(Note: This is a draft, and I'm not sure I said quite what I wanted to say, but it is late. I will revisit it another time.)

Frequently, science and technology will start demonstrating an amazing effect through the careful manufacture of new processes. That leads a certain type of person to capitalize on this, under questionable premises. We're all aware of the kind of quackery that banks on the credibility of scientific achievement, such as "magnetic Chi balancing rings":

Manfred Porkert was quoted in Wikipedia as saying:

...the term qi comes as close as possible to constituting a generic designation equivalent to our word "energy". When Chinese thinkers are unwilling or unable to fix the quality of an energetic phenomenon, the character qi inevitably flows from their brushes.

In this product, we see the unholy union of the undefined (or very loosely defined) with the narrowly-and-well-defined. Yet at some level, it is easy to see how some might view electro-magnetism as "verifying what the ancient cultures knew all along"...that power and energy flow through the universe in ways that the eye cannot see. Bolstering that argument is the sad fact that many materialists who would have dismissed the vague Chinese notions were equally slow to accept science's more empirically-testable field of electromagnetism, until it gained popular acceptance.

So it's not that the victims of these products are lacking in intuition. If anything, their intuition is strong—they know that it is possible for interactions invisible to the naked eye to affect our material situation. Without that belief, and the willingness to look for and model things we cannot see—could scientists have ever made the mental leap to even look for electromagnetism and radiation?

Clearly, for science to gain credibility with holistic thinkers (and be accurate) they must phrase their work as a refinement of certain ancient traditions. Otherwise they seem to have an attitude that seems to sound like Jack Handey's joke:

"We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me."

The current situation is that when people are not happy with how well science extrapolates its findings in line with their intuition, they look elsewhere. Eventually they find someone who will sell them an interpretation that mutates a modest discovery into a cosmic notion of "what they always knew was true". A great example of a perplexingly weird movie that distorts a lot of buzzwords and scientific research to such speculative ends is What the Bleep Do We Know.

(Note: Despite the movie's rather grand distortion of Quantum Mechanics, some of it was done pretty well, including this basic explanation of particle wave/duality in a cartoon...



...yet doing a good job on such basics does not excuse the greater overstatements in the film.)

One thing that has come to my attention is that of the theory of The Holographic Universe. This suggests that each small part of the universe contains the information needed to recreate the whole. It's a pretty wild theory. But it's a new way of thinking, and some odd phenomena in science can indeed be explained by looking at them in a new way. I think the new way might be summarized somehow like this:

Imagine you are watching two people in a room. You know they are not communicating with each other—they have no cell phones or secret signaling method. Yet when one of them holds up their right hand, the other one INSTANTLY raises their left hand. In fact they seemed to make the decision at the exact same time—how could the second have known what the first was going to do?

The answer is not always obvious—but you probably weren't looking at two people in the first place. This strange instant communication can be explained as just one person and a mirror! Science has a lot of situations which might be re-imagined in an analogous way...to simplify what looked like a weird or complicated problem.

If you keep doing this over and over you can reduce a cosmos of things to study down into just one thing...e.g. The Holographic Universe. But I think of people getting too hyped about such things are getting ahead of themselves. It would be like someone who is so happy to have explained the person who instantly raises and lowers his hands, who gets confused thinking there's only a single thing to study—one person. But you really now have two things again—"people" and now "mirrors"!

It might be tempting to keep applying the method and investigate a way of saying there isn't really a person and a mirror but just a "personmirror". This single object can be explained as having properties that sometimes makes it look like a person, and sometimes look like a mirror. This would be analogous to finding an equation for the universe that could predict all past, present and future. I'm not going to say that isn't possible, but where's the chalkboard to write it down or the computer that's going to crunch the numbers?

(Note: This reminds me of the old Steven Wright joke: "I have a map of the United States...actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile' I spent last summer folding it. I also have a full-size map of the world. I hardly ever unroll it.")

What does it mean to take a small finding and turn it into something too large? The classic tale of over-reaching from a single observation is the story of the Blind Men and The Elephant. Everyone knows that each blind man grabbing a different part of the elephant was making a valid observation but not ready to accept the complexity of the whole, which didn't fit into a neat shape.

Discoveries of science are our observations. But it will take even harder thinking to assemble the pieces to the next level—not a glib armchair assessment from a non-scientist. I'd prefer it if the average New Age writer stuck closer to first-hand testimony and stuck to their guns about what they perceived, rather than overblowing the relevance of scientific discoveries to support their philosophy.

Coming on the heels of a dream in which a plush shark told me it thought of God as a "preservative" [1], someone asked what *my* notion of God was. It's not a word or concept I've given a lot of thought to...which might seem strange for me not to think about. After all, I sure seem preoccupied with trying to catch the attention of helpful/wise/guiding superintelligences—under most definitions, God would qualify!

Yet I think the reason I've avoided focusing on "God" is that I'm not very hung up on whether I meet the being that created The Universe. By the same token, had I been an orphan I don't think I would have spent much of my life searching for information about my parents. The odds of those particular adults being the only ones I needed to talk to would be unlikely.

This notion I have of "The Creator" not laying ultimate claim upon "The Created" features pretty heavily in my philosophy overall. If I were to write a song, I think it would be wrong to not allow others to sing or perform it if they wanted. Yet it would also be wrong for those people to pretend they had written it, if asked. Thus I'm more impressed by showings of ethics than showings of power—although I am all for using power when it can bring a serious change in making the world more fair.

(Note: I saw some of Gandhi The Movie last night, and it was interesting to see his perspective: "Where there's injustice, I always believed in fighting. The question is, do you fight to change things or do you fight to punish? I have found that we are all such sinners that we should leave punishment to God. And if we really want to change things... there are better ways of doing it than derailing trains or slashing someone with a sword.")

Despite my bias of "Existence of God: Not As Interesting a Question as You Might Think", I do have a meaning ascribed to the word. These are a few requirements I came up with off the cuff that would be qualify a being for the title "God" in my book (which, don't forget, is The Reality Engineering Handbook and not The Bible):

• Must have a vision of right and wrong. Something can't be amoral and have me consider it God. It has to be aware of suffering and pain (and able to empathize with our model of it, even if ours isn't the only model out there He has to take into account). He must want to improve the situation wherever He is able. He must consider the creative liberation of all consciousness and spreading of awareness to be a worthy goal. Some people might be fine with a less value-driven notion of God, as a kind of cosmic life force that feels no sadness at suffering. Their God doesn't care when a plant dies of lack of rain, or when a cat eats a mouse, or the human dies from murder. But I'm on board with "dividing the light from the darkness", else it's not God...it's just Math. I might diverge in opinion of justice from God at the moment, but as time reaches infinity I should come to agree with Him when I see the bigger picture, as per this classic Sinfest comic:






• Must be an active force. God wouldn't have to have created our Universe with the production of human species as a focus of His initial attention. In fact, He may even not know we're here yet. Omniscience is not a rule—since my God operates through The Law of Mechanism, he may take time to find us just as we might take time to locating subatomic particles after studying a collision. But He must have existed before humanity, must have been involved in whatever event sparked our current existence, and now that it's happened He must have the agenda of getting directly involved in the uplifting of species. Creating us and walking away wouldn't be enough to be God in my eyes:






• Must not uniquely identify with humanity. My God must be ready to embrace animals, alien races, and AI (when it arises, if it has not already). He is not the "created mankind in his own image because He's an old white guy and thinks it's okay to eat cows" God. He'd step in with animatronic soy cows that taste like the real thing, because he thinks you can have your cow and eat it too—all with no suffering. (Sidenote: If it's what you really want to believe, God might let you believe the soy cow is real and suffering at your hands, but he'd be busy liberating animal rights activists and cow souls out of the soy-cow-murder theater he left behind.)


