The is an essay based on a conversation I had with a drunk friend of mine. It’s been edited and refined.

The block quoted portions are my friend.

Insects communicate chemically. Ironic that the organisms the chose to seal them selves off behind exoskeletons ended up being the most connected. The insect became a single immortal individual. Like the queen said in first contact, “You imply a disparity where none exists, I Am the collective.”

The Borg as they would be is the ideal form of life, they would be pure thought, purpose, action, and loyalty, a single mind expanding to fill the universe, painless, fearless, ultra aware, and infinitely ethical. The apotheosis of mankind. Committed to the death to elevating all others,altruism personified,
charity, given immortality and power. That’s what we are going to become. We will shed our fears and hate like so many warts frozen away.

Of course the Borg of Star Trek are so different from that, the claim of inspiration seems misleading. Star Trek Borg are a torture machine, no learning, no comprehension, just hunger and torture, the mythic hell to scare the villagers away from the dangerous disruptive technologies.

The Borg were designed to be a bad guy. I think they accidentally made something not really scary if you carried the idea forward logically. This is why the Borg behave so paradoxically in the series. I mean really why would they not convince people? Why would they not conquer by stealth? We are they so impatient? Why don’t people volunteer? Because ultimately Star trek is anti technology, and very definitely anti transhumanism.

*The conversation turned here to psychosis and its origins as it relates to communication, since the Borg, and insect communicate instantly and completely.

In true happiness there is no need to communicate. Communication is a plea to those around you for aid, that’s the point of tribalism. To enlist the aid of those around you, the insect stepped further making the next individual a part of them, sharing fear and pain directly so that it can be fought with equal conviction. We can’t speak to insects because they have nothing to say 550 million years experience has shown them the value of silence. We are at the loathsome middle ground, too grown up to go home too young to command our destiny. We are leaving adolescence, and we’re very nervous about it.

We got smart too fast for the basic comfort system. As stand alone as we would like to be, there are very few who can actually be alone and not go insane. We are too smart and too tribal. A down fall of over-specialization.

Our minds are widening the gap between itself and the meat pet it evolved in. Our horses don’t want to cross the river, eventually we’ll have to hope off and swim. (Or grow gills, build a boat, etc.)

You are still thinking in terms of matter. I believe with a kind of work I can’t begin to comprehend, we can become energy.

Indeed. One method could be to study stable forms of complex energy with an eye towards replication what makes them stable, chaos theory is probably a grand first step in that direction. I suspect we need to refine what our concept of “object” means, just to get us thinking in the right direction. We know these things but we don’t grasp them intuitively. Energy is more fluid than matter. Energetic structures are more obviously transient so we think of them as such. They exist but not like the cup on our desk. We don’t think of a wave as an object precisely because it is unstable. And yet it exists like the red spot on Jupiter, or a water fall. We are like that. We are constantly having our matter replaced and yet we are stable. But as you say, those incorporate matter.

Is it possible to replicate the processes of life in the completely energy medium? I don’t see why not. The trick I think would be roughly something like the development of energetic objects with the goal of creating energetic computers and ships to hold our minds. Imagine a material machine creating a field, like a Tesla coil, but the field would be something persistent, something that creates a secondary field. We manipulate the device to manipulate the first field to manipulate the second one in such a way that a loop is made. The second field replaces the material component’s function and the loop closes and you end up with an energy object.

I would not be at all surprised to discover energetic life forms already in existence, formations of energy that behave like life, inside of stars, the only common stable nearly pure energy environment I can think of. Fire for example is lifelike, but it consumes matter. Of course ultimately the barrier between matter and energy is cognitive. They are actually one thing. We’ve simply evolved to think of them as separate. Basically what we’re talking about is building a container for a mind out of materials that are far less dense and far more energetic. The goal being durability.

People think of energy as being indestructible, but they don’t understand. Saying the soul, (an energy human) is indestructible because you can’t destroy energy is like saying a wine glass is indestructible because you can’t break sand. Obviously if you pound a wine glass into powder it stops being a wineglass. Energy structures may turn out to be far more fragile, though of course there are environments that energy structures could survive in that no material structure could, again like the inside of a star. Also energy materials would have different properties and different scales.

