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.