LastThursday

I really need a holiday from myself. Most folks use surrogates such as social media or binge Netflix or play videogames to get away from themselves. There are other ways to be absent, such as meditating or getting lost in creativity. I find all this sort of thing work to a degree, and you may have your own escapes. I want whole days where I can be not me. The absence of myself implies the presence of someone else. I can't ever get too far away from being a human, this physical body doesn't let me. I could take drugs I suspect and that would even take me away from this body, and I can probably spend whole days doing it. But without drugs, the only option is to become someone else. The current me is an intricate system of memories, manerisms and context. To become someone else implies changing all of those things. Saying that I do feel like there is this disembodied ineffable pinpoint at the centre of it all that I can identify as me. I've had moments in my experimentation where that pinpoint has shifted and I've felt like someone else entirely. What's a better name for that pinpoint? Let's call it my anchor. My anchor is the thing that responds to the name "Guillermo"; it being that recognition of myself as myself. One way to pull that anchor away is what I call forcing. Techniques include wearing different clothing, talking differently, moving differently, hypnosis. With sustained effort I have longish periods where that anchor is not my anchor, but someone else's. It's a kind of possession, or walk in. In fact I will often invite that new person in and expel the current one (temporarily). This is fundamentally play acting, the things kids do in the playground, where they are temporarily possessed by the characters in their imaginations. I could argue that there is a real "Guillermo" living inside this body, but in actuality I'm play acting even him - it's just that he's taken hold and become anchored firmly in the seabed. This is all very powerful stuff. Having the flexibility to genuinely switch characters and take a holiday from yourself is both relieving and crucial to growing yourself. It allows for the expression of completely different traits. And for me it's all a step further to mastering my own psyche.

I've had this sort of question in job interviews. The answer I always want to give is: "not working for you". And so it is. Answering the question is a bit like predicting the weather on a specific day in 12 months' time, the best you can actually do is say it'll be Spring. Being very specific can give you a sense of certainty, and that can be very motivating, which is where the value in asking the question comes from. But the whole reason for asking the question at all, is that you're either unhappy with where you are now, or you see you current situation as temporary. But also, it's always good to tease out what things excite you and are important to you and what your values are: a.k.a living authentically. If I'm honest with myself, I don't want any part of the life I have now in ten years' time. But I have no clue what that would look like (yet).

Solipsism is bullshit but that's for another thread. Or, read my journal, although I forget which year.

I get this feeling about every ten years, but it passes.

The Truman Show Man finds out he's living in a reality TV show. Total Recall Man saves inhabitants of Mars. Or does he? A Scanner Darkly An undercover drugs agent finds out no-one is who they seem to be.

I'm continuing to work on myself along with my coach. When can I stop working on myself? I dunno, maybe I won't. Stagnation is the work of the Devil. Whatever circumstance we find ourselves in, it is or becomes normal for us - even if it's miserable or ecstatic or something in-between. We always want more or something different though, that's our nature; just like cats like to stalk birds and dogs like fetching sticks. It's our nature to constantly expand and explore our potentials because we know it's latent within us. Anything which suppresses our latent nature depresses us and constricts us. Although. We are limited: in time, place, abilities, physicality, circumstance, thought. Part of the joy of limitation is in working with it, around it, or pushing through it. It's also human nature to tell good stories of how we overcame our struggles and succeeded: it's the hero/ine's journey. Like great art we work within the media at our disposal and use the limitations as something to push forward against. The struggle against limitation can be hell, but we always expand our boundaries as a result - and so we get to express our true natures. Also. Our potentiality needs to be directed. Having a sense of direction gives us impetus and shows us where to expend our energies, we need hope and purpose. We humans work so much better with certainty however ill-defined it is, even if the certainty is just a working hypothesis. So we push against limitation and pull towards purpose. And when it's all over we get to tell the story, the joy is in the story and the journey. What more can a man like me need?

The fallacy is that all change can be resisted. On an individual level your body will keep on changing, if nothing else - and you'll have to confront this change. The paradox of change and identity is that once you change it becomes your identity. As @Inliytened1 puts nicely, "your identity is just shifting and morphing" and it will do this even if you resist it; you may even convince yourself that you haven't changed at all over time. All identity is in any case is a self-sustaining system of beliefs and ideas about a "you". In order for the identity to exist at all, it has to be naturally resistant to its own destruction; so it makes up stories about how special and pure it is. Change is a kind of death, but change is also a kind of rebirth.

