Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

Synchronicity.

These meaningful coincidances sometimes seem bizarre or contrived or as if you're being pranked.

On the surface they appear to be random and rare. I have a few incidences of these I remember clearly:

 

I was in a kind of phase of limbo in my life. I had moved away from Brighton on the south coast and moved back in with my mum in London, with the intention of going travelling for a few months. I had my sights set on New Zealand.

I had stopped working altogether a few months before and so was free. I would meet up with a friend of mine who worked in banking in the City. There was a coffee shop he frequented near his work. On this day I turned up and found him already talking to an unfamiliar woman. Somehow they had got into conversation. It turns out she was working for another bank, but she was a New Zealander. She gave me a few tips of places to visit and said that she had a friend who ran a hostel in Oban on Rakiura. A few months later after having gone the length of New Zealand from North to South, I spent a few days in Oban. I made myself known to her friend who happened to run the only other hostel on the island, and conveyed my "hellos" from her friend!

Another synchronicity happened in New Zealand.

On the way back up North to Auckland, I was posting pictures on Facebook and mentioned that I would be revisiting Motueka. Coincidentally and completely unknown to me a friend of a friend was also in New Zealand at the same time. Apparently he had been travelling around Asia and Australia with a whistle stop in New Zealand. We spent the day drinking and smoking and catching up.

Another one also happened in London.

I had a few weeks before been to the Globe Theatre to see some Shakespeare. I was walking in South East london when I noticed the Sackler Studios, which I believe is a rehearsal space for the Globe Theatre. I kept thinking about that name Sackler, there was something about it but I couldn't place it.

A few weeks later I found myself in Kew Gardens in South West london. There they have a walkway over a lake called the Sackler Crossing. Again I started to think about that name Sackler.

I had been sent a yearly alumni email from my old University in Brighton, and that triggered something in me and I looked up the name of the various faculties around campus. And there it was: "The Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science".  This was a completely brand new buidling and hadn't been there when I was studying there.

Turns out Sackler was a philanthropist and had fingers in many pies. But the personal connection was weird.

And one more for luck:

A few years back I was reading a Wikipedia article on the Great Fire of London. I find history fascinating. As I read down the article a strange compulsion came over me to look at my Debit Card. It was only after I saw my security number: 351 that the penny dropped I was kind of gobsmacked. Did my brain unconsciously make the connection? Or was I driven by a different force?

 

Do I have a theory for Synchronicity?

I do. I think there's a sliding scale of surprise to synchonicity. Or to see it from a different angle: synchronicities are everywhere. For example seeing two cars of the same make is a synchronicity, but there's not much surprise to that - it's expected and mundane.  In other words there's a kind of pattern matching process between disparate things which is constantly going on. Meaning is being given to the world of appearances by matching things together.

In order to recognise anything at all from the chaos of qualia out there, there has to be a patterning process going on. Everything is categorised into recurring patterns. Where do the patterns come from? YOU. The patterns are simply a kind of echo of yourself in space and time. You are shattered into a trillion fragments and you keep noticing parts of yourself and making connections between them.

A different view on it is to think of patterns as symmetries (in the mathematical sense). These are just the same thing viewed after different transformations. The "Sackler" episode above is just a symmetry, different views on the same thing. It had to be personal because the symmetry itself sprang from me.

The way to make more synchronicities happen is to play closer attention and be more surprised. Of course this can be taken too far and you can go around the whole time being surprised at how everything is weirdly and very personally connected. But hey, different strokes for different folks.

 

Edited June 22, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Are we all going down a Blind Alley? I hope not.

These ladies properly rock.

 

[LastThursday]

One important mantra I live my life by is not to be in debt.

For me not being in debt is just an extension of my other mantra and that is to be as independent as possible.

That's not to say I have never been in debt, I have, many times. But the intention is always to get out of debt as quickly as possible. 

Unfortunately, society is predicated on being in debt. You'll find that your government regularly racks up huge debt, so this mentality comes from the top. 