• Must be self aware. God must know he exists and what He is doing, and He must have started His work completely alone. I don't think He has to know why, or where He came from. He merely needs to know where everything since him has come from and be able to explain it as a first-order or second-order by-product of His own doing.

My definition of God means He would have to be a real thing that interacts with other real things. Though it may seem to limit Him, practically speaking "being real" is not much of a constraint. After all, even with our tiny brains we can shape atoms and light...so for all practical purposes, a super-being could do quite a bit.

The best metaphor I can think of for how God can be real and yet reach up to us might be to say He is like an Operating System on a personal computer, while Earth and Ourselves are programs. An Operating System is a program too, just a special one that runs before the rest and that keeps all the programs in motion. For God OS to meet the rules above, He must be the primordial operating system that wrote us (or the things that wrote us). And unlike Windows, God would be a self-healing OS that is constantly reaching upward and refining things, with diligence and attention, subject only to the limits of The Law of Mechanism.

I'm okay with God having been created, but just have the rule that those creators have not ever (and will not ever) be able to interact with Him. It would be like He was set off in this Universe alone, to build and explore. Understanding God's haze on where He came from can be explained by something analogous to a bootstrap process—which if you've studied that in computers, can be fairly profound.

So now that the groundwork and definitions for AmIGodOrNot have been laid down, where do I stand on the likelihood of God's existence? I'm skeptical and increasingly on the side of the fence believing "the universe is a careening out of control with no one at the wheel". Thus it may be down to us, alone, to bring order to a universe with no active God. Dave Gahan's song for Kingdom says:

Can you feel me coming?
Open the door, it's only me
I have that desperate feeling
And trouble is were I'm going to be

I know you hear me knocking
So open the door and set me free

If there's a kingdom behind it all...
Is there a God who loves us all?
Do we believe in love at all?
I'm still pretending I'm not a fool

So in your infinite wisdom
You show me how this life should be
All your love and glory
Doesn't mean that much to me

Like Dave, I'm puzzled by my life experiences, and a bit worn out. I'm to the point where I'm not quite sure how happy I'm going to be about all the love and glory which might come in the future, even if it did. Sometimes we can be so burnt out that when we get to the end goal with the supposed prize we were seeking, we don't really want it that much any more and we're just depressed...so, c'mon God. Let's see some action here, I am ready to believe.

If you wander into the New Age and Spiritual sphere which , you will frequently find references to "The Law of Attraction". Wikipedia has analyzed it thusly:

The general consensus among New Thought thinkers is that the Law of Attraction takes the principle "Like Attracts Like" and applies it to conscious desire. That is, a person's thoughts (conscious and unconscious), emotions, and beliefs cause a change in the physical world that attracts positive or negative experiences that correspond to the aforementioned thoughts, with or without the person taking action to attain such experiences. This process has been described as "harmonious vibrations of the law of attraction", or "you get what you think about; your thoughts determine your experience".

Books and films like The Secret put forth this argument. They are widely criticized for their lack of credibility, and I agree: don't believe a yet-to-be-understood scientific law is responsible for any success their methods offer. Successful results from small-scale visualization exercises may seem like magic when people haven't understood how powerful that and a small amount of planning can be, but even common sense tells us that luck favors the prepared mind.

I've seen the "Like Attracts Like" law invoked in other contexts. This included the idea that on a spiritual course we are being constantly pulled closer toward our soulmates, or toward the experiences that we have dreamed for ourselves. Channelers say that if you are in telepathic communication with some being, it is because the two of you share something very similar and can resonate with each other. (This is much like if you pluck a guitar string very loudly and have another guitar in the room, that same string on the second guitar will start to vibrate.)

But if The Law of Attraction is THE prime directive of the cosmos, then it's a tough policy to live under in my case. It seems the other residents of my planet have very little in common with the way I think, so how did I get here with them! And I sure hope the spirit realm isn't a like-attracts-like situation in dreams, because there's frequently unpleasantness that gravitates my way. :(

(Note: I'm usually pretty nice in waking life—I even catch spiders in cups and put them outside instead of squishing them. If I were meeting beings "like me" in my dreams, they would not attack!!)

So what I've devoted my study to is The Law of Mechanism. That is to say: every system has rules, and if you don't understand them you can't really control what happens to you. The Law of Attraction is *sometimes* compatible with the Law of Mechanism—for instance masses coming together in space by gravity. But there are tons of exceptions—identical charged particles do not attract, they repel and need another model.

If you find a case where Law of Attraction is holding better than Law of Mechanism, it just means you were probably focusing on a smaller part of the mechanistic system than you should have. You must expand your theory of the system's working to account for whatever was making the Law of Attraction work in the places that it does. After doing this work, you have a model that can explain both the cases where like-attracted-like and the cases where it didn't.

For instance, Google is clearly a place where like attracts like. It was built that way! But you need more operating principles to understand it than that—it is a system, and they ban pages sometimes. Two banned pages may have a lot in common but find no attraction in the Google sphere. If your internet connection goes down, you will need careful application of The Law of Mechanism to get it working again!

A dream discussion about Google's color-coded aesthetic reminded me of my belief in the importance of Semiotics. Simply put, semiotics is the study of signaling processes—and how the symbols around us carry meanings.

Some people would say that anything can be misinterpreted, and thus everything is arbitrary. Yet in my view, meaning can be constructed and applied. I think that using symbols carefully can improve the chance of meaning being preserved when an object is taken out of context, or modified. Doing a proper job gives us discernment and builds worlds where communication is possible.

(Note: I do know the CIA thinks pretty carefully about how to make flyers, such as these warnings which were scattered all over Hiroshima prior to bombing it.)

Look at this picture of hot and cold water taps both drawing off of a cold water pipe, where the labeling of red and blue have no meaning:

I often feel like the uneducated villager in a country without running hot water who goes to the store and puzzles over the red and blue taps they sell.

me: "I need yellow. That would coordinate with the color scheme in my bathroom."
merchant: "These come in red and blue only."
me: "Could you order me a yellow one?"
merchant: "I have never seen one. We can't special order, the taps we get are dropped from the sky and always are blue and red."

Perhaps I'd go all over to every shop in town trying to find a yellow one, only to see that I can't get anyone to sell me anything other than red or blue. But perhaps at one store I see an interesting thermometer.