A material body may very well be superior all told.

Just a neat question to think about… What if energy beings evolved into us? What if the big bang was engineered by them to create a material universe for these superior forms?

There is a whole other issue. Have you thought about what being bodyless would mean from an intellectual emotional perspective? People think of it in terms of having a body made of energy, as opposed to a mind made of energy with no need of a body. But, my body overly influences my mind. The link between mind and body is seriously interconnected in some people. Like Bruce Lee and the martial artist idea of harmony between mind body and spirit. People like me are the other end. I would like to shed my body.

The problem with that barrier would be giving up material things and not just stuff, food, water, sleep. It would be hard to separate those simple joys from existence. I mean how much of your mind is built around sustaining a meat machine? Around 90% it would seem.

If I’m hungry I’m angry, if I’m horny I’m sad, if I’m tired I’m despairing. We are all dopamine addicts, given a fix when we do the pet’s bidding. We are master blaster. A trapped minuscule tyrant on the back of a dumb demanding but ultimately loyal pack animal. We fuck to make more, we get a sugar, we eat to keep it going, we get a sugar, we carve out a safe place to regenerate, and we get a sugar. We are kept and strung out. And we strive to be free and yet also fear it. You’re dead on, 90% of emotions are the pet.

What is happiness without sadness?/blockquote>

Happiness is a brain state separate from sadness. Like winning the lotto and finding out your loved one died at the same time. You can be both happy and sad, therefor they are unlinked scales. You can say you’re more of one than the other which just confuses the issue, I can say I’m more banana than blue, those doesn’t mean they are both positions on a single slider. Ultimately happiness and sadness both have presence and absence. The contrast each other, just like a banana on a sheet of blue paper would, again that doesn’t mean they are linked beyond the metaphysical links like they both exist or they are both in my analogy.

We are a neo cortex, a brain on top of a chimp, on top of a lizard, on top of a fish, on top of a worm, on top of an amoeba. We have an overly narrow definition of human, you spoke of feral children and other nurture anomalies.

But what is the difference between feral and ‘normal’?

Psychopaths are not made that way they are born, they have a brain structure difference. Of course any human can be trained to behave like a psychopath, but that’s a different animal entirely. MRIs and brain dissection of executed criminals show some consistent anomalies. Nothing conclusive, but tantalizingly suggestive. Psychopathy is caused by a disconnection an inability to receive certain signals from our emotional center. The dopamine system becomes partially ineffective. They don’t get the sugar for hugs and love nor do they get the whip for crime and harm genius is, like psychopathy, a deformity, a mutation. In psychopathy its a lack of sensation they stomp a kitten and feel nothing many refrain from stomping kittens on intellectual grounds.

The dangerous kind are the ones with a half functional system, no guilt but plenty of reward, so when they stomp a kitten they feel the tiny rush of power of being able to arbitrarily torture something but none of the guilt at being so wasteful or sadistic, so killing becomes potentially orgasmic. All sorts of horrific circuits become possible with pain dampened in places and pleasure expanded in others leading to truly insane behaviors.

And that is why meth is popular with rednecks.

Drugs are a cheat, a way to steal the dopamine, masturbation, all drugs are similar in this regard. The point of any drug is the same, to trick the lizard brain into dispensing sugar without having to go through all the hassle of eating, sleeping, fucking, etc. The lizard stops giving out sugar at the same levels. Diminishing returns ensures that we seek new opportunities. This is adaptive in the jungle for an organism with no mind as we know it. Now, it needs to be shed.

That’s why heroin addicts taper off on all of the animal maintenance activities, without the sugar, we tend to disregard the pet, that’s also why the martial artists talk about unity so much, making the pet work with you instead of over you.

My mother often comments about Bill Maher’s saying of how if he had a choice he would remove religion from himself like a tumor.

The reference is about how we can find ourselves with an idea in our heads that intellectually we know is absurd and yet it has great emotional weight in direct contravention to our own intellectual set of ethics. I have a similar situation about memory. There are two uncontrollable elements here, one is memory itself, the other is emotion and how they relate to birthdays, holidays, and cultural imperatives relating to proving one way or another that you care for someone. This is always in my opinion just an excuse to get you to serve the system in some way, usually by spending money. A natural outgrowth of emotional advertising.