The only way to borrow large sums is to have a good credit rating, which essentially means that you have a good history of paying debt off. In other words if you need a temporary loan to tide you over, you need to have already been in debt. This of course is completely ridiculous, but no-one ever questions that.

A much better way is to move the zero point of your finances upwards. What I mean by this is that if your outgoings matches your income, your bank balance should read higher than zero. In UK money I would say a buffer of £10k is extremely useful. The aim being to always have £10k present in your account. It's fine to dip into this money because that's what it's for, but it should always be topped up as soon as humanly possible.

Is this reasonable?

I don't think it's impossible to save £1000 a year over ten years say. That amounts to £83 a month. It's high, but if you build it straight into your outgoings, it becomes normal.

One way to achieve this is through lifestyle minimalism.

Don't buy useless crap, and that includes services such as gym membership and that TV sports package. That is, unless you actually use those services fully, most don't.  Another is to always cook for yourself, restaurants and takeaways are expensive and very bad for health overall. Alcohol is expensive and bad for health, avoid bars and pubs as much as possible. Don't go for an expensive flat or buy a house that's too big; find something that's "just enough" and nothing more. Live in a cheaper area if possible. If it's avoidable don't have children until you have saved enough money. Don't have expensive or lavish holidays. Don't buy silly expensive cars with lots of power and that require expensive parts - don't ever buy a brand new car. There are many many things that can be done to reduce outgoings. The main theme being not to be a sheep, you DON'T need to buy into society's values on what success or progress means.

The other side of the coin, is to work on your earning potential. In today's world that means changing job regularly every two or three years, and upskilling as much as possible. It takes time to master a certain type of job, so that necessarily builds inertia which is undesirable - it makes changing career a lot harder. But, once you have enough cash saved you should look to be flexible in your career and explore different avenues. This is something I admit I haven't done yet, I find there's too much inertia, the money is too good - but the core of my being knows it's bad.

You shouldn't just save £10k, that's a recommended minimum. If you can save more, then do so.

One money saving option I'm currently seriously considering is to build my own house. More on that in my next post.

 

 

Edited June 23, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

One for the introverts working from home:

 

[Zigzag Idiot]

6 hours ago, LastThursday said:

One important mantra I live my life by is not to be in debt.

For me not being in debt is just an extension of my other mantra and that is to be as independent as possible.

This we have very much in common. I watched and lived with the stress of my parents being in debt most of their lives and I knew then that having a lot of debt means being more or less a slave for the bank which equates into a major loss in freedom. In my twenties I struggled to just keep $1000 in the bank as buffer/emergency money. In the nineties I built most of my house only subcontracting out certain bits. Had to borrow 10,000 to get it finished after 2 years of working on it. Never married or had children. 2 years ago. Shortly after turning 50, I realized I could semi-retire by being out of debt and having saved a little nest egg to see me through until I can draw social security. That is, if I'm able to maintain a minimalist livestyle.

I think the word mortgage translates to 'death grip'. I would rather be a little poor and somewhat free than to be highly leveraged materialist with all the latest goodies.

I enjoy the thoughts you express and your Journal in general.

 

[LastThursday]

@Zigzag Idiot that's much appreciated. It feels good to get my thoughts in order and if others get something from it, that gives me much happiness.

I like 'death grip' it explains my feelings towards a mortgage well. Here in the UK house prices are beyond ridiculous and rents are high, especially here in the South East where I am. I've worked steadily nearly all my adult life and I'm lucky to be in an industry that pays well. I feel as though in my position I ought to be able to afford my own property and be independent from a landlord or bank. But it's not really possible.

The main problem with building here is land. Land is hard to come by and very expensive. Labour is also expensive. So options are limited.

If I could retire and be free and a little poor, I would do it tomorrow.

[LastThursday]

Continuing on the theme of life style minimalism, during lockdown I've been devouring this channel on YouTube.

The idea is that the Tiny House Movement is about building small houses that can be moved around and parked wherever it suits. It's also about self sufficiency and owning your own property outright. It's also about being green and minimising waste and being "off grid". All those ideals definitely resonate with me in a big way.

