concerning memory:
2004-06-10 - 2:15 a.m.
- it seems i'm at a loss. consider for a moment, that we are born with all the information we will have in the half-moment before we die. life then, is the process of remembering those things which you will have forgotten.
Since school got out, and since I haven't gotten any hours at work, I've been devoting a lot of my time (noticeably more than normal) to my insanities. Dream worlds. myself is talking to me as if i was someone else myself was talking to (it seems that most commonly, i-prime is someone who is predicted to talk to me later that day, regardless of the fact that banks are closed on sundays). Making up excuses for things I didn't do, to people that don't exist, with reasons that aren't quite logical. On a sidenote that may be related, I've been eating vegetables.
Broke into the apartment next door so I could borrow their ceiling (which really, is half my ceiling, but I wasn't in my half of it, is all). I had locked my keys in my car, (and! lost my marbles, though I wasn't aware of it at the time, which indicates that I need to buy one of those super bouncy balls for a quarter so that when I loose that I'll know that I'm about to loose my marbles) and both doors were locked because I had just taken Chris to Latham to get his insert-curse-words-and-extraneous-figures-of-money-*here* car, and he happened to be the last one out the door. Several hours after dropping down into my apartment and unlocking, I found me curled up with myself on the chair, watching that guy who used to be on MASH(tm) do a documentary on Alzheimer's and amygdala damage. One of those shows that made you think you were right there, so that by watching the television you really got the experience of talking to one of these people with two-minute-tops memories, remembering occasionally that they had probably forgotten your name again by the time you finished your sentence. But it was not one of those *cough*reality*cough*talkshow*cough* shows that actually forces you to core-dump your memories every two minutes.
Two days later and I'm still pist. Personally, she can ask me whatever she wants, and I'll answer bluntly. But it's not fair, when she knows that I had no answer to that question, for her to test me with it. doshitenihongobenkyoosurundesuka my ass. Because. That's all. I have since thought of several reasons for why I took the class, and now I can't figure out what was so hard about answering the question before. Militaristic dedication kept me going to class each day, the swirly-complicated characters and words like 'tokidoki' kept me doing the homework. It felt really good, the two or three times that it happened, to be asked a question and answer it without questioning myself about it, not because it was wrote memorization, but because I felt I knew enough about the patterns and structures of the languages to be confident with the answer. And I really liked that feeling, of being confident in the process that lead to my answer.
The 'whole cow' theory. Assuming that fridge-stored slab-o-beef stays about as fresh as ground-beef-stuffed-in-intestines, we shall state that the individual constituents of one cow all have more or less the same refrigerator-life-span (not to be confuzled with refrigerator-life-spam). If this be the case, it should be maximally efficient to have one whole cow eaten completely before eating another cow, so that there would be no need to waste the other 4/5 of the cow when everyone is having a side of steak with their fireworks. The injuns, they used every part of an animal when they killed it, even though not every person needed all the parts. I suggest that if you're going to be eating cow as often as we do in America, that you should buy all the bits and pieces before moving on to the next prime portion. This will either have the akward effect of causing people to realize how much we waste as a nation, in uneaten flesh, or it will cause spontaneous generosity from people who would quickly buy a liver, tongue, 24 hamburgers, and 87 hot dogs to give to a friend so that they could get down to the more desirable portions.
Sometimes I wonder, if the people that I meet in a day, the ones that I don't expect to see, are *there* for the same reason I am. I wonder if a group of people get the same sort of inclination to park their car in front of a family sitting on their porch, leave the music blasting, car running, turn right, walk down the street, move an orange cone two feet to the left, return to the car and continue driving. Judging by the faces I didn't see, they don't operate with such misguided urges, nor did they appreciate me operating with them. Driving to school this morning, about four hours before the movement of the cone, I had came across a car in the middle of tenth street, out of gas and attempting to get a push up the hill from a single person. Without thinking much, I parked and got out, and we got the car a ways up the hill before it got too steep. At this point another person parks their car and jumps out, and the guy who was driving the opposite direction as me and had parked in the stewart's lot arrived. Another person showed up when we were a camel's hair away from being able to push the car all the way up the hill to the pump. Five strangers, pushing one car, and I was under the assumption that people weren't so quick, on thenth street, to help one another like that.