It’s March 24th and I forgot my dads birthday sort of. Now that has a lot of connotations to it, a lot of assumptions are made about what that says about me and my relationship to him.

I try to make it clear every day that I love the man and that I’m grateful for everything he does for me. I do the same for my mother though we have less in common, and communicate completely differently so I don’t think I make myself clear enough. I think on some level she’s a little afraid to try and understand me for fear that she’ll find me wanting.

But anyway… About the birthday. It needs to be noted that I don’t have any money and my dad knows this because he pays all my bills. I feel guilty but intellectually I know I shouldn’t. I didn’t choose to be broke. Its not like I’m a pill head or blow my money on horses. I can’t find a way to make any in the first place. I went to sleep at seven, he spoke to me twice and didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what the date was because I don’t have a job, I don’t have any reason, to align myself with the calendar, beyond the arbitrary social obligations.

The calendar was invented to keep workers organized during the birth of agriculture and its current purpose is not very much different. It’s just a way to keep the ants walking in line and I have no eggs to carry, no leaf cuttings to move from chamber to chamber so timing doesn’t apply to me really and thus I forget. Sometimes I don’t even know what month it is. Side story: once my dad caught me checking my watch to determine what moth it was and laughed a lot. Now it’s an inside joke, I’ll look at his wrist and say “Hmm, March” anytime I’m being oblivious. Anyway… Like Bill Maher I would like to remove the belief that because I forgot something I don’t care about it, that because I’m not conforming with the calendar and making the prescribed observances I am somehow dishonoring someone.

If our memory responded to what we care about we’d have effectively perfect memories. In truth our memory is ordered by the dictates of our animal primate brain, not our neo cortex. The only way we have conscious control over our brain is study and exposure.

This is a problem because while the calendar itself is unimportant to me, people obviously are. My mom and dad being the binary star of the “people who’re worth a damn to brandon” system.

My solution is technology. I’ve got myself a Google calendar now and it’ll email me before their birthdays in the future, several times. Still, I wish I could get clear of the whole “you didn’t pay someone, and you forgot something therefor you don’t love them” thing. Maybe one day when technology gives me direct access to my brain I’ll be able to fix that.

The dye studies show that ultimately its about applying focus until other areas of the brain become starved as a result of over prioritizing the area associated with the focus.

Like you focus on the sound of a stream and your brain processes that sound as if it’s the most important thing in the world because you’ve given it that designation. Everything else gets put on standby, even basic processes like the sense of self, which being a fairly recent evolutionary development is one of the first things to be powered down.

Also meditation tends to traditionally occur in sparse boring settings. Putting yourself in a state of sensory deprivation where in you start to get clear data from your body, for example being able to hear your heartbeat due to near silence, produces a situation where biofeedback training becomes possible, and since this possibility emerges in that sensory deprived state (the isolated monastery) you are able to use this as “something to do” and you can train at it constantly while sitting there.

This sort of biofeedback training can be achieved by other means with a heartbeat monitor, but body temp control (another interesting display of meditative “powers”) is slightly trickier. It’s a well known fact that thinking of running vividly enough causes micro-tremors in the muscles associated with running. So I could easily picture something similar being done with convincing yourself you are cold, and thus trick your body into requesting heating measures. I suspect this would be far easier to do if you’re in the starved state mentioned above since the brain would be less able to process conflicting data (the actual temperature readings).

In short meditation is not magical, its not even particularly special, its just another brain state and I’m personally tired of it being the intellectually fashionable way to indulge in golly gee mysticism. I’m tired of it being the atheist’s kosher religion

I’ve realized that different sensory pathways have different emotional defaults. To explain what I mean imagine a piece of bad news, imagine hearing it read to you by a computer voice and now imagine reading it yourself as an email or letter.

Your emotional reaction you would assume would be based on the event not the delivery, but the remarkable thing about the brain is it doesn’t work that way.