I could be the guy in this video (but better looking and older of course):

 

I have a real desire to build one myself from scratch with my bare hands. There's something very primal about that. The learning curve is steep, but I've helped build wooden structures in my time so using power tools and handling "big wood" is no problem. I have an engineering degree so electricty and plumbing wouldn't scare me too much - or at least I have a grounding in the operation of those things.

The guy in the video has it absolutely right, he's free in a very real sense. That's how to be a nomad in modern society.

My only two big hurdles are finding a place to build the house that's sheltered and finding a parking spot for it once built. There are restrictions on mobile homes here in the UK, mostly about size, road worthy construction and siting. It's not going to be an easy project.

It's possible to buy such a home "off the shelf" in a price range that I can afford to buy outright - so that would remove one hurdle entirely. I could also tailor it to suit me to a certain degree. However, that would take some of the satisfaction away from having built the thing myself.

Am I too scared to do this? At the moment, yes I am. But I believe I posted on a thread on the forum recently, that "if you're scared you should say yes".

Edited June 23, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Quick note before it completely slips away from my reality:

Deck of cards

Thought

Priority

Algorithm

Stradling cultures

First love

Timeline therapy and re-experiencing

Pattern interrupt

Will fill in tomorrow.

Edited June 23, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

How would you teach a computer to think?

Traditionally you come up with a nice metaphor that easily translates into computer data structures and algorithms that work on them. Before eyes glaze over, here's a more human-centric metaphor:

Imagine a deck of cards face up. The deck is special in two ways. Firstly every card is different, and secondly, there are infinitely many of them. For this metaphor only the top card in the deck is important. We call this card "The Thought".

Computing-wise the deck of cards is the data structure.

A static deck of cards is not very interesting, so we need a way to shuffle them around. The way this works is to pick a card at random from the deck and place it on top. 

Now with my computing head on, I know that the infinity of cards is going to cause me a problem. No real computer is actually able to deal with an infinity, they are finite machines. But not to worry, we have a super-powerful computer that can deal with it - we pretend.

The shuffling is special in that it's not evenly distributed. We skew the distribution and say that cards towards the top of the pack are more likely to be chosen. The further down the pack, the less likely. We can easily come up with an algorithm to do this - I won't bore you with the maths.

So at intervals we run the algorithm. 

Cards keep getting moved to the top and older cards slowly make their way down the deck. Note what happens. As a card gets further from the top, it is less and less likely to be chosen. That means cards towards the top keep being chosen, and end up back at the top. But every so often a card from deeper down the deck ends up at the top and can stay near the top for a while.

Since I thought of it, I call it the LastThursday Thought Machine (LTTM). 

 

Is this a good model of how we actually think? 

Well it has certain characteristics that match. 

Primarily we can only think one thought at a time. This corresponds to the top card on the deck. It's super important to note that our current thought influences how we feel and our mood. If we have a thought about "how bad the world is" we will have a visceral reaction to that thought, we can't help it.

Secondarily, thoughts come continuously and we instantly forget the older thought. This is because we can't hold two thoughts at the same time, there is only one card at the top ever. But, the same thought can bubble up to the top (into our consciousness) regularly. This is in fact what happens. 

Depressed or anxious people are not continuously depressed or anxious. Instead they have many different thoughts throughout the day, some of them happy and relaxed. But because thoughts near the top of the deck keep being chosen, these people keep having the same bad thoughts over and over. This is what depression means. You have depressed thoughts so often that your body is hardly out of its depressed state.

What happens when we have to deal with an immediate danger in our environment? In that case we need a way to modify the algorithm so that important thoughts/cards get placed nearer to the top of the deck. If we are hungry, then the "hunger" card will be placed higher up the deck and maybe even directly at the top. It will become hard to ignore the thought, as it keeps recurring (bubbling to the top) - and you will eventually take action.

One last modification to the LTTM is needed.

Every time a card comes to the top, we are allowed to change it's importance rating. In other words instead of just letting a card slowly descend down the deck we force it down a few more levels - since cards further down are less likely to be chosen.

Ok. 