At other times, I wonder if the injuns ever harvested fruits and vegetables for their color alone, though I dunno how one would extract oranges from oranges.
I remember a day this semester, sitting in Kuwata Sensee's room after class for our weekly get-together. She was reading another student's essay, something about a dream. At first, I was nodding and following the story, so she read faster. I stared at the opposite wall and scrambled to find handholds in the essay, while she increased the incline, and at some point she was really getting off at it, seeing how fast she could read japanese without making mistakes, with no regard to the fact that I had made a 'aah, cannot-make-out-any-words-gaa...' noise a while back. I hated her for showing off like that. The stream of sounds was sort of nice to listen to, though. For some reason, memories of life's activities that are less than a semester old don't seem as worthy of retelling, as if they haven't yet aged enough to make a savoury recollection. It's been boiling for long enough now, to grow, to fester, to bloom.
Let's assume, for a moment, that the brain does nothing. All of our 'higher-level processes' and 'cognition' is handled by a series of patterns and interactions between what we previously thought of as 'low-level processes'. And let's assume, that for this argument, that the terms 'interior' and 'exterior' are not in our vernacular (personally, I can see very little difference between the two, except for the fact that 'exterior' describes things outside of a membrane, while interior describes the things within�but the human body is so encased and filled with different types of membranes that it makes sense to question which membrane we are talking about, that must divide the two�so for sake of simplicity, we assume that no such terms exist). Since the brain does nothing, we look elsewhere for motivation, for a mechanism that drives behaviour. Which leads us to question "what behaviour?" If a man is hungry, he attempts to eat, attempts to find some means of getting food to his mouth, because somehow, he has learned that if he feels no pressure on his stomach walls and still he detects pepsin in his stomach, he is 'hungry'. Somehow, he has learned that the large white box in the next room is half-filled with food, so to there he goes. Somehow, he has learned how to open the fridge. Ironically, he investigates the food that is available and somehow, he chooses. Now, something must be said of how the man has learned, for we notice that he knows how to grab an item, put it close to his mouth, and bite; a process which is learned very early in life. We say then, that the neurons of his hand have a 'memory', a conditioned process of mobilization that (ironically and tangibly compensating for the size and weight of the food) allows him to pick up and move it to his mouth. If then, this sort of 'physical memory' is local to the muscles with which it interacts (occasionally going a longer path, to the spinal chord and to some other muscle for coordinated motions) then the things that we can't do without the brain are much diminished.
This week, I am busy making animations of legomen, and finding ways to make potatoes interesting enough to eat. They walk in straight lines, up stairs, pivot in place, wave, jump up and down with joy, and remove their own heads...I'm going to do a few fighting maneuvers and redo the whole thing in OpenGL, which I know little to nothing about. For the record, this is the method by which good intentions are combined with temporary fascination to look like effort.
In the field of AI, we are simply attempting to make something intelligent out of something unintelligent. In medieval times, a person sees that a dead carcass sprouts larvae and then flies, and makes the reasonable assumption that the carcass itself has created life, or that the carcass's life has somehow 'passed on' to the lives of the flies. In the 21st century, we are of course more intelligent than to think such things. We have never seen the flies crawl out of a digital carcass, and yet we are not only willing to believe that it is possible, but we are willing to believe that we can make it happen. Nay, I think we need to realize that a pile of dung (ie the internet) is a fertile environment for something to grow, but it is not capable of being itself alive. What we need then, is a seed of life, a spark from which to start this process, a mother fly that currently does not exist.
While hiking on mountain trails, I sometimes see things that cause me much discomfort. A flower, beautiful and healthy, sits on the side of the path all alone, watches me as I agonize over what is to be done, now that all of my travels have brought me to this Reality, this *here*. I am torn between wanting to uproot it, take it home a replant it, categorize and name it, take a picture, or just leave it be. The decision I come to is always the same, but it's the tearing that's important.