And I always appreciate your questions. Nah, just have two cameras timed so that they shoot snapshots alternately and so there are no gaps - since each camera has a finite exposure time. Even video cameras have frames (snapshots) or more likely a rolling shutter. There is never any continuity as such, it's always static frames. More precisely that movement is relative to the observer. An object can be motionless in one POV (frame of reference) and moving in another (at the same time). My mug is motionless on my table, but moving at thousands of miles an hour relative to the centre of the galaxy. Being motionless is just a special case of movement. If instead of a camera you used a Doppler gun, you could most definitely get a measurement of movement, because of the absolute shift in the wavelength of the returning light. So the paradox is only manifested by the equipment you use to measure movement with. Notice that with a Doppler gun you can't measure position, unlike with a camera. So you have the opposite paradox, where you know the arrow is moving, but not what path it takes through the air.

Very Beethoven and one of my favourites and it's loooong but worth it

The legend that is Billy Connelly Oh my lord

The Unexpected Hanging Paradox is a mind warper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox

Three things come immediately to mind: 1. The snapshot has an exposure time which is unavoidable. So there will always be motion blur on the snapshot (no matter how small). Ok, motion blur isn't movement, but it is evidence of it. If you keep decreasing the exposure time, the image will get darker an darker. A zero exposure time will capture the arrow perfectly still, but there will be no image. If you were thinking of it scientfically you might even conclude that the arrow becomes partially transparent when it moves through the air. 2. And a lesser more philosphical point: is a snapshot of an arrow an arrow? Can it be trusted as a representation of the real thing? A representation necessarily throws away a lot of information - including in this case most evidence of movement (and the back of the arrow etc). Can you even trust the person showing you the snapshots that they are all of the same arrow? 3. This story shows that the mind thinks platonically as it were: where snapshots are perfect; motion is composed of a series of perfectly still arrows; the snaphots all go "together" in a series and are of the same arrow, taken close in time together etc. But reality is always a lot messier and less clear cut.

And intuition can be wrong, that's why science does experiments and gains consensus. It's not either/or. The process of science is a combination both. You need intuition to tell you what experiments to do and to come up with theories. You need experiments and consensus to tell you if you're deceiving yourself or not - or at least to get rid of as much bias (deception) as possible.

The Police are amazing, I could listen to them forever. Not sure if this is my favourite but it's up there

Thing is, science has been more succesful than just using intuition alone. That's why science is done. The problem with gaining knowledge intuitively is you don't know if you're deceiving yourself.

So illegality is not a red flag for you and for the consquences of being open about sourcing in general?

Sure I'm with that. You do the spadework and look for connections and generalities which emerge out of that. Maxwell realised that light was an electrogmagnetic wave off the hundreds of detailed experiments done by others. I don't think this holds in general because of emergence. For example the laws of thermodynamics emerges from the individual behaviour of atoms moving around - or spiral galaxies emerge from the interaction of gravity, angular momentum and matter. The thing about emergence is that it's hard to predict the behaviour of systems with a large number of interacting parts. The three body problem for example is the best that can be done exactly using mathematics, after that you have to use statistics and you start getting emergent behaviour. Personally, I think general relativity is an emergent phenomenon because all mass comes down to subatomic particles and their forces: so whatever gravity means at the subatomic level, then emerges at a bigger scale as general relativity. It could be that the distortion of spacetime by mass emerges out of the interaction by a large number of entangled particles at the subatomic level.

I think the problem between general relativity and quantum mechanics is getting experimental evidence for the relationship between the two. They both work at vastly different scales and because gravity is so incredibly weak at the quantum level, its influence (at the subatomic scale) is hard to work out experimentally. The one thread that links the two is light and the speed of light. Both QM and GR involve or affect light, although in different ways. If a TOE is going to be found I reckon it will have to be there. You can only understand the universe in generality, you could never know the specifics of every single particle etc. So theories aim to be as general and wide ranging as possible - theories get ever more general with time as connections are found and experiments get carried out. In that sense maybe eventually there will be a TOE. But my own intuition is that no theory will ever be complete, because there is infinite nuance to nature.

Nothing beats a bit of Bach:

The one danger I can see is that if sourcing is openly discussed, people will become lazy and there is danger for confusion. Say you post a way to source X drug, which is legal in the poster's country but illegal in other countries. Some noob who hasn't researched their country's laws, then buys from the source and gets into (serious) trouble. At least if sourcing isn't discussed, then potential buyers are forced to research for themselves which keeps them safe. One help maybe to have a dirtly long list of drugs and which countries each drug is legal in stickied somewhere - it might help.

This kept coming up my recommendations, so in the end I clicked on it. I'm always intrigued at the story behind and told by paintings, the little plaques on the wall in galleries never give you much backstory: