on joining a webring
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Kind of on a whim I decided to add the lainchan webring to this isolated corner of the internet. Even this barely maintained site hosted on an old rpi 3b+ leeching off some benevolent japanese domain owner apparently qualifies. It makes me glad that people still try to host their individualistic sites in this day and age, where every other person is part of some monolithic corporate entity.
There are these general sentiments floating around: "the internet was supposed to empower people!", "people only use the same five websites!" or "the old web was much better!" I wonder how much objective truth there is to these general sentiments. It's true that big corporate websites overshadow many smaller websites in terms of bandwitdth, but then again, you wouldn't compare this static site against some (shitty) streaming service like netflix. From another lens one could also argue that nothing is stopping people from trying to make the web the way they want it to be. Be the change you want to see, as they say. This webring is fantastic for this reason and incidentally also solves the problem of discovery, albeit only on a small scale. I've also seen individual people participate in more than one webring, which is fascinating, essentially they're endpoints between two different webrings, the node connecting two subgraphs, or the portal between two different worlds, however you want to frame it. I wonder if we secondary denizens of the internet can manage to put together a web of our own.
To conclude my ramblings, glory to webrings.
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Sat, 19 Dec 2020 14:40:34 +0000
inspiration
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Something lovely I stumbled upon while listening to a conversation between Lex Fridman and Eric Weinstein.
"Quit, don't quit. Noodles, don't noodles. You are too concerned with what was and, what will be. There is a saying: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."
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Mon, 09 Nov 2020 10:43:01 +0000
on detective fiction
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Recently I have taken up the hobby of dabbling in detective fiction. Detective fiction is interesting from a variety of perspectives, like for example its evolution throughout history. Because murder (or any comparable crime) is the one universally shared feature for works of literature in this category, there are always three vital questions to be answered:
- who is responsible for the crime, the whodunit
- how was the crime executed, the howdunit
- what is the reason behind the crime, the whydunit
We can already see that some very interesting puzzles can emerge in works of detective fiction. Different authors place different emphasis on each of these individual puzzle pieces, making the task of finding out answers to all these questions variably difficult. But in the first place, is it always a puzzle? After all, murder mysteries are dealing with the dynamics of real people, where victims can be dead for no other reason than coincidence. To introduce even more complexity, not all crimes find closure in real world. Indeed, some aren't ever noticed to begin with. Thankfully, our compassionate literary overlords wouldn't put us through the torture of letting us think there was a guessable solution when there is none. Most of the works that originated during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction go though great efforts to present a reader with enough clues to reach the truth. Not always can the three dunits be easily guessed, but at least some combination of them. Unlike in real life, all the factors necessary for crime are without exception presented throughout the story. The murderer is always one of the people our detective meets with, for there wouldn't be any reaching a conclusion if the murderer were to be some person not introduced yet. The same goes for the howdunit, there shouldn't be any hidden magic mechanisms that remain undiscovered as a means for the murderer to kill their victims. Guessing the whydunit is yet still harder, because every author has a different take on psychology.
It is curious to me how a great heap of literary writers somehow collectively invented this protocol for all their works. A many detective fiction works could be said to follow Knox's "Ten Commandments", or alternatively S. S. Van Dine's "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", a list of properties meant to ensure the reader can unravel the mystery using only what is presented in the book (perhaps alongside their common sense). Just by following the protocol, such works attain the almost mathematical sort of property of being self-contained intellectual puzzles, a set of facts closed under completion so to speak. On the other hand, real life is assuredly more complicated, because real events do not necessarily follow this protocol. Detective fiction is truly a fiction and could be said to be slightly out of touch with reality, but that is as much a con as a pro. In any case, once such rules are imposed, writers get very creative and bend their stories enough to be too tricky to easily guess while remaining self-contained. In the case of the works of Van Dine, this inevitably leads to highly prepared and competent murderers and many, many misdirections thrown into the mix, but the outcome always follows a clear trace of logic. I can't say I myself have an easy time getting the right answer for these sorts of works, but it certainly makes detective fiction all the more enticing.
One last point, a lot of popular detective fiction works are not contemporary. These stories often live in a word in which there are no internet, computers or smartphones. These technologies greatly complicate the job of a single detective and have really transformed how we do justice today. Older works, besides being written in terms of simpler times, have the added benefit to be entirely uninfluenced by modern developments, unlike modern society. Even if some of the works are about a hundred years old, they are surprisingly accessible, although there can be a lot of archaic english.
"Do you hope to run a murderer to earth by dillydallying over a chess game?"