How do we get out of depression for example? Here's my recipe:

• Realise that you are not continuously depressed - you are periodically depressed - just very frequently
• You have depressive thoughts that cause your body to react negatively every time. Thought triggers emotion, not the other way around.
• Realise that thoughts themselves are completely neutral, it is your body's reaction to them that counts. It's possible to modify this reaction.
• You keep having the depressive thoughts regularly because you've had them recently.  In other words the deck of cards maintains it's structure, cards near the top, stay near the top.
• You keep having the depressive thoughts because you are not actively modifying their importance.  If you stop placing importance on depressive thoughts they will recur less often (you can push them down the deck).
• You can modify your thought patterns, by placing more importance on other (more positive) thoughts. Eventually these will naturally recur more often, pushing the depressive thoughts further down the deck.
• You can distract your thought patterns by placing yourself in situations were other thoughts become more important (i.e. further up the deck). Take a walk or exercise, go on holiday, meet new people and on and on.

My new name for this therapy? LTTM Therapy. I'm going to be rich beyond my wildest dreams!

Note how this therapy is completely different from conventional therapy. I would say the following in defence of LTTM Therapy:

• Talking therapy continuously brings the unwanted thoughts into consciousness and keeps them there. Keeping us depressed.
• Other therapies and common sense assume you are a vessel full of thoughts and emotions swilling around. And your current emotional state is the sum total of all that stuff. And, that bringing structure and understanding to the whole system will somehow fix the problem.
• Chemistry doesn't affect the thoughts, but only the reactions to them. Taking antidepressants only helps by severing the connection between the thought and the body's reaction to the thought. It doesn't modify thoughts at all.
• Other therapies assume that cause and effect is the chief cause of the problem. And that by re-evaluating past history you can change the effect.
• Other therapies assumes a smoothly varying emotional state that we stay in for long periods of time, instead of the actual staccato thought-driven states we go through on a second by second basis.

*Rant over*

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

This is quickly turning into my Commonplace Book. Is this allowed? I didn't realise I had so much mental energy.

Notes for later:

Childhood imprinting

Chess and stalemate

Time.

[LastThursday]

Why is it we have so many ideas and yet we take so little action? Wouldn't life be wonderful if we just did the stuff we desired?

Doing anything is a game of reward and consequences.  Lifting your arm takes energy, which you later have to replace with food or you will soon run out of energy and perish. Luckily evolution has made the body extremely intelligent in this respect and we rarely have to think consciously about the consequencies of making a cup of cofee or brushing our teeth. This "energy conservation" is evolved in.

This is similar to a game of chess. When we've played a brilliant game and both players are down to two pieces, a King and a Pawn each.  We each battle to get each other into checkmate, but eventually realise nobody can win outright - stalemate. We can continue to take action, but we can't progress. This happens often.

In the case of chess we are stymied by the rules. In the case of real life, we are stymied by costs being higher than rewards. And subsconsciously we are constantly playing the cost/reward game. Some costs causing inaction might be:

• Risk of losing the comfortable life you already have (stalemate)
• Not enough cash or time or resources
• Ill health and physical disability
• Not enough information to make a good decision or unable to make any decisions because of ill mental health
• Risk to life
• Risk of embarrassment, failure, being ostracised, or other socially induced rejection
• Having to do activities that can't be stopped such as caring for someone or need to be working enough to stay alive
• Fear that taking action for yourself will be to the detriment of other people (you love)
• Fear of other people in general and asking for what you need or want (exacerbated by inadequate social skills)
• Fear that once your start something it can't be stopped or reversed
• Knowing that a task will take a very long time and lots of resources
• Fear of unforseen consequences

The list is essentially endless. It is worth picking up that a lot of these things are based in fear. That's no coincidence, fear is simply the emotional value of cost. Fear is the signal of cost. It is a very strong signal in a lot of cases and very effective at causing inaction.

