whither away or you actively take it out, and what that means is removing the class at the top of the hierarchy. "the state" is really just another word for "the aristocracy". like, that's marxism 101 that zizek is failing, here.

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it's one thing to point to different measures of different truth and realize they exist, but it's another to throw your hands up in the air and decide you're stuck with relativism because of it. given two different systems of truth, we should be able to compare them and determine which is a better way to understand truth than the other - we don't have to just see them as equally useful, or interchangeable, or whatnot. in fact, we have a system of mathematics that can help us systematize and work something like that out; this was worked out primarily by godel, in the middle part of the last century. we can, consequently, evaluate how useful a system of truth determination is, and whether a system has value or does not. and, of course, the great scandal in mathematics is that our system of arithmetic has some problems, and that kant was consequently pretty much dead wrong.

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you know, you don't need foucault to follow this discussion, you just need to ask the question:

if a tree falls in the forest, and there's nobody around, does it make a sound?

you can bring in this naive concept of the observer effect, and a bunch of quantum woo, which is what zizek is doing; it sounds like he got that from deepak chopra, or something. or, you could point to the fact that sound is energy being released by the motion of the tree, and the gravitational force ending with the *thump*.

tuberculosis is, of course, a bacterial infection, and while the bacteria has no doubt evolved , we can trace it's genetic history back. it would probably be more correct to say the pharoah died of a bacterial infection that is ancestral to tuberculosis. or, maybe you don't think that tree makes a sound.

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"the time will come when we will realize that co-operation is in our self interest". 

well, there you go, slavoj.

that's kropotkin. perhaps via dawkins.

atta boy.

it's even hegelian, too. right?

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no, i'm going to repeat the point - comparing tuberculosis to a perception is of course a basic category error. what he's saying about rape is true enough, but it doesn't make sense to apply that kind of language to tuberculosis....except regarding what i previously said, namely the fact that bacteria changes so dramatically and so quickly that the tuberculosis of thousands of years prior would really only be an ancestor of the tuberculosis of today. and, so, he's managing to accidentally make a valid point, but he should be appealing to actual darwinian evolution via natural selection, rather than this kind of dawkinsian thing, which is sort of about memes, really - to try and salvage a sciency-ness in a topic that should be approached purely empirically, not using this goofy theory he's citing. and, i haven't read  the paper by latour. maybe i should take a look at it and post something to my blog about it...

and, just to be clear - it's just a question of approaching specific questions with the right tactics. you can talk about perception with rape; perception is the only thing that matters with rape, as two people could experience even the most violent types of sex consensually or nonconsensually. but, how tuberculosis changes over time rather clearly reduces to an evolutionary question, and you need to be using the language of science to approach it; otherwise you're just being dumb. but, i'd like to see what latour actually said - did he talk about the tuberculosis strain evolving over time?

ok, he doesn't, and that's a shame, because he'd almost have a point if he had approached the question with the right tools. but, the article seems to really be as dumb as chomsky implies....

====

i watched that twice to make sure i didn't miss something worthwhile the first time.

nope.

i was a big phil hartman fan when i was a kid....

that's really all i know about joe rogan:

you may remember me from such classic tv shows as newsradio, the one on mtv and a bunch of other bullshit nobody watched.

i really, honestly, couldn't tell you anything else about him, and i'm not interested in learning about it - not unless he gives me some reason to, and i'm not holding my breath.

i mean, i know that some people want to put philosophers at the top of the intellectual hierarchy, but i don't share that position; my epistemology places empirical science at the top of the hierarchy, and deductive or synthetic philosophy at the very bottom of it.

kant got this ass-backwards, as per usual.

outside of those topics - math, computer science, law, physics, economics, music - everything you see here is dabbling & self-taught.

and, i am more interested in dabbling in some things (history, politics, anthropology) than others (religion, philosophy).

we'll do this again.

- i do not believe i have a high school diploma. i didn't attend graduation because i didn't want to have to hang out with the kids in my graduating class; if a diploma was mailed to me, i don't have it now, and i've never seen it. i have a transcript. the reason i don't think i have a diploma is that there was a specific requirement introduced by the mike harris government to participate in a certain amount of community service (that is, unpaid labour) in order to graduate, and i boycotted it out of protest. so, this was a conscious decision on my behalf...

- i have a diploma from carleton university in my closet, somewhere. this is a b. mathematics (honours), 2006. that's a four-year degree. i was initially admitted for software engineering, and bounced around through several programs before i graduated with the math degree.

- i completed the requirements of a mcse while undergoing training directly from microsoft in 2007, but i did not pay to receive the accreditation, as it would have been more than they paid me to go through training and, again, i wasn't interested in working for free. this was, iirc, three months of paid training directly from microsoft.