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Mon, 09 Nov 2020 07:24:38 +0000
on hallucinations
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After recently finishing the astonishing read that is Hallucinations (by Oliver Sacks), I felt obliged to personally give an account on some of my many thoughts, so as to not let them wither in the face of time. First of all, there is an incredible diversity in types of hallucinations. This does not even refer to the difference between visual and olfactory hallucinations, even amongst hallucinations pertaining to a specific sense do we observe diversity. Secondly, for there to be this many different types of hallucinations, there have to be respective people under the effect of these hallucinations (hallucinatees?). Hallucinations are apparently a lot more wide-spread than everyday life would lead you to believe.
This is interesting in its own right: how many people you pass in the streets daily are currently hallucinating in some form? Putting it against statistical odds like that diminishes the effect, probably making it not so many. After all, some types of hallucinations are only experienced once very particular conditions are fulfilled. Sleep related hallucinations for example (hopefully) only happen at home. Many people are aware of sleep paralysis for example, a very curious phenomenon on its own, because sleep paralysis is actually something many people experience. Sleep paralysis however is only one of many types of hallucinations experienced during hypnopompic state, during the transition from sleep to wakefulness. Interestingly, there is plethora of sensations experienced during hypnogogic states too, during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. It is easy to miss or not recall these, as during this state our consciousness fades. Repetitious exercise can induce the Tetris effect during this state for example, but there is also a creative element to these hypnogogic hallucinations. Some artists, be it of literature, music, etc., claim to have drawn great inspirations from their hallucinations of this type, be it visual, auditory, or of another nature. Quite illustrative are the accounts of Vladimir Nabokov, who since young experienced hypnogogic hallucinations, reporting of vivid hallucinatory imagery. Some apparently also try to purposefully induce such a state as a means to spur on their creativity.
Delirious states are also reported to bring about very interesting or surreal experiences. Something as simple as a fever or as dramatic as injury followed up by surgery can bring about such states. Many substances have the same effect, the anti-malarial drug Lariam Sacks himself reports to have taken before his trip to the Amazon commonly causes very vivid and colorful dreams (or nightmares) and much more rarely full-blown hallucinations and psychoses. In delirium people experience effects like hearing music, or seeing music sheets painted on the walls.
Now for something a little different, various types of hallucinations varying in intensity come from migraine and epileptic attacks. Migraine related hallucinations are typically less complex, consisting of hallucinated geometry or other patterns, flashes of light or other obstructions of vision. Epilepsy on the other hand can lead to complex hallucinations, with many people reporting quite peculiar experiences during the onset of a grand mal seizure. Epilepsy haunts the general populace for as far as we can look back, quoting Sacks:
"Epilepsy affects a substantial minority of the population, occurs in all cultures, and has been recognized since the dawn of recorded history. It was known to Hippocrates as the sacred disease, a disorder of divine inspiration. And yet in its major, convulsive form (the only form recognized until the nineteenth century), it has attracted fear, hostility, and cruel discrimination. It still carries a good deal of stigma today."
Giving the sheer volume of particular hallucinatory experiences enough credit in a blog post is impossible. Even Sacks struggled, even though he had an entire book on to paint on. Nonetheless, I want to touch on the social effects of hallucinations. In general, people don't like to talk about hallucinations, because of their portrayal as a sign of lunacy in our modern times. This culture entirely unfit to harbor people with hallucinations makes someone experiencing hallucinations questioning their own sanity. Even when talking to trained practitioners, as Sacks reports, are people reluctant to even mention the fact of having experienced hallucinations. While many types of hallucinations are harmless, others are often indicative of some sort of neurological inconsistency.
I've also touched on how hallucinations can make people creative. Complex hallucinations where objects, animals or people are sensed in some way. I've always wondered about spiritual beliefs of supernatural entities, but after reading about various forms of hallucinatory manifestations it would arguably be more weird for these supernatural entities to not exist. To quote Sacks:
"Until the eighteenth century, voices—like visions—were ascribed to supernatural agencies: gods or demons, angels or djinns. No doubt there was sometimes an overlap between such voices and those of psychosis or hysteria, but for the most part, voices were not regarded as pathological; if they stayed inconspicuous and private, they were simply accepted as part of human nature, part of the way it was with some people."
