Underlore

“You can present the material, but you can't make me care.” ~Bill Watterson

Archive for category Logic

Thought ramble.

Apr 20

Posted by Innomen in Ethics, Fiction, Logic, Neurology, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology | No Comments

(Perspective disclaimer.)

Anyway… The human body is a space suit for the brain. A way for the brain to link to the world yes, but primarily a way to survive in said world.

There are three ways to expand your sphere of influence in this context. To adapt the environment to yourself, find an environment already suitable and travel there, or adapt yourself the environment. Everything that has meaning about a person is in the brain. I am firm on that point. I am not my arms or legs or liver, but I most definitely am my memories, my feelings, and my experience. The only reason my body is remotely me is because what is really me extends into those things. My nerves.

Ok so we can look at a person and we are so used to looking at people that we come to think that this is what people, which are brains as I just explained, look like. But what if another kind of brain evolved? What if other brains took different options? What would a brain in a suitable setting look like? What would a brain adapted for life on land look like? The answers are terrifying because these models of life aren’t fantastical or alien they are ubiquitous and completely disregarded at best or shamelessly exterminated or consumed by us.

Indeed I’m having the worry that intelligent feeling life on this planet might be more common than unfeeling life if you simply expand  your scale a bit. I am not the first to have this idea. It’s in fiction everywhere. But this is the first time I thought about it from a purely anatomical perspective. If you hardened my neurons against the elements and made them more physically flexible, or maybe even blended them with muscle tissue so they could individually contract, what would that look like? A blob? A large moving mold? A jellyfish? And aspen grove? I’m looking around at my world from the brain’s perspective and I’m realize that half of what I see could be brains that have found various ways to dispense with their body.

What if the skull has cut us off? I don’t like where this is going.

As I’ve realized before the only thing special about us in this context materially is the ability to exit our biosphere completely. But what if that’s only because our condition leaves us totally blind to a far superior method of escape? What if the answer to the Fermi paradox is that radio is completely crappy as a communications tool, and that space ships or physical travel is an equally crappy travel mechanism? What if they are watching us for resurgence? Would you bother talking to an anthill? What if the thickness of the skull prevents reception? What if that’s why ancient cultures cut holes in their skulls and did other gruesome things to their heads? What if that is the real purpose of a crown? What if that is the source of power and divine right? What if that is how warriors came to be rulers again and again not because of the fighting but because of the head injury?

I’m tempted to not share these things since each would be a story idea maybe and I’m not supposed to share and I’m so powerfully broke. But whatever, I love writing and I love talking and fate has kept me alive so far. Failure to gain is not the same as loss. Maybe someone will help me.

Bitcoin, Zombies, Symbolism, and Kudzu

Apr 13

Posted by Innomen in Economics, Logic, Sociology | No Comments

Bitcoin!As I’m sure you know there was a recent explosion of interest in bitcoin leading to a short lived but sizable bubble. Poverty conditions forced me to sell my coins around 13$ each back when that was market value. As of this sentence they are at 108$ each, and during the bubble they got up over 200.

(If you don’t know what a bitcoin is start here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Introduction)

A quick Google of bitcoin leads to some truly hilarious crap. Bitcoin haters crack me up. The total value of bitcoins right now is just under 3 billion dollars according to Forbes. At what point will the haters admit it’s a real and viable thing? I mean if I made 3 billion dollars with my writing. I think it would be fair to say that at a minimum I was a successful writer.

In my opinion, at this point, informed bitcoin hate is a nearly flawless ulterior motive detector. Including some people who I think are hoping to exploit their influence among investors to suppress the value of bitcoins so they can secretly buy them more cheaply.

Sure investing in bitcoin to X degree might be a bad idea for Y group of people, but that’s true of any investment.

What I can assure the world of is that bitcoin value will NEVER hit zero because I promise to buy whatever is up for sale if that ever comes close to happening, just for bragging rights. And I’m sure I’m not alone there. So then it behooves us to think about other “worst case” scenarios above that threshold. The price set by people who are willing to say “meet my arbitrary/fixed price or take a hike” as a whole more or less divided by outstanding coins represent the floor and there is no going below that floor precisely because some people are irrational.

And that’s completely aside from all the other reasons bitcoin has utility above and beyond all other currencies. I’m not even going to try and lay them out, I’m just saying there is a rising baseline wholly independent of what you might call market pressures. I would literally burn physical money before I sell my last bitcoin. It will not leave me by my choice for anything other than life changing money/technology or a black swan event. I have a price, everyone does, but a drop in bitcoin value relative to the fiat currency of my country, is a non-factor.