Suppose there is a video game, in which a character has to eat something durring the day or the player will receive a message "you are hungry". If the player decides that the character is fasting, and somehow turns off the messages, is the character still fasting (assuming there are no noticeable in-game effects)? It's all about receiving and yet ignoring the bills; it doesn't count if you give them someone else's address.
Memories about one Sharron Stone. A psycholinguist of sorts, with poofy-finely-krimpt black hair who wore glasses when she read, and wanted very much to compete with hooked-on-phonix, but never achieved that level of success. In the dream, if it was a dream, I imagined coming across a series of recorded messages on tapes (which I listened to through a phone and a dial-by option service, because the recordings had since been recopied in digital form). The messages consisted of her giving me some sort of sentence on paper, and then asking me questions about it. I have no idea what age I was during the dream, because it seemed to bounce around�at the present of the dream (when I discovered the recordings, and then went to seek her out, looking for answers, and finally found her preaching to a assembly of dyslexics and illiterates, in some sort of church where vespers were a series of english phonemes, and all the rose windows had inscriptions about ' positive thinking') I was in the middle teens. Some of the recordings, I think, were taken from when I was three and four. One specific question that stands out, she asked me what I saw on the paper. Looking at the paper, the first thing I saw was the letter 'n' (some vague recollection tells me that I had been asked this before many times, and the letter 'n' was a common answer because 'n's are very appealing to me, evidently[no idea what font the sentences were in]) so I replied with the name of that letter, being very careful to pronounce it slowly and without error, and then she would make a silence that meant it was the wrong answer and ask me again "what do you see?". Perhaps I was supposed to read the entire sentence, but if so she was asking the wrong question. Now, here's the interesting part...I am at least 85% positive that the memories I have of these language therapy sessions are all completely fabricated, mostly based on the fact that I am sure I never went an visited this fabricated person in her fabricated church. The feeling of memory that I get when I think about it may be because this dream was part of a longer series of dreams, vividly remembered, from when I was three or four, and learning to read. End Dream. It is entirely possible, since I was nearly a self-taught reader (with the help of my mother and the wrote memorization of 'the three little pigs' [littlegoldenbook version]) that I had made up an imaginary teacher to help me learn. What I am actually remembering from last night's dream, are the dreams that I have associated, over time, with that childhood delusion.
Amazed with the way humans can touch something like a beating breast, and not just feel, but Hear the heart buried within�the only way I can think to make sense of it is to say that if you know what a heart sounds like, and you know that it makes that sounds when it beats, feeling it beat causes you to trick yourself into thinking that you are also hearing it. Hearing it from memory (which oddly enough, may not even be the same heart).
Eating mac+cheese never ceases to spark an adventure. I was scrounging for something other than potatoes, but while I was eating I came across a funny little brown sport. Chalking it up to a random defect, I munched happily until I came to another one and munched on that as well. When I got to the third UFO(unidentified food object) I became to get suspicious, and eventually reasoned that it must be some sort of larvae that I had somehow cooked in with my meal (for the record, my spice rack does not contain dried larvae, mostly because I don't care too much about the nutritional value of the things I eat). An earlier, more outdated version of myself would have been able to convince me that there's nothing wrong with eating boiled bugs, and I was eating them before and that sort of thing, but I lost my appetite anyways. It's more the crawly, rather than the creepy, of the creepy-crawlys I don't appreciate. Like when an old man approaches you in the white house, touches your elbow, and asks 'do yau like to have fun?'. 2 parts disinterest, one part confusion(mild), stir much too slowly.
I wonder, if for some girls that work as tellers at banks, bad credit is one of those things about a guy that turns them on (as I do not particularly like using this phrase, in the future I may say "flips their switches"). Because I got the weirdest smile today, while I was being denied for a line of credit.
Other things happened of which I will not relate here, becasue it's been a while since I really sat down and jacked in, and so important things were forgotten.
itsumo kumo no ushiro ga hi nai kara nikonikoshitekudasai.