While sometimes hallucinatory entities appear malicious in their nature, like entities observed during sleep paralysis are often purported to be, other times these hallucinatory entities can appear to be entirely benign. With no other way to explain certain phenomena, psychology was not a developed field not too long ago after all, it is no wonder how some of the curious variety of subjects of folklore came into existence today. To end my ramblings on a positive note, I want to leave a final, particularly incredible and heartwarming story of a hallucinated externalized voice experienced during life-threatening circumstances:
"The threat to life may also come from within, and although we cannot know how many attempts at suicide have been prevented by a voice, I suspect this is not uncommon. My friend Liz, following the collapse of a love affair, found herself heartbroken and despondent. About to swallow a handful of sleeping tablets and wash them down with a tumbler of whiskey, she was startled to hear a voice say, “No. You don’t want to do that,” and then “Remember that what you are feeling now you will not be feeling later.” The voice seemed to come from the outside; it was a man’s voice, though whose she did not know. She said, faintly, “Who said that?” There was no answer, but a “granular” figure (as she put it) materialized in the chair opposite her—a young man in eighteenth-century dress who glimmered for a few seconds and then disappeared. A feeling of immense relief and joy came over her. Although Liz knew that the voice must have come from the deepest part of herself, she speaks of it, playfully, as her “guardian angel.”"
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Sat, 08 Aug 2020 13:15:39 +0000
on Japanese folklore
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As we find ourselves in curious times, I cannot help but distract myself with the odd peculiarities of Japanese folklore. Perhaps this is a bit random, so I will admit, this is largely motivated by an increased reading capacity for Touhou manga. In any case, folklore as it is presented in official Touhou print works were my gateway drug.
Folklore in general is a wonderful thing. On the one hand, the many pieces of wisdom one can extract from these tales is staggering, on the other hand, it is easy to interpret meaning where there actually was not supposed to be any. This is really what makes folklore so enticing initially, but also keeps individual tales reverberating. I speak generally about folklore here, but really, I have not much of a clue about non-Japanese folklore. I do hear though, Irish folklore can be very interesting too.
Another observation is, while the sayings of Japanese folklore are typically very brief (unlike this blog), their explanations are often-long winded, littered with historical connotations and the like.
So as to not let this monologue remain in all its worthlessness, I want to supply an example:
Tsukumogami represent household objects or tools that have acquired a spirit or kami inhabiting them. The legends tell, all types of tsukumogami gain sentience in one form or another after having existed close to or exactly 100 years. They can be peaceful, or vengeful, depending on their treatment during use.
So, there are a few interesting things of note here. First of all the meaning of the word, tsukumo for example can be literally taken to mean 九十九 ("nine-tens and nine"). The -gami part can be likened to kami, representing a spirit in the religious sense of Shintoism. The disposition of this spirit depends on how well it has been treated during use, such that tools that have been treated or thrown away disrespectfully become animate, angered because of its treatment and hostile towards humans. Such tsukumogami are characteristic youkai.
As an ancient folklore story, it carries a certain persuasive reasoning, because it is a very human idea to treat that which is important to you with care and respect. It could also exist to make people realize tools are not always so worthless that they need to be thrown away immediately, because their [a tool's] very existence represents opportunity. In today's landscape, where technology is built but much too soon disposed of, because their designers deliberately made them irreparable, this particular piece of folklore is surprisingly profound.
Another insightful interpretation follows, when the idea of tsukumogami, an object becoming a youkai, is not taken as literally. After all, many objects that serve well and survive a century are typically prized collector objects. Their value, then, comes from having "lived through" quite a fair amount of time, carrying fragments of civilization and culture from back then, capturing the "spirit" of their respective time. These objects can then be seen as distinct from their original purpose, because of this newfound association. Can it not be said that legendary objects have a name of their own?
Of course, it is easy to lose oneself in the many reasons a piece of Japanese folklore could exist. This quality of having apparent wisdoms and many possible meanings, while in itself being a silly belief is widespread in the likes of Japanese folklore. I'm not sure for what reason, but Japanese culture seems to have a lot of stories or concepts of this particular nature and these are from my point of view one of the defining aspects of this culture. You can still see the remnants of folklore in shrines, architecture, even in everyday customs, making it, alongside the culture, all the more charming.
Fri, 17 Apr 2020 13:37:18 +0000
Blindsight (Peter Watts)
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A long overdue essay on a book I read about the end of last year concerns this magnificent book by Peter Watts. This is something I meant to write particularly because his work exhibits an idea I want to document. Now the book, being a hard science fiction book, appears at first as just another interstellar politics story. The idea is nothing new, of course first contact scenarios offer a lot of possible scenarios that are interesting to explore, but this particular idea has been written about countless times before. A consistently central theme is the question of intelligence of other life forms. Because a first contact scenario begs the question, what are we dealing with. Very natural of course, but Watts' take on this issue is particularly fascinating. This is on tangentially the scope of this essay.