I consider my last bitcoin my first bitcoin, a status symbol from when I was lucky enough to value something now at 100$ each that was at the time 5$ each. It’s also a piece of history and a piece of my era.

Bitcoin for me and many others has become not just an investment, but a symbol. And there is just no getting people to give that up once it becomes true for them. Bitcoin in this sense has become a little bit like firearms. They have utility and market value but for some, including me, they have also come to have meaning above and beyond the nuts and bolts of their function and operation.

They are a non-violent attack on banks and all architects of debt and oppression. They are a clear and present danger to anyone who wants unilateral control over your assets. They are a leveling factor. They are a protest song. They are proof that the information wants to be free. They are the best chance for a resurrection of real class class mobility my generation has ever personally seen. They are the future.

And call me crazy but I don’t ever see the value of a symbol which represents those things going under 20$ a share again for any meaningful length of time.

Now I do expect bubbles and crashes, technical problems and political problems, and I’ll admit that a severe enough combination of those factors could cause the price to temporarily dip below that new lowermost level, but I don’t believe it would ever stay there. And I think that level will rise.

I look at it like this. The total size the the global economy is somewhere around 70 trillion. The maximum number of bitcoins cannot exceed around 21 million. You divide one by the other and you get a ratio of around 3.5 million USD per BTC. So if around 10% (by asset, not population) begins treating BTC like a legitimate currency you’re looking at a possible value well over a quarter million each.

With potential like that it’s going to take something truly catastrophic to permanently kill its value. And I’m thinking that if something that big happens to us we might all be dead already anyway.

Which reminds me of my favorite whine about BTC being worthless. The zombie apocalypse argument. The crux of which is to remind me that I can’t spend BTC in a black out. (Forgeting the fact that I can’t use an ATM card during a blackout either, yet they remain popular.)

These people seem to forget we are an interconnected species and we only live in our current numbers because we have collectively learned to capture economy of scale. Think about NYC. Now imagine putting a wall around it and not letting anyone or any item in or out for 10 years. After that 10 years are up what do you think the population would be inside the wall? If you said something like “probably zero because nyc lacks farms” “or probably zero because of the fire/plague/riot) congratulations. You have a better grasp of reality and the price of interconnectedness and urban specialization than the ZA survivalist type.

Something like 90% of all existing currency is digital already. All the world has to decide is whether or not unilateral government control of a currency adds to or subtracts from its value. And the nature of bitcoin prevents the government from meaningfully participating in that decision. Sure they could declare war on it, and there are lots of discussions out there about how to kill bitcoins. But I don’t think it can be done or else someone would have done it by now.

The idea of killing bitcoin reminds me of something my dad said once about what it would take to exterminate kudzu. “You’d have to kill everything green.”

Show me the money.

Mar 24

Posted by Innomen in Economics, Ethics, Logic | No Comments

Today I looked at my stream. I do that less and less, and a thicker and thicker filter bubble is required for me to tolerate the frustration caused by the feeling of impotence being unheeded creates.

I feel too deeply and I apologize for the disservice this does to my readers if any and the hypocrisy and paradox of this sentiment, since I’m basically whining about not being read while I explain why I’m reading less and less.

If enough of the world cared to collectively pay my electric bill so I didn’t have to beg the government for an insanity label and a check or sentence my family to wage slavery as an alternative to eating a bullet, perhaps I wouldn’t feel this way.

But to date not counting what amounts to a clerical error and the soaring price of bitcoin, my lifetime income from my writing and my desperate and near constant effort to engage with humanity and participate in solving its problems and addressing it’s suffering is about 40$. (Not counting the hosting for this site graciously donated to me by one of my few readers, and now friend. So I guess in that sense the writing is self sustaining at least if not author sustaining.)

The phrase dollar vote comes to mine, and if that’s where I stand in the mind of the mass of humanity I genuinely want to help, then I must be doing an atrocious job indeed.

Is my writing and the desire to help that spawned it really so worthless to you all? It must be. Conversely, is the good done by the CEO of Goldman Sachs for example really so staggering? It must be. Has 50 Cent done more for humanity than Norman Borlaug? He must have.

To all children. My apologies for my failure. I swore when I was a kid that when I grew up I’d save other kids. And I meant all of them. All of you. But I can’t convince these people, these adults, of even the most obvious truths. I feel like I could hit them with a brick and they would still deny the existence of bricks. I guess like all my adult peers I’ll have to take part in passing the buck.