So how do we get around this if we desperately want to take action? I would say there are some basic strategies:

• Reframing
• Making the reward more than the cost
• Research
• Planning
• Breaking down the action into smaller steps

Reframing covers the areas of self development, confidence, experience, practice, acquiring knowledge. So putting yourself into a postion where the fear is lessened (reframed) and the reward becomes greater than the fear.

Setting you sights higher can also be useful, if the reward can be seen to be much greater. Or lessening the reward enough that the fear is a lot reduced.

Research is covered in Reframing, but very often inaction happens due to lack of information and the inability to decide and where all options appear to be equally bad. Research can bring clarity and different ways of taking action and taking perhaps a gentler slope towards the goal.

Planning and reductionism can also be useful in reframing the fear so that the action is done as a series of less daunting steps.  Planning can also be used to ameloriate the "fear of unforseen consequences" - it's a way of hedging the risk.

We are driven by cost and reward, carot and stick. It's pointless to tell someone to "take action" if their perceived cost is too high. But like chess sometimes we a driven by the cost of inaction itself - and we go for it: pick up the opponent's King and walk off with it.

 

 

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

What would you do if you met God? In the street?

Ok let's tone it down.

What would you do if you met your celebrity crush? In the street?

I think there would be many reactions to this:

• Disbelief
• Joy
• Embarrassement
• Walking on by pretending nothing's going on
• Sign the T-shirt I'm wearing. NOW!!
• Selfieeeee!!!!!
• "...Kiss me gosh darnit..." blush
• Don't do anything Ms Celebrity, just keep looking at me me me

Ok Zooey you get the picture. I mean... Anyhow.

How would you even recognise God?

Does God even bother to inhabit a human body anyway? Isn't God some sort of aloof asshole who decides to interfere with your life when you least want it? Didn't God die anyway, wasn't it Nietzsche that killed him, I think...?

Questions. Questions. Questions.

Fuck. What if you are actually God. I mean everyone else is just a normal run-of-the-mill human, but you are actually The God, The Creator. All those poor souls you interact with every day, the people you love and hug and talk to. And all that nature and all those cities and animals and plants and humanity and oceans and stars and galaxies and all that fucking empty space.

What are you supposed to do with all that stuff? Why you? Why this peculiar body with two arms and legs and a head? Why any of it?

What would you want God to actually do, if you met him or her in the flesh?

I just want God to look me in the eye and say "Hey, don't I know you?"

 

 

Edited June 25, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I started to write...

Quote

 

There's a lot of talk about Time on the forums.

It's tricky to unravel it all, because we're so used to deferring to clocks and calendars to tell us about how time works. In this sense time is just a number on a number line. Each minute comes after each minute, everything happens in order and at the same pace.

What do our senses tell us?

We can agree that stuff "out there" is changing. Stuff moves and is reconfigured and rearranged and we can observe it happening. There also appears to be a fixed rate of stuff changing. If you drop a ball, and then drop the same ball again, it seems to do it at the same rate - we intuitively know this, it's kind of built in to our psyches.

 

But ran out steam. It happens. Will finish it off soon.

Feeling kind of lazy. Not in a fatigued way, I'm otherwise alert.  It just feels like I want to simply switch off and be inert, and let the mind wander off into nothingness.

Ever catch that sweet spot just after waking up and just before the waking mind kicks in with all it's problems? That's where I want to be.

[LastThursday]

I've never been a particularly future oriented person. I just don't think I ever had a role model that was driven by goals, so I never learned. Sure I had shorter term aspirations such as going to university or wanting to travel or whatever. I think as a consequence I've mostly lead a reactionary life, stuff happens and I do what I can to accomodate myself around it.

Because of this up until my mid thirties or so I simply let life pull me around, like a buoy on the ocean. Mostly this meant being at the whim of other people's dreams and intentions, mostly my long term girlfriend of eleven years. We'd met at university and it was what it was, two young people trying to work out what the "right thing to do" was. I needed an anchor in my life to give me stability and a future, and she was it. Eventually it fell apart however. But I think she felt the pain more acutely than I ever did.

I found the period immediately after very awkward and daunting. I was cast adrift without really knowing where I was going or how to manage my social life and friends we had shared. I made do, and just went through the motions.