Curiously, Blindsight only masquerades as a book about first contact, but really tackles a much more earthly concept. The question of consciousness, namely. Ingeniously, the premise is a first contact scenario between two wildly life forms, one being us puny but crafty humans, but the other a vastly more intelligent appearing but also seemingly intelligible collective intelligence called Rorschach. What makes this life form peculiar, is that Rorschach is not a solid entity, but a comparably gigantic gaseous composition with intense EM fields that constantly emit radiation. A crew attempts communication, upon which they detect specific EM waves emitted by Rorschach that could be synthesized as speech. The two parties exchange, but a linguist crew member eventually suggests Rorschach is simply generating familiar seeming speech patterns it learned from telecommunication exchanges on earth and doesn't actually understand what either party is actually saying. Understand in this context is to be interpreted as the conscious action of processing and interpreting language.
This is really peculiar, because it suggests that a vastly more intelligent life form has evolved without any traces of consciousness. Consciousness is the key here and what decidedly makes Blindsight speculative fiction, because there is still no consensus on the mechanisms or even the purpose (function) of consciousness. Whether discussions of consciousness are ever scientific is also an ongoing debate, but this never stopped humanity in its attempt to test other complex organisms for consciousness.
In the science forum Ratio 2017 Peter Watts held a talk titled "Conscious Ants and Human Hives". He goes on to mention a study on ants, where the scope of the study was to test whether ants are self-aware. This sounds like a crazy idea, but seemingly ants will recognize themselves in a mirror. This means they seem to be able differentiate between themselves and other ants! The talk showcases many more such concepts.
Rather than speculating the origin of consciousness, Watts focuses on a characteristic that would hint at the origin. His grand idea was to ask, what is consciousness dispensable? We all take for granted that at least part of our intelligence is attributed to our peculiar consciousness. Some research suggests otherwise.
Seminal work by Libet et al. in the 1980s suggested that movement preparation (i.e. neural indicators of wanting to execute functions that lead to movement) as a neural process occurs before any awareness of it! This would imply that awareness is not a prerequisite for movement preparation. We like to say actions of ours are the result of deliberate thought. If awareness only follows suit, we instead are in a process of constantly justifying actions already in the execution pipeline. More recent evaluations of awareness timing confirm parts of this seminal work but also question whether accurate enough methods are even available yet, suggesting further research is necessary before something of this gravity can be shown. The original study does have very convincing arguments and there has been difficulty in refutation. [1]
More bizarrely, separate studies inspect our capacity for making good choices consciously. Specifically the phenomenon of intuition presents a mystery I still can't reason about, how can intuitive answers ever beat results of deliberate thought processes? A comprehensive study analysed our capacity for choices made consciously and unconsciously. They presented catalogues of products from within categories, tasked people to make choices that are as optimal as possible in terms of some known criteria. It is hard to summarize a study this comprehensive, but basically groups of people who consciously reflected on optimal decisions made objectively worse decisions compared to groups of people who intuitively answered. [2]
Perhaps we really are capable of complex cognition without having to be aware of it. People can drive to a destination and arrive without any subsantial recollection of the process of getting there. People can achieve feats while sleepwalking (homicidal sleepwalking anyone?). For Watts this begs the question: is consciousness a parasite? Albeit somewhat radical, he does have a point. Evidence suggests consciousness is not in charge, evidence suggests consciousness is not even a prerequisite for complex cognitive tasks and we still have enormous difficulty in framing the purpose of consciousness at all. Is consciousness just a side development? A parasitic result of evolution that is neither responsible for harm or benefit? If we assume all of humanity is conscious (which is also hard to confirm at times), what specific evolutionary advantage does consciousness grant us? There is actually no trivial answer to this question!
[1] Timing and awareness of movement decisions: does consciousness really come too late?
[2] On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect
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end of an era
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Years come and go, we say they pass. With every (+ current-year 1), we celebrate yet another new year to come. What is really being celebrated is the death of current year.
Incidentally, this is also the end of current decade. Supposedly this assigns current year greater importance.
As a reminder to myself, this new decade has the potential to become the best one yet. When times are rough, pull through and achieve greatness. After all, what else is there to be done in life.
After all, the only constant in life is change. (Heraclitus)
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Thu, 02 Jan 2020 18:47:23 +0000