I may draw the conclusion that the taps were constructed in a place that has not only cold water infrastructure, but some kind of hot water infrastructure. But with no way to prove it, because no one in my country believes such a thing exists. I'm stopped at every turn because I have no way to get out of the country without being shot at the border.

I've frequently experienced anger directed at the lack of forthrightness of dream entities who would seem to have the ability to assist me in building a permanent connected line to other dimensions. Regular reader and participant mr_nihil asked the probing question: "If you were somehow in charge of another world, would you let most of the current population in?"

My answer grew lengthy enough that I wanted to make it an essay rather than a comment.

---

If I were able to set up the design the world I'm in charge of, no one is unwelcome but everything is guided toward its right place. I don't have a problem with unpleasant people existing, nor do I take issue with them being happy. I'm merely mad when they have undue influence on those who do not deserve it...if they were all alone in a bubble munching on Doritos with other unpleasant people, that's fine.

In fact, I probably enjoy many things that unpleasant people have made. It may that the precise reasons I find them unpleasant were what gave them the perspective for their invention, making it appear surprising and thus unique to me. It would be foolish to try and define the entirety of my universe so that such viewpoints could never exchange information with me (hopefully in a very indirect way, e.g. through trade of inanimate objects).

My only rule is that the walls which separate groups of beings from each other not be impenetrable. There should be freedom for each person to find their right place, and not be stuck somewhere with those they don't like. Communities can have policies for admitting new members, but shouldn't hide their existence all together, at least not long-term.

Are there hidden communities? I often quote this bit from Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel, where the narrator has entered a secret spirit-world that surprises him. He expresses his outrage that those beings are not communicating better about their elusive plans with mortals, and supposes to tell them about the right way to do it:

"Fools," said I, "you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said "The words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence"

I have mixed feelings about this concept of being so subtle. But the need for subtlety in intervention does arise here on Earth. Let's take a real world example: the 5-year-old girl in the neighboring house is *constantly* being verbally abused by the father, in a loud and unacceptable way that I can hear in my room next door.

Certainly it would be nice if I could go over there and tell the kid that this is unfair treatment. I'd like to offer some insight into what might be done about it so they aren't alone in processing this. But if I tried to influence this situation and talk to her when no one was looking...that's not feasible for a stranger to do. I could get in a lot of trouble, and talking to the father is likely not going to work either.

Despite the fact that something can in principle be done about this--realistic solutions are hard to come by. The pool of foster parents is somewhat limited, and might not provide as well financially. The kid's not being *beaten*, so child protective services don't get involved. Also there might be attachments! Despite this guy being a jerk, if the kid found out she was going somewhere that the father couldn't go, she might not accept it.

Though I seem stuck in helping, there are things I can do. I can write children's books, or make TV commercials, or games that might appear on the back of a cereal box. Then I can hope that all of my little work will help that child (and more than just that child) so that when they get to 18 they won't be as damaged as they might otherwise be. I always thought They Might Be Giants were quite subversive with their children's album, suggesting an active rebellion, as in "I am not your broom":

Now Broom, you must now sweep for me
The dust it fills my room

No, John, I will not sweep for you
For I am not your broom

What nonsense are you speaking, Broom
My words you must obey

Another life awaits me and
I'm leaving you today

I am not your broom
I am not your broom
I've had enough, I'm throwing off
My chains of servitude

I am not your broom
I am not your broom
No longer must I sweep for you
For I am not your broom

If the macrocosm and the microcosm have similarity, then this applies to any smart being that might reach down to help me. Not only might it be "illegal" to even start a direct conversation, but there could also be a limited number of "foster families" to put me with & perhaps there are higher priority subjects. My attachments to this world might be too great--for all my complaining, I might be homesick after a day or two.

Though some of this is what I've put together from intuition, some has been explicitly communicated in other dreams. Once a dream-being told me he was not allowed to talk to me because it was illegal, and there was quite active prosecution going on [1]. Others have shown me hospitals where they're trying to orient newly reincarnated beings to their non-material bodies, and that it's a tough process [2]...the more experience you've had in the physical world, the better you might be able to adapt, so it could be worth living out your life and getting your mind as far as possible before you try it.

Most people assume there is an objective physical world outside of themselves which they explore while awake—and then as they sleep, their experiences are entirely a by-product of their own minds. I've been rebelling against this duality and claiming that it is possible to receive signals from "outside" during the dreamstate. I say the reason it doesn't seem like there is a coherent dreamworld is that we are like babies who haven't yet learned how to assimilate the dream stimulus into a fitting coherent model. Thus, for us "dreamstate babies" it takes time for the right signals to fall into place so we can really understand what we are seeing, even if it doesn't fit the 3-D model we learned as "waking babies".

Well, that's ONE idea...

Another way to break the duality would be to argue that our waking experience is not as firm and rigid as we believe, but rather emerges from our own mind and not from the "outside". Thus, one might want to practice bringing one's waking life toward using more of the models that come from dreams (being able to conjure and transmute matter, levitate). This is a very different direction than constantly bringing reality checks and stability into dreams... it's about bringing the malleability of the dreamstate into waking life.

Touche.

I used to be very open to this other model. Many years ago, as part of my first foray into the New Age movement, I was into books like The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts. This is one of the better known books in the conscious creation movement, in which she offers advice that she delivers in a trance state from an entity that names itself Seth.

(Incidentally, her explanation of channeling and model of oversouls as presented in the "Oversoul 7" books was actually very persuasive to me. When discussing the nature of her channeling work, she said that it was a model she had adopted because she internally could 'feel' the difference between when a thought came to her instantly and when she had to work for it, so she began to gain an awareness of her internal dialogue and could tell what came from "Jane" and what came from "Seth". I go through something similar--in fact, this blog is only one aspect of my personality and I break it down through a certain name and identity, and that is a useful division.)

Seth's advice is similar but opposite to mine. I suggest that goals like reading and writing persistently in dreams are very attainable, though they require discipline and practice on small things... like reality-checks in your daily life. Seth suggests that we can consciously create our bodies out of physical matter and do extreme things like heal our organs or grow wings... but it involves a process of greater attention to our conscious thoughts. Dreams are a footnote in Seth's world, because he thinks where we are and where we need to focus is on greater empowerment through raised consciousness; the gateway to his plane of reality is through being more awake, not more drugged and fuzzy.

I've been mesmerized by the weirdness of what I go through in the "drugged and fuzzy" dreams, as well as what hypnotized or trance-state people say when they're in that state. There's enough structure and coherence that it points toward an escape from my waking life, and I'm looking for that escape. So my wishful thinking is that empowerment will come from study of these occult secrets. Yet if you believe that we are "here" because we are "supposed to be" (a very new age concept) then attempts at escape miss the point.

Because of some various personal frustrations with the ability to manipulate waking life, I stopped reading things like Seth's words. My challenge to Seth would sound like this: "If you're from another dimension of super-evolved beings, why don't you describe your daily life? Map coordinates that we can test with radio waves? Why don't you tell us about an invention we've never heard of? After all, even the dumbest person in our society could describe a Rubik's Cube to an alien, or draw one. You are clearly smart but you offer us nothing besides feel-good mumbo jumbo. Why does everything you say fit so consistently with what a literate new age lady with a perm might make up? Give me alien PROOF, something ASTONISHING! Interdimensional channels should do more than paraphrase!"