One over-arching theme in my life has been escaping the feeling of being imprisoned by circumstances and people. I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that from a very young age I've had a strong sense of personal freedom. My parents I don't think really loved each other, they were just a crutch for each other. The rift was there from all the time I could remember. My mum wanted the best possible life, and my dad was supposed to be her saviour - but he was a dreamer and workaholic (he still is) and poor - she had married what she thought was a "rich" foreigner off the back of a holiday romance in Mallorca. I think she wanted a dream life for herself, my dad wanted a beautiful exotic wife. They were young and stupid. They moved to London.

Because of this dynamic and being the first child, and because my mum never learned English (she's profoundly deaf), and because my dad was hardly ever around, I was used as a kind of go-between and intepreter for her. I always hated it. It was often too much for a young kid to take on. The problem became acute as a teenager when my dad finally upped and left. The only future goal I trully had was wanting my freedom back and eschewing any sort of responsibility - I'd already had my fill for one lifetime. I got my chance by going to University and I escaped.

Much later in my mid thirties I had a further relationship of a few years. I moved into her home for while, but I was still living someone else's dream. She loved me, but it didn't work for her in the end, I just wasn't the career driven person she wanted. After that relationship, I drifted for a year, then I spectacularly fell apart.

What initiated the breakdown was a very strong cognitive dissonance. I acutely remembered the naturalness and freedom of being a young kid, compared to the socially awkward, scared and directionless adult I had become. It took me over a decade to re-configure myself, and the process is still continuing. 

I'm now starting to feel an intense desire to make my life go in a direction of my choosing. I need to learn the skills of seeing into the future and actually doing things to make that future come to life. It's a very daunting task, and I'm not sure I'm ready to take on the responsibility for the freedom I desperately desire.

 

Edited June 27, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Someone care to give me a tune? I had the perfect rythmn in my mind, but it's totally lost now:

i saw it some day
written that way
that you never said
you'd take it away
how I feel
how I feel
how I feel

don't say again
how much I would pay
for you to say
(that) you'd take it away
how I feel
how I feel
how I feel

it'(wa)s written in stone
'n right through my heart
across the stars
and you took it away
how I feel
how I feel
how I feel

how I feel
how I feel
how I feel
how I feel

how I feel
how I feel
how I feel...

[Wisebaxter]

@LastThursday Try this one I made dude. I've already sung your lyrics to it and it works quite well

 

Edited June 27, 2020 by Wisebaxter

[LastThursday]

I'm not sure I can cohere myself. Zoom + alcohol + friends + quiz = omg.

I think I had more Morissey in mind, but for the life of me I can think which one.  Blreughehgh not this one:

BUT. If you can actually sing my lyrics and give me (us) a demo, you can have them gratis. Making a tiny impact in the world is more important than capitalst sentiment - and my ego will suck this up in any case. Do it man!

 

Edited June 28, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I'll do tomorrow's post now, because it's tomorrow (1:26am). Excuse the slurring.

We're full of stories. This forum is full of them. We live and die by the stories we recount. I am the story of myself, nothing more nothing less.

Humans are addicted to stories, especially about themselves. It's like we're given substance and sustenance and existence from the accounts of our lives, our pitfalls and trophies, our tragedies and love stories and our flashy "look at me me me".

Guillermo. Sitting on his sofa has become aware of his story, of adversity and occasional love, all those tens of thousands of days easily forgotten, never really lived, just experienced by some other version of me. I'm not a "me" instead just a "thing" I don't really know what. It's creepy and brilliant, thrilling and succint and torturous and indistinct and downright fucking weird. Please.

I'm still stuck in 1989, the story stalled then. Everything else changed but that infinitessimal spot stayed constant.  That first incantation of consciousness.

The sound of this song and the smell of Lulu. I love you can't forget you seems like I just blinked and took a breath:

 

[LastThursday]

The best song ever made?

"I'm the son and heir of nothing in particular.... I am human and I need to belong..."

 

 

Edited June 28, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

@Wisebaxter just to say I much appreciated your music.