Tuesday, 02 August 2011
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Brief News and Mass Contemplation
Been putting a shit ton of hours in to redesigning the Shyfted Minds site, what ever that means. It should be ready by the end of the week. Mainly lots of internal linking left to do. I know that it's just a modified template on some one else's domain with a tk mask, and I know that it's not for profit, any way, so in the eyes of the kings of the scene I'm just an awkward kid with no real vision. Jesus, man, have some empathy! That makes you sound like a total cockass!
I want no thing more these days than to work my ass off on the "O" sound track and chill the fuck out in good company, but the battle rages on and on... I rarely find my self with time to get a full work out in since I returned from vacation, and yet my muscle definition has continued to increase. Not complaining. Just confused. Going to be making a new gabber album with K.H.D.. It's going to rock, but damn, I need to stop adding things to my list of things to do- or stop sleeping. The remainder of this post is going to be rather lengthy and comprised of material that I typed else where and then edited to make sense in this context. It's thoughtful. You'll hate it.
On music classification:
Genre (of music, literature, film...), I think, was an idea simply to help people describe a thing that they liked. It is easier than explaining all of the details of any one song, and most people don't understand technical music lingo, any way. Now there are two problems with genre: many people act like they think that genre names are meant to describe how good the music is (for example, 'gabber is awesome but dub step sucks'), and people act like they need to create a new genre for every little innovation or cross over. Hey, have you heard that new female fronted melodic symphonic blackened deathcore/doom metallic neofolk band!?
Nah, man. They sound too much like female fronted melodic symphonic blackened deathcore/doom metallic classical to me.
On 'futuristic' technology:
My greatest concern involving artificial intellegence, advanced robotics, and nanotechnology is that humans might not be mentally prepared for it. The same goes for genetic engineering. Humans have been trying to be their own masters for generations. Humanity has been pretending to write its own destiny since it learned to write, and now that the means to actually begin to do it are in sight, millions are claiming that they would rather pussy out? This is why the government is fucking us. No sense of adventure! More seriously, jobs are always erased and new ones are created as technology advances. Many rich individuals have always gotten a certain satisfaction from being distanced from the general public. That's no thing new. What else can be observed from history is that culture usually lags significantly behind technology. If people won't know how to appropriately react to practical human augmentation through the use of robotics and nanotechnology, if people are going to respond to artificial intelligence with anger and terror, there will be huge problems. The culture shock of revolutionary technology will be the worst during a time when all of the greatest acheivements will be morally and religiously charged, and these technologies will be, if the thinking of the general public does not change away from how it is now. Refusing to accept these new technologies will only have a more drastic distancing effect between those with and those without than we have ever seen before due to technology in any one nation.
On the subject of overpopulation, while on the one hand it seems cruel to prohibit breeding to any degree, that is the mentality that we have adopted from a time when overpopulation was not a considerable danger to our survival as a species. It probably seemed absurd to some people when we first imployed the use of traffic lights and speed limits, but as the streets became more and more populated with automobiles, regulations had to be put in place to prevent disasters. Some thing that should be rather obvious is that, in the past, we needed to produce many offspring because none of them had a very likely chance of survivial. Our system of breeding, if it could be personified for a moment, expected most of our children to die. Now overpopulation threatens the lives of our children again, leaving oversized but poor families to starve as the world's resources are drained too quickly. How can a state in which children are being born in to starvation and scarcity be better than one in which population is regulated to prevent such a catastrophe? Human beings have demanded more from their health, wealth, and ability to control the Universe around them since they first started to use tools and wear clothes. Human rights are a far newer concept. Either we have to curb our innovation, leading to disease running rampant and mass starvation leading to a sort of survival of the fittest among our selves that will keep our race going but on a much smaller scale, or we have to curb what we declare to be our rights. It sounds horrible when phrased that way, but, if we do no thing, the first scenario will inevitably occur, any way, when we run out of resources.
As George Carlin once pointed out, we have no rights. There are no such thing as rights. We invented them along with gods to make our selves feel better about the cold, uncaring nature of our unconscious Universe. We make up rights to get things done, and we break down rights to get things done. That's all.
As far as cybernetics and human bioengineering goes, the biggest problem in my mind is a similar old fashioned thinking. We have lost our humanity dozens of times in the past. Every time we simply adopt a new humanity. Humanity is a relative term and is meaning has changed with the adoption of new standards. Using it carelessly in ethics is foolish.