Or in other words, I came to feel that my own transcripts were besting those of Jane in terms of contact-with-transdimensional-alien proof territory. So I turned toward my own experience, looking to it for guidance instead of the New Age section at Powell's. But moving on doesn't mean I don't believe what Jane/Seth said, I just wanted MORE. And as Jane is dead, I can't go to her to have my questions addressed.

Recently I met someone (who has training in hypnosis and a family history of working with it) who has the "We Create Our Reality, even in Waking Life" point of view. I had not really thought about how this was contentious with my "We Don't Entirely Create Our Reality, Not Even In Dreams" agenda. It is and it isn't, but as one of my big goals of meeting hypnotists is to get transcripts of what I might say in a trance state... she asked the tough question:

"What is your ideal result from such a session?"

...and the even tougher metaphysical issue...

"What if your desire for what will come from that session is the critical factor of determining what will happen in that session, and how you will interpret it?"

As evidenced by the fact that I used to really identify with The Nature of Personal Reality and consider it a must-read for everybody... I can't just dismiss these questions. Most people don't ask them because they're so busy attacking my thesis of dream-as-objective-experience that they don't turn it around to reality-as-subjective-experience.

The best analogy I have to explain my wish has a lot to do with validation, and I am reminded of the Invader Zim episode Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom... I don't want people to think I'm crazy. But in further conversations about reality and challenges therein, I had to ask: who is my audience? Why do I care about proving things to people who elect to dismiss my ideas on their own merits? Is my entire system of goals misguided from inception?

These are questions that are very big, and I don't necessarily have very good answers. I don't think elementary school kids often have very good answers for why they want to drive a car, or drink beer... but if they get an awareness of those concepts they might tend to obsess over them rather than focus on making the most of "the phase they are there to experience". General challenges to why I want to rebuild waking reality in dream life rather than turn waking life into my ideal vision is a valid point to bring up... and I'll work on that explanation.

In the meantime, I think perhaps I should try and refine my goal for being (myself) hypnotized as that I wish to become a channel and speak to an interrogating audience directly, whilst awake.

A lot of people who've gone far into shamanism are insistent that trees have a certain spirit and thought (despite lack of what we would call a brain). I can't say I've ever had experiences leading me to feel I can verify the claim, but I do believe I've had experiences suggesting animals might be more conscious than we give them credit for. And I'm willing to generally grant the idea that consciousness may be a pervasive universal quality.

(One person espousing this idea is Peter Russell, in this video on the primacy of consciousness).

Recently I was describing how when humans behave very predictably they start to lose their importance as free agents and might better be modeled as a force of nature. For instance, I remember an instance in which a Christian man linked to an article on The Onion which was a "humorous" opinion column. The Onion joke was written from the point of view of a girl raving about how much she was looking forward to getting an abortion. On his website the Christian railed against it, saying it was an outrage that someone would be so brazen and sick as to think it was *fun* to kill their unborn child. Hundreds of mocking atheist bloggers linked to his rant, saying it proved that Christians were stupid and couldn't recognize humor. But after a critical link mass had been reached, he changed the page so that instead of being the critique, it was graphic photography of aborted fetuses.

So who turned out to be stupid? Kind of like Jujitsu, he redirected the energy of his opponents to get his message linked... raising his Google rank and possibly bringing those who were eager to click-and-mock closer to confronting the harsh reality of abortion. These human beings acting very predictably can be manipulated, and when that happens the inner consciousness can become ignored and people can be studied as a kind of science. A sufficiently high-level entity might not bother to learn our language, but just start harnessing us based on our predictable behavior...using it to create a desired resource. (I think the Matrix movie went a bit too far in proposing that machines would actually harvest humans for electricity, but metaphorically it makes sense to say it is "energy".)

Thus it wouldn't surprise me if atoms had an internal consciousness, but we are only able to know them (at the moment) for their emergent properties. Perhaps if I took enough LSD I'd be talking to trees like Timothy Leary and listening to their treeish wisdom, yet I don't think that's where I'm going to be doing my investigation. ("If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? Maybe. If they screamed all the time. For no good reason."--Jack Handey)

Last night I watched an interesting BBC video about four famous contributors to mathematics, all of whom died of suicide or in sanitoriums. It's called "Dangerous Knowledge":

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3503877302082311448&q=dangerous+knowledge&total=342&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

It opens talking about Georg Cantor, who was given particularly harsh treatment for his theories (now accepted as foundational in mathematics, thus more or less 100% correct as far as we know in 2007). Many of his famous colleagues at the time said his approaches were "a grave disease"... "laughable and wrong"... or called him a "scientific charlatan". The video puts emphasis on how much these attacks from these particular people hurt him, and led him into isolation and self-destruction.

When the problem you study is only of interest to a small community who can understand it, it is hard on visionaries who find themselves under attack by that group. In my case, I don't know that I have a "group"... but certainly my group is not the New Age movement. They tend to lack education, and they often have extremely bad taste. Even their websites are horrible amalgamations of the worst wallpaper colors, animated GIFs, and grievous application of the Papyrus font. Though I might find agreement with some of their unique experiences, these are not people I want to spend time getting to know.

Who do I want to be accepted by? Educated, curious, artistic, scientific people. But as I've mentioned before in terms of my conflict with perspectives like those held by Dawkins and Dennett, there is a tendency for intellectuals to take on an attitude that becomes headstrong and dismissive. What I consider to be my obvious intelligence does not spare me—it is impossible to be respected and have a dissenting viewpoint, when dealing with a conformist group.

A recent study published by some researchers managed to give people a sensation that matches empirical descriptions of "Out of Body Experiences". A lot of bloggers have chosen to write about it, and depending on their biases, they either think it validates the accounts of OBE-havers or invalidates them. I tripped across a journal in which a converted Atheist quoted a portion of the account including this sentence:

"the studies suggest a scientific explanation for a phenomenon often thought to be a figment of the imagination"

And added his own two cents:

"(...) No doubt believers and meditators will come up with some other concocted reason to think science is wrong about this. When will the supernaturalist madness end?"

I responded with this:

I'm sure many atheists denied that anyone ever experienced an out-of-body experience. Now they might concede "ok, it happened, you weren't making it up... BUT it didn't mean what you thought it meant!" I think many scientists tend to marginalize the significance of that shift. There is a big difference between being right all along, and merely being willing to change your opinion if new evidence comes to light! It’s no justification for cruelty or dismissal in the meantime.

So I think you should be more cautious of statements like "when will the supernaturalist madness end?" Some of those you are labeling were the ones who stuck to their guns: they bravely reported the facts of what they saw and experienced in OBEs, and didn’t recant merely for fear of being labeled "mad". They gave the data to help motivate the experimentation, and this is a step toward bridging those experiences with existing peer-reviewed research.