- i went back to school in 2008 on my father's insistence, and against my better judgement - i was happy at the time, and it was probably the biggest mistake i've ever made in my life. i should have continued on the path i was on. alas. i was supposed to do a qualifying year for grad school in math, which he offered to pay for and i really had no actual interest in doing. but, he had to pull out at the last minute (you'll recall there was a market crash in '08...) and once i found myself faced with the need to fund this myself, and without an option to pull out due to the economic facts that asserted themselves (and have yet to undo themselves), i switched directions and decided i'd be better off with a more marketable undergraduate degree in computer science than a more or less useless masters degree in mathematics. i also decided to look into the application of a computer science degree into the field of neuroscience, with an intent to explore tactics towards accomplishing immortality, and had this idea in the back of my mind as i was going forwards. however, i found myself taking graduate math courses as electives.

- so, from 2008-2010, what i was really doing was completing an undergraduate degree in computer science and a graduate degree in mathematics,  at the same time. and, i actually got to within a half credit of the computer science degree, as i amassed not six but eight math credits at the graduate level.

- about 2010 or so, i realized that shapeshifting would require levels of computational complexity that would not be realistically developed in my lifetime, decided i was wasting my life, firmly concluded that i didn't want to work in the programming industry (i've never played computer games in my life and have no interest in them...) and shifted my focus towards law & political science, instead. if immortality was beyond my reach in this life, i decided i wanted to fight the fuckers within the futility of existence - to do something useful. i neither applied to graduate with a computer science degree, nor applied to graduate with a masters degree in mathematics, but i have completed the course load for the latter and am a half credit short for the former.

- i then had a mental breakdown that i maybe never fully recovered from and took a few years off.

- i got on odsp in 2012.

- without ever even transferring out of the comp sci program, i went back in the summer of 2012 and, over three heavy semesters, completed the requirements of a three year sociology of law program. while the requirements are complete, i never even applied for entry into the program - these courses were taken as a comp sci student (and, frankly, as alumni from the math degree).

- in the spring of 2013, i took a mushroom trip with some occupy activists near a creek and decided "fuck it, i'm wasting my life in school", and that i'd rather live on disability, instead -  i'd rather just exist. i just got up and walked away and moved to windsor to find affordable rent, instead....

so,

- i completed all of the requirements for high school except the bullshit community service nonsense, and therefore don't have the diploma. i don't think.

- i completed the four year math degree and have the diploma.

- i completed and passed training as an mcse but didn't pay for certification.

- i completed the requirements for a masters degree in math, but don't have the diploma and don't really think the diploma is actually worth anything.

- i completed the (substantive) requirements for a 4 year comp sci degree, but don't have the diploma, and don't care. i have no aspirations in the field, whatsoever.

- i completed the requirements for a three year sociology of law degree, but decided the system is too skewed to bother fighting in - that that would be a waste of time, too.

over that time, i also picked up undeclared minors in physics, economics and music, and maybe a few other things i'm forgetting.

what i want to do is exist as an artist blogger/musician with a gai in a small apartment in the urban core of a major city and experience life from that perspective. and, things weren't too bad before they closed the border...

if this continues much longer, i may need to move to toronto. i hope the rents continue to fall - that will help.

a few months ago, i was spending time with the stanford lectures, particularly the physics lectures as they were the ones i had the most interest in sorting through. i'll remind you that my academic background is in mathematics, physics, computer science....& law. 

i have never taken a philosophy course in my life and, frankly, wouldn't want to waste my time in a philosophy course. *yawn*.

but, i've pointed out many times here that i've had difficulties with surveillance on my machines, partly as a consequence of various illegal entries into this apartment. so, i put a password on the machine that required the use of an external keyboard.

what they did was break the external keyboard when i was gone, and i found myself defaulting to this chromebook to watch videos when i was eating, instead.

i initially starting watching a lot of paul jay, because i kind of missed him. but, then i found myself drifting off elsewhere...

youtube's algorithm's are notoriously terrible, and i've ranted about them in this space on multiple occasions. it's not just the fact that they're designed for maximizing ad revenue - they seem intended to maximize the spread of ignorance, as well. they seem to intentionally push religion and pseudoscience instead of valid scientific sources, and i'm not convinced that's some kind of accident. and, so i found myself watching all of this pacifica network garbage it was pushing down on me, which was fine during the election, but i've recently erupted a few times at the ignorance and stupidity of the media personalities and need to train the filters to stop pushing these garbage vloggers down on me, that present nonsense designed for uneducated morons.

seder is a little better. the rest of them are a bunch of ignorant idiots.

it's a sad truth that you need to be vigilant about this, nowadays - if you let them, youtube will turn your brain into mush with these garbage kyle kulinski and jimmy dore and the hill and katie halper and ... videos that all seem to be funded and directed by this corporate conglomeration directed by cenk uygur. this is a media oligopoly that's every bit as dangerous as the old nbc-abc-cbs triad. if we need antitrust legislation right now, that's what it should be directed towards - breaking up this vlogging network that pushes absolutely terrible information, and reduces the discourse to absolute trash.

i let my guard down for a few months there, and just found myself pissed off by it, in the end. i'm adjusting. and, i should be back to watching lectures and documentaries when i'm eating, rather than the garbage i've been polluting myself with recently.