On 'big words':
I love a good thesaurus, but there's no thing that bothers me
more (you know, while I am observing it) than an inappropriately used
'big word'. Many scholarly articles drive me to a ridiculous level of
frustration when they constantly over word things. I keep telling my
self that I am probably too much of a simpleton to really appreciate
and understand their scholarly wisdom, but I certainly feel like they
are being pretentious on purpose just to flaunt their scholarly-ness.
When some one begins two sentences in a row with 'in other words' they
are officially a bag of douche. If you are not locked in
conversation, limited by the other party's attention span, and you are
being paid by the thousands to write this damned article, you better
fucking put the effort in to it to say it right the first time.
Conversely, many large, uncommon words are not simply synonyms of
smaller words. They are specific, and when I can find a use for them
it is usually after toiling over how to express an idea that has me
stuttering. To find the right word in that situation gives me a silly
amount of satisfaction.On choices:
The following rant is in response to a response to this article: http://www.giftedbooks.com/authorarticles.asp?id=7 . The article has a silly looking title, but details a very interesting phenomenon that I am personally tormented by. Basically, being aware of the reality of infinite choice is rather daunting. I typed this one out with little thought, but, if you've read this far, you probably don't care. Thanks for that.
The feeling of 'this is the right choice; there is no other' is one of
the best feelings I have experienced. For many, I am sure, this
happens to them as a result of every damned decision they make, but
for /me/... I am aware that there are limitless choices. I know that
there is always a better choice. I also know that refraining from
action until the best choice is plain to me is a colossal waste of
time. The dangers of dedicating one's life to planning! The man who
plans with care and precision at every turn does no thing.
Spontaneity can accomplish zero long term goals!
'Any learning is better than none.' This is true, but hard to stick
to. If I know that I can learn any thing (if I know that I can do any
thing), then the /best/ is included therein! If I can come by the
best, then I /should/ come by the best. Right? And before I obtain
the best, I should obtain the knowledge to recognize the best. In
order to do that, I first have to learn to recognize the study
required to recognize the best. How do I do /that/, if I am now twice
removed from what I am really after!? Even while I was reading this
email, I was wondering in the back of my mind how I might better spend
my time. 'Mike and I are very similar. Why do I need to read his
ideas? I probably already know them.' And that brings me to a
related, but far more frightening question:
Why waste time surrounded by people that I can truly relate to, if I
may risk only simulating conversations with my self? So, okay, that's
easy- I'll surround my self with people who /don't/ agree with me.
Wait, but- /what/? Those people are WRONG!
It seems too black and white, but that's how it feels to me some
times. I know that we're all just a bunch of complex machines- what
could we conceivably be, if not? There is no magic in people. There
are wonders only so long as there is misunderstanding. My intellect
is teetering on the edge of my instinct. My intellect does not
understand the benefit from using copious amounts of time trying to
make new friends, when all signs point to new friends being highly
unlikely to promote any sort of intellectual stimulation. My
intellect does not understand using the presence of others as a form
of meditation, soothing that need to be social. It just seems like a
waste of time. I'm one year in to college and I already owe sixty
times the amount of money that I have ever held in cash. Chilling
with friends doesn't pay back the government, nor does it help me
ensure that the money was well spent. But what would I be doing, if I
didn't have to worry about money, didn't have to work, and didn't have
to go to school? I would probably want to spend most of it with
friends- but after telling my self to curb my social needs for so
long...? I would probably be seeking out even more impossible feats,
for fear that I am squandering my freedom. The only thing keeping me
from getting too bent out of shape about the horrendous state of the
general public and its governments is the fact that I can tell my self
that I'm too busy to make a difference. This is good, because /I can
not make a difference/. I might kill my self trying, other wise.
I think that I'll just keep going, if I don't choose a place to stop.
I'm not going to proof read this, because I'll just find mistakes that
I'll feel the need to correct for paragraph after paragraph. One last
point: I can't stand the idea of making money just to survive. I want
to make money enough to do that and feel like I'm many more than one
step ahead of my dues. You can't really know that you're going to
make that happen until you've gotten there, though, and I can only
imagine how horrible it would feel to wait it out only to die having
just barely survived all of your life. If we may never get to truly
live, but can't know if we're going to fail until it's too late, how
can we be expected to logically go about making the best choices?
KABOOM FULL CIRCLE
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