Long live the scientific method: cornerstone of intellectual growth and best-known compass of reality. But death to fundamentalism... on both sides of this kind of debate... we have tons still to learn! Who knows what other findings will surprise science and bolster the accounts of some aspects of "supernaturalist" experience?

In truth, I kinda despise religion, and I'm tempted to launch into a Edward Norton 25th Hour rant about the various kinds of people I dislike. But I think I see all things as religions; if someone spends all their life in World of Warcraft vs. studying the Torah, I'm not going to say one is obviously better.

I play Devil's advocate because there's a tiny fraction of people I care about being overlooked and mistreated, myself included. From the outside I don't see how one would tell the difference based on anything other than careful conversation with the individuals in question. So I push for more open-mindedness. But like the four from the video, the fight takes a toll.

Imagine a person seated on a sofa playing Super Mario Brothers. Every move that Mario makes precisely correlates with a signal received on a Nintendo controller—because that's the way it works. Yet if Luigi were studying Mario from inside-the-game, it might be very difficult to "see" the person sitting on the couch who is playing, even with relatively advanced instrumentation.

As Luigi's tools come closer to the reality of the hardware, all of Mario's impulses would appear to originate from "the controller port". Phenomena like the delay patterns of fingers pushing would be discovered as cul-de-sacs and footnotes of "gamepad science".

(I am reminded of this poem about blind men and an elephant, which has many versions.)

Analogously, the brain is clearly how our presence in the physical world using the "5 senses" is manifest. Just like you-as-Mario can't be animated in the Nintendo universe without a controller, you-as-Human can't be animated on Earth without a brain. But just because the brain can be analyzed to be a function of much of our thought doesn't mean this is the only place the thought is happening. It just means the brain is the bottleneck for our spirit to manifest itself.

A question Luigi might need to face during his study is what he's really interested in. Does he care about Mario, or the person playing the game seated on a couch? Mario's abilities, appearance, and mannerisms will vanish when you pull out the cartridge and meet the player; who might be in a wheelchair (and not even speak Italian). So who is this Mario guy anyway, and does he really die when a Goomba gets him?

(For an interesting study of how people's game avatars differ from their real-life incarnations, this slideshow is informative.)

I think we have some similar questions to face about our higher selves. They might not be "higher"—they might be less capable and living through us as an escape from their own limitations. (Notice that Mario, despite his dangerous lifestyle, is effectively immortal...while we pulling the strings seem to be the fragile ones.) I'm fairly certain that our higher selves don't have as much in common with the idea we've built up about our bodies, personalities, and talents as we'd like to believe.

On the extreme, some people are very convinced that the brain is the controller and the couch is empty. But it doesn't have to be all one or the other! There are non-player-characters and player-characters in online games, which is to say that some beings have players on couches and some don't. If you were doing lab experiments inside the universe of World of Warcraft, it would really matter what specific individuals you chose to study as to where you'd find the whole thing bottoming out.

My leaning to believe in another life is based on dream experiences more than anything else. They lead me to believe that we aren't seeing connections that exist in higher dimensional spaces, and those connections are as tangled as any brain we might map out here in 3-D space.

When studying the work of people who focus on neurons and the brain to find consciousness, I'm quite interested. I read Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, though I like the more open-minded attitude that Oliver Sacks has in describing people with abnormal brain circumstances. Dennett really seeks to squash the notion that there are things about the brain we don't understand...I think he's loony for pushing that viewpoint.

Putting too much on the brain seems parallel with a turn-of-the-century scientist studying a modern computer on a wireless network. Knowing what he does about electrical conductivity, he might trace the internal circuits and start mapping out the machine. As he delves, he'll discover the entire field of semiconductor science; marveling at how tiny things get and the millions of transistors he finds when he breaks the chip apart. In fact, he can be so overwhelmed by the intricate and magical beauty of this new field that he might ridicule those who invoke "invisible magic wires" to explain what's going on: can't they see how much of what they had not understood before is explained by the architecture he's discovered? Don't they see how information is stored magnetically on the hard drive, and migrated into physical memory on the bus? Not a single invisible wire need be invoked to explain the entire operation of The Sims.

Yet for all his amazing findings, his assumption is wrong: there *are* invisible magic wires...he's merely yet to discover the 802.11g technology integrated into the Centrino chip and exactly what role it plays in the overall system. Precisely how much his explanation fails depends on what programs he runs--if he sticks to spreadsheets and Solitaire, then the invisible magic wire won't be relevant at all. But if he happens to run a web browser, then questions his model can't answer start to mount up.

People like Dennett, Dawkins, and the neuroscience camp are doing a great job of characterizing systems in the brain. But their insistence that the brain is where the buck stops is parallel to telling people who are getting IM messages or streaming video that it's all coming from their hard drive. I'm not in a position to show them The Invisible Wire any better than Galileo could have handed anyone a moon rock—I'm just a guy who's turned off by how little credit they give to the experiences of intelligent people who just happen to have their firewall configured differently.

Maybe this invisible wire lives somewhere in The Tenth Dimension?

I've struggled with a difficult balance between the wish to be incredibly clear, and the constant desire to be cryptic in order to attract attention.

The new LiveJournal userpic I made does a couple of things. It gets rid of the lens flare—which seemed kind of cool many years ago but these days is a bad-photoshop-art cliche. The background color is chosen to seamlessly match the color when shown in context with my journal. It embeds the journal name inside, along with the little icon that LJ uses for a user.

Sanity check for all readers in this universe and others

The background color of the icon should be: #ebf5fc (a pale blue, which is almost white)
The text should read: realityhandbook
The IP address serving the journal's material should be: 204.9.177.18

And here's where I face the dilemma. Do I play the straight man, and make all this information accurate as I see it? Or do I scramble it up, just in order to try and make a point...and get people to develop their skills a little further?

For instance, if I subtracted one from each of the RGB color components, how would you be able to tell? Do you have the skills to find out what the IP address is, and do you know how to deal with a poisoned Domain Name Server? I can see if anyone's paying attention, and if I get a mail that says: "It doesn't match, your color is off..." then I can rest better because I know the people around me are educated, investigating, active minds. Not only can I trust them to get my back, I can trust them to be watching out in general.

Speaking of watching out, I've managed to connect with Nmeumoni Nmeumoni on chat and though our conversation is anything but normal, there's hope for getting questions answered. Why 125 myspace pictures, many of which are nearly identical? Do you live like this, for real? Why so many ae's? (I'd long used them before finding this person, perhaps I will write a story explaining that history at some point. I do consider æ to be something of a secret handshake, though like all symbols it can be used for pretty much any purpose.) I'll keep delving but it's slow, because the subject will usually end conversations with the need to go recharge its "aenergi".

When conversations are frustrating I often go off on my own creation cycle, instead of getting at the reality of the situation. Or here's another example...even though in my initial creation of the LJ icon the background was a specific color, the process of sending it to LJ caused it to be re-encoded. So doing an eyedropper test I learned my information was unintentionally inaccurate. When I get hasty I think "Oh, that's all part of the game!" But for right now I'm in the mood for clarity, so I fixed it.