I have a phobia so to speak of phones, specifically making and receiving calls. This does not apply to text or the Internet obviously. And I don’t mind talking to people, I actually kind of like strangers under certain conditions. For example I enjoyed the christmas time subway in new york, but I don’t like crowds at walmart.

Anyway, I’ve realized that audio data gets its emotional value magnified, while text gets its emotional value gutted. I can read about or see horror, but if I hear it I feel it.

Take for example being broken on the wheel, one of the most horrific methods of killing a person ever known. I hate it, but it doesn’t “get” to me. I’ve read accounts and seen drawings, but still, no real emotional impact.

But when I watched the video of the trucker being beheaded with a steak knife, I wish I could un-see that, not because of what I was seeing but because of what I was hearing.

I think people would be better off if they could realize the fact that different paths in the brain have different emotional value by default. It would tell them a lot about themselves emotional states and the world.

Its not merely threat rehearsal in my opinion, its, benefit maximization rehearsal.

I have a very quiet life, and I’m also a lucid dreamer when frightened, so my number of nightmares has dropped sharply in the past 5-10 years, on the order of one every 6 months about or less.

But, instead I seem to have dreams of opportunity with choices. Difficult ones. Many times theft and profit are themes which develop, like I’ll have a choice between turning in the envelope full of cash so to speak. Sometimes turning it in becomes wildly inappropriate, like its a blank envelope in the middle of the desert, other times its blatantly obvious like you just saw the old homeless mother, drop it.

Sometimes its sexual situations, and before you think fantasy allow me to explain a bit. It will be someone’s girlfriend, or someone drunk. Some times they are seducing me, and sometimes I just ‘know’ in the way one only can in dreams, that they would be responsive if I merely asked. Sometimes the situation is normal, but there is an interruption, and its always important so that I’ll have to pick between personal immediate physical pleasure or the more lasting and less tempting egotistical pleasure I get from helping.

Sometimes it’s food, I’ll be presented with what amounts to a buffet and a time limit.

Only twice have I dreamt of sexual fantasy. And one of the times was on the night of valentines day, a day charged with sexual imagery especially if you have television as I did at the time. Perhaps that was an opportunity test in and of itself. As if my brain was testing, “Well how would we handle it if you got exactly what you claim and think you want sexually?” I did learn about myself via that dream. And I never had one like it since.

I have a point I’m getting to thats relevant to you, just give it a second heheh.

Effectively I have great dreams but there is ALWAYS a catch. In a nightmare the catch is gigantic and the choice is between evils, but, I’m going to guess that there is ALWAYS a choice, and that choice is the whole point of dreams. To train us to make it or choices like it quickly when the time comes, either to avoid threat, or to maximize benefit. In short dreams force us to consider so we can say with honesty “All things considered, I made the right choice.”

Previously, I thought that catch said something about my general insecurity, as you all know I have my hangups, but seen in the context of behavior rehearsal I feel a lot better. My dreams may actually be reflective of the future of dreaming assuming our future is a good one.

My dreams are not characterized by fear or negative emotions of any kind really. Perhaps because my psychology is a bit more evolved (before you go all frothy at my impudence, this does not necessarily mean better) to fit a threat-less situation emotionally. Example, I don’t get jealous, I don’t lose control with rage, my primary fears are social and are about making people happy and loss of happiness, as opposed to fear of pain (not that I don’t fear pain, I just don’t to a pathological degree) or harm or loss, I’m extremely tolerant (irl), but not so much so that I become a drone.

Knowing the nature of dreams is a test, then perhaps the way to improve them is to out wit your wit, and focus on decisions you’d like to make, rather than decisions you have to make. Like assume your problems were solved, what sort of decisions would you be likely to make?

“Do I fly to Paris today or just stay home and ride the dune buggy outback in my private 10 mile square sand box?”

…Or I could just be a nutjob. Your call.

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy? | Video on TED.com

Because they’ll just grow to love it anyway.

Right?

I’m sorry but maslow’s hierarchy kinda shatters this notion.

He’s basically talking about coping skills.

A modern version a “it builds character.”

In short, an excuse to be a royal dickhead and exploit your fellow man.