CAPTCHAs are getting out of control, and when I saw this style pop up on Myspace days later I was pretty much thrown back to a dream I had:



Amazingly unreadable. Looking on Google for anyone else who agreed that MySpace CAPTCHAs were insane, I found this rather interesting article (warning, turn down the sound!) which shows how much worse it might get.

I wrote the blog author the following letter.

---

I found your entry about future CAPTCHAs, amusing and prescient. But I couldn't find the comment button, perhaps I have to crack your new CAPTCHA to be able to? :)

I'm very concerned about the evolution of spam and web scraping, especially the reverse problem: what do we do when the computers are the smart ones and *we're* dumb. Imagine the music not being there to distract, but actually being part of the puzzle...like you have to synergize something about the music and the words. The sense-impaired have a tough enough time already. Have you ever actually tried one of the audio CAPTCHAs? They're tough, try the audio on this one:

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

I am a chronic lucid dreamer and recently journaled on the topic of a related experience:

http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/40960.html

Then coming across the Myspace CAPTCHAs today--required for every message sent to a new person--it really had a close feeling. I don't know if it's because the site doesn't trust me yet or if that's how it is for all accounts. But it made the fact that I've been getting Myspace spam seem a bit more amazing...like, who's cracking these regularly in order to send me fake profiles trying to advertise phony dating services? Does anyone take that bait? How can it be worth the work?

Food for thought. Anyway, great post, and I also really enjoyed checking out your scenemusic...it's good! I used to be very much into Purple Motion. If your blog has a comment mechanism I'm missing, let me know where it is!

I saw this quote from Carl Sagan:

"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries."

It's interesting to hear a quote like this from a steadfast atheist. I generally associate atheism with an oeuvre of dogmatic rejection of experiences like my own, in which internal reports of are discarded merely because the analyzing parties don't experience them. Yet Sagan advocated for sending signals into space to try and tell aliens about Earth, which put him a bit on the fringe:

"Sagan was a proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to listen with radio telescopes for signals from intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms. So persuasive was he that by 1982, he was able to get a petition advocating SETI published in the journal Science, signed by 70 scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners. This was a tremendous turnaround in the respectability of this controversial field. Sagan also helped Dr. Frank Drake write the Arecibo message, a radio message beamed into space from the Arecibo radio telescope on November 16, 1974, aimed at informing extraterrestrials about Earth." (from Wikipedia)

Culturally, we disagree and factionalize about so many things...even when we all experience them, presumably in approximately the same way. Two people can watch identical movie and one person can like it and another can hate it, or come away with completely different opinions—even though we generally assume they heard and saw roughly the same sensory input. So when you think about how much disagreement there is in the world already among people whose senses tell them the same things, it's no surprise we're going to disagree over things that are not common experiences.

In trying to place myself in the philosophical spectrum, I don't know where to be; I'm very empathetic to the aesthetics of the hardened scientists, but my life is so strange I feel like an outcast talking to them. But now and again they show so much openness about the ideas of other forms of life in other dimensions and with other properties that I wonder where we'd be at if I could feel like they'd take me seriously? In this speech by Richard Dawkins (entitled "Queerer than we can suppose") he speaks about many things I've thought about, including the idea of bringing quantum-level simulations up to a scale where we can learn them intuitively, and how we might be able to build intuition about things that we have no ability to naturally perceive:



A good listen.

We're all familiar with the typical colorblindness "dot" patterns in which colorblind people can't see the number. Today I saw a counterexample where the colorblind have the leg up:

If you're colorblind, you'll easily see the number 5 above—it'll just jump right off the page. Color sensing people should be able to make out a blue-pink-purple 5 in the mess of color now that I've mentioned it...but it's less obvious because your greater ability to see the other color distinctions makes this appear very "noisy".

It's an interesting example where people who are more sensitive might well be considered to be "missing the obvious"...and points to how having a sense that other people do not have can be problematic, leading you to lack another sense.

My own senses--while awake--are probably very poor. I know I don't see very well (without glasses) and my sense of smell is not very good, plus my touch is reduced by something known as Raynaud's Syndrome. I'll eat pretty much anything without complaint, though I think I can describe tastes pretty well...still, I'm average at best in this area. I tend to hear things others do not, so my ears might be better than average.

Amnesty International has a campaign to fight net censorship, where you put a little bit of Javascript on your page that fetches a segment of text from a censored website/domain and place it on your pages:

http://irrepressible.info/

The idea of trying to "jump past" a censorship filter is a lot like the tactics in spamming! In fact, I've noticed that practically every spam I get these days is including some of the text from a published book in it. Maybe we're supposed to ignore that image/ad thing and just reassemble texts from if our oppressive gov't is restricting intellectual property! I certainly wonder, based on my dreams, what kind of logic or effort it might take to pass information through the barrier of a conspiracy—what information are we being kept from?

Something curious I've noticed about Google ads is that it has something of this viral character. If you look at a google ad it sometimes injects a colored border around the ad, which varies from site to site. It makes me wonder if the color is carrying some kind of information about whether you should trust the hosting site (or the ads linked within?) I don't know enough about it to say precisely whether Google is doing anything tricky or not, but the potential does exist if you carry an ad that is a function of the site to do something like Amnesty International's trick.

The epitaph on Shakespeare's supposed tomb says this:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosèd here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

This is clearly an allusion to the whole Egyptian mummy's curse and related folklore. But we're talking about a genius writer who thinks people are just actors on the World's Stage. Isn't it likely that he'd see his skeleton as little more than a prop to be played with in Hamlet?

They say Shakespeare penned this, which implies that he wrote it while he was *alive*. Now if while still alive *you* said: "Cursed is the (wo)man who moves my bones!", you'd be saying "Argh, my life sucks, what a plight I have." That's because YOU move your bones...with your muscles...under the control of your mind.

Shakespeare is full of double entendres. I'd go so far as to say he was notorious for them. We can take bets on which of these was meant in more seriousness—but they both were intended—otherwise it's a non-sequitur. But when I search the web trying to find someone else who agrees with me on this, I'm like Mugatu from Zoolander: "Doesn't anybody notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!" Just lots of people wondering why Shakespeare would believe in curses!

It may seem like a little thing, but it's not a little thing. It gets at the thrust of the very isolating plight being spoken about by The Bard...or rather, it doesn't.

Let us think about what it means for an object to be "Real". Real objects have real dependencies—the physics or expectations upon which they have been implemented. I'll pick an example of an object we might evaluate...how about a toaster?

You generally expect a toaster to have a power plug. But what else does a toaster depend on besides electricity? Of course, it depends on several natural phenomena—like the ability for air to transmit warmth, or for electricity to cause coils to get hot. Perhaps it seems silly to mention these things, but every dependency matters if you try to apply the design in other contexts. A toaster's dependence on gravity is important if you're an astronaut—the bread would float out unless you physically held it in the device!

Some dependencies are not acceptable. If your toaster also came with a large "adapter" that you had to plug into your oven, this would be a cause for concern! Firstly, there is the issue of awkwardness of the connection—it takes up physical space, and may prevent you from using the toaster and the oven at the same time. Also having to put some kind of heatproof tube which extends between the two devices creates another potential point of failure...which could be quite dangerous.

But conceptually speaking, it seems like you should be able to use a toaster even if you don't have an oven. Of course, you don't have to worry too much about your toaster actually being 'fake' and just being an interface to your oven's heat—because if your toaster depended on the oven's heat you would be required to attach some kind of tube carrying that heat.

Three dimensional space generally provides a good sanity check on dependencies. If your appliances were were unnecessarily depending on things they weren't supposed to, then your house would look like some kind of Rube Goldberg Device, like this one made by the Japanese to cook Ramen:

As silly as this is...we're already seeing precisely such implementations when the restrictions of time, and space, and cost of components are completely removed from a design problem. Sadly, this is precisely the situation that has arisen with computer software.

Unlike the physical world, our current operating systems don't do a very good job of letting the casual user dismantle the software they are using and understand the dependencies inside it. When you try to run TOASTER.EXE and it says you have to install OVEN.DLL...how would you know whether this is a legitimate or illegitimate dependency? To those who understand software, they understand that often programs are written with dependencies that are nearly as ludicrous...introducing bloat, limitations, and unnecessary points of failure.

When I think about the kind of illusions we might face as technology advances, the dream about Reliable Culture comes to mind. In that dream, a girl and i were dealing with a product that would taste and look like wine if you drank it straight. I scolded her for buying it from a "spell shop" because it was designed to stimulate only the "wine sense" of one's memory—thus it wasn't completely implemented with all the protocols of a liquid!

Even in today's world, it is often less expensive to get a simulacrum of an object or experience than to obtain the full object or experience itself. Yet at some point the simulacrum will break down from the reality.

Admittedly, some people might prefer the "fake"—those who purchase pornographic videos may actually prefer that to the actual reality of going through the experiences depicted. Yet by and large, simulations are a shoddy substitution for the real experience you expect. Pushing the "wine button" in your brain may be an inexpensive shortcut, but something that just pushes the "wine button" can't be used in cooking to create a new and nuanced flavor for a sauce.

So perhaps we should be thankful for our relatively stable system of physics—with only one kind of heat, and where you can't make a wine that isn't also obeying the protocols of a liquid! Living in a virtual reality will certainly open up possibilities for exploits beyond any of the deceptions that we've seen in this world.

I've found that there is a big difference between me thinking something and saying it in a dream. Frequently when I share a piece of specific information, I find myself getting whacked out of an environment and awoken. For instance, the moment I said "United States of America" I felt a strong push out of a dream that had otherwise been going along fine[1].

The way it feels is that there are certain words and names that cause retaliation when I say them. Kind of like if you say "Viagra" in an email and suddenly it gets swept away as spam. I'm very curious about the nature of the filters and evolving infrastructure of our communications network that people tend to gloss over.

For instance, look at this picture that came attached to a Spam email:

If this is an authentic attempt at marketing, it is tough to imagine what value it has to the sender to be putting so much static on an image. It makes it harder to read. One radical possibility is that the markings are hidden information encoded on top of a seemingly generic advertisement. By broadcasting the message all over the internet, it might be a means of anonymously collecting secret data without pointing a finger at a specific recipient.

That might sound far-fetched, but many hackers have been caught because their mechanisms for hijacking passwords sent obvious data to a single traceable destination. Whoever set up that account or accesses it is obviously the perpetrator. For instance, the backdoor in G-Archiver sent user names and passwords to the author's Gmail account. Contrast this with a spamming system which puts information everywhere, but that only the sender can decode.

(Note: If you want to read more about how meaningful information can actually be encoded into such "noise", then check out Wikipedia's article on Steganography. For a very simplistic example of hiding a message in a spam email, try out Spam Mimic.)

The idea that mysterious data is encoded in these messages is very interesting to me. But the more "reasonable" interpretation is that the static somehow increases the odds that the message will be delivered. But why would this be the case? One answer would be if there was software trying to read the images, and rejecting them if it could make out the letters to say certain things...passing them through if not.

Though that may sound preposterous, a little research reveals that this is the case. Many email systems employ optical character recognition (OCR)—these are computer programs with the ability to convert JPEGs into text files. Once the text has been extracted from the image, the results are fed into the same algorithms that filter out letters with words like "Viagra" or "Investment Opportunity".

The way I found out about this was not because I got a message or notice from my email carrier about the exciting new technology that was being applied to screen my mail. It was evident when I received the image that got through. When we see unusual things taking a certain shape or pattern, it can be instructive. For instance, this spam which was recently sent to a friend:

From: "Jamie Clemons" <a-b-c@agion-tech.com>
Date: 30 de mayo de 2008 11:48:25 PM PDT
Subject: Let's chat

Hello! I am tired this evening. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you. Email me at Birgit@whoplantcut.cn only, because I am using my friend's email to write this. I want to show you some pictures.

This picture has the same noisy patterns on it, quite similar to the textual spam. Once again we must ask the question: would this message not have been delivered if the noise weren't there? Are there certain faces or photos that are being screened out just as mechanically as certain words. If so, how can this be possible?

There is already considerable research into automatically identifying photographs as being potentially "adult". These computer programs tend to be very conservative—looking for certain characteristics common to human body parts or flesh tones. Frequently, innocent images are falsely classified as mature...when they are not.

Google's SafeSearch is a combination of those image processing techniques, as well as looking at the rest of the text on the webpage where the image appears. Yet it is still instructive to repeat one's search with the filter on and off, in order to see what you're missing. For instance, look at this page of the first 15 results for "Human Sexuality".

Strict Filtering:






Moderate Filtering:






No Filtering:






You may find some of the banned images to be surprising. The simple diagram with two circles in the lower-right hand corner of the "unfiltered" results may be interpreted as cartoon breasts by the robotic logic of the filter (at least, when paired with some sex talk). It starts seeming that our picture of "Jamie Clemons" could be filtered out for its flesh tones, and somehow the marks are disrupting the recognition.

Whether or not there is an adult filter on your email...yet...there is another explanation for how the weird dots on the woman's face would assist with delivery of the message. There is filtering based on a "fingerprinting" technique. If an image is circulated around in email and identified as Spam, then if any region of that image is recognized as "visually similar" to an attachment to another message, then it is marked as spam as well. The disruption to the image must be uniform enough to beat the fingerprinting method.

All of this raises many questions in my mind. Why would anyone would work so hard to beat the filter for something so nonsensical? How many humans--as we know them--respond meaningfully to form letters and static/distorted pictures of marketing or faces?

One possible motivation for this madness would be if someone were desperately trying to show us: "Hey... *THERE ARE* filters on your email, you need to know about them." By intelligently hacking past the filter, they might not be trying to sell you anything at all—just to show you the shape the filter takes. An interesting aspect is that the email address included is a question. "Who plant cut?" And it comes from China. Perhaps that's asking anyone listening who cut the means of communication?

My interest in this topic may seem not to be using Occam's razor...but as usual, my ideas did not emerge from a vacuum. One of my more notable "a-ha!" moments about this was in a dream where I was tracing why a music video couldn't get through a network, and it was specifically "Coffee and TV" by Blur, which looked like an advertisement for milk [2], so it had been automatically filtered:






A small thing, perhaps. But it does point to some of the major problems that all futurists are aware of. Simply that the power of computers and AI, as well as their potential misapplication, have profound implications. What will we do in a future world where our brains haven't gotten that much more sophisticated, but there are mechanistic systems churning out information at a rate we can't possibly understand or distinguish from that produced by other simple brains?

Content filters on email never made sense to me, as I'd think checking the origins of the message makes much more sense. But as you know, I look at things like this and go "whaaaaa?" What the heck is going on?

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=229205020

Let's say the fabric of the universe has something in it designed to prevent communication between the astral and physical worlds. The only way to find those filters is by looking at those few communications that do make it across. Similar to with email, if you're trying to talk to someone who you usually can't get messages to, there might be words to avoid...seeing variations of these things are instructional tools so you know what the filters ARE.

One conspiracy that I think is actually rather likely is that this is an attempt to disrupt communications and shape traffic—under the guise of something that a lot of people would dismiss as simple advertising. Imagine if the Chinese government wanted to block communications between their population and the United States...if they were to delete the messages outright it would trigger an international incident and attract attention. But sending American system administrators emails from China with pictures of penises (and telling them how small theirs is) seems far more effective—they'll voluntarily cut off communications with those servers!

Ever-present in conspiracy movies like The Matrix or They Live is the notion that you—in your simple day-to-day life—are being exploited and deprived of your full rights of existence by something more alien than just "The Man". It's an issue not of power as you understand it, but subtle programming at a level you can't even fathom until you get an aerial view of what's going on.

Someone told me about Temple Grandin, who designs slaughterhouses and has been praised by PETA for her work in making them "humane". The circuitous path through the slaughterhouse is so invisible to the cattle that they don't realize what's happening, or what's coming. It's nothing as obvious as a farmer walking up with an axe and chopping your fellow cows to bits.

Must we—like in the Matrix—wait for someone already living outside of the system (like Morpheus) to show us the needles which are sapping us of our transdimensional blood? Or can we figure it out for ourselves without help?

My thinking is that the only approach is education, and directly challenging our senses and the environment we've been given. Only by causing some disruption can we hope to find that sometimes our wriggling results in pulling the wool off of our eyes. This takes some risk, and I've tried to write stories to explain what reasonable risk is and how we might go about testing our assumptions.

Let's think momentarily about how those who don't have regard for rules can easily take advantage of those who do follow the rules. Someone could just go and put traffic cones out in front of a public parking lot and start charging for people to enter—who'll check their credentials? I once went on a hike at a reservoir, which was a very beautiful place, where a lot of expensive houses were. They had put a gate around it and had a big sign saying "no photo or video equip on reservoir premises". This was apparently a relaxation of a prior rule about not allowing people there at all. But a reasonable person asked: Well, who put that sign there?

Rule-followers who become suspicious of the veracity of an obstruction can test it, but can't necessarily do it alone. If you see a door and it says "DO NOT OPEN-ALARM WILL SOUND" you might wonder what's on the other side of that door; what if it's an identical sign? If you don't want to cause a disruption you could slide something under the door describing what's on your side—at least that way, you can help someone on the other side realize if this is an artificial boundary—and not something that's related to safety. Of course, then they'd have to decide what they trust more...a slick plastic sign from a print shop, or a paper you slipped under. So you better make your message accurately describe what's on your side. And you also need to find a way to hide your message in case the authorities regularly sweep things that come out from under the door.

Of course, this makes me think of the harmlessness of things like little colored tags. If you graffiti a parking sign, so no one can read what it says, a parking attendant will report it and it will be replaced (and you will probably get in trouble for vandalism if you are caught). But if you get a little red ribbon, and tie it on the signpost, you can perhaps say something without actually attracting much notice. Authority will probably not untie it, because they are lazy and will perceive it as no threat. But if you later notice another ribbon tied onto the post you may be able to infer something from it—at some point you get a critical mass and your process-of-elimination can help you realize you're not alone and it is time to stage a coup.

I make a habit of noticing little "harmless" tags. One day I noticed for the first time a little green plastic tag on one of the cables outside my home—presumably a phone line. I wondered "what's that green tag there for?" It's the sort of thing that stands out to me the way that empty colored shopping carts placed precisely squarely on street corners do. Sometimes I'll push the cart back to its store, and if it comes back (along with another one) that's cause for wondering.

In any case, I wondered about this tag...then the next day I was awoken by loud hacking and crashing. I went downstairs and saw some guys literally tearing the entire wall off our building, and they'd cut that wire in the process. (Not all the wires, just that one.) I asked what they were doing and they explained to me that the wall was bulging and kind of rotten so they were fixing it.

The most suspicious thing is that they're actually repairing something, especially in a proactive way...that doesn't add up, because usually something has to be far beyond broken to get attention. But I have to say, this stuff does kind of make me feel eerie. It's scary, like in The Village...where they started having the red marks show up on their doors, and with the yellow flags. (It turned out their whole society was insane, and living archaically isolated from the broader world.)

Are you? One thing is for sure—if you find that your society is treating you like a criminal under the label of "insanity" for doing harmless tests, you have reason to worry greatly. Unless you're happy with your lot in life...and of course we must all make time for centering activities and recreation. But I don't understand people who can be happy when others are not, because in a global sense If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.

If you haven't had to worry about the latest rash of SQL Injection vulnerabilities, consider yourself lucky. Hackers have found a new hole in computer systems to exploit, and are taking control of a server near you.

I was speaking to someone about looking for vulnerabilities in systems in order to do hacking. In the course of our conversation she mentioned that it was like "pattern recognition, except instead of noticing the patterns you're noticing the gaps". That sounded about right, and I realized how important a skill it is—complementary to pattern recognition, yet maybe even using a different part of the mind. When you think about what computers are better at, it's certainly pattern recognition.

But our culture mostly trains kids by rewarding them for finding matching shapes or colors. But how often are they given the task to pick out the object with unique properties? There was a segment on Sesame Street where they'd divide the screen into four quadrants. Each one would have a child in it performing an activity. You were supposed to pick the one that wasn't doing the same as the other three. It had an accompanying song:

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

Three of these things belong together
Three of these things are kind of the same
Can you guess which one of these doesn't belong here?
Now it's time to play our game (time to play our game).

I'm not sure what the moral is. Should this person be ostracized? It's one thing to point out the difference. But to suggest they don't belong there seems a bit extreme. Diversity should be recognized and accepted.

At the end of the day, it's kind of like what Stainlius Vasquez said:

"Het doel blijft meer van hetzelfde, namelijk schieten, moorden, rijden en daarmee zoveel mogelijk respect verdienen. DiskIdee werd lid van een bende en ging de straat op."

Which I can't translate because I don't speak, uh, whatever that is supposed to be. But I intuit that it was just his way of saying that conventions avoid question marks - those evil things that make users "wonder".