winterastral

hey kids

2009-04-08T04:32:00.000-07:00

No, i haven't abandoned this. I've just had nothing to say at all. I'm not an verbose person at the best of times, and my mind has been dead with the physicality of it all over the past year. Frankly I'm sick of it but that's not the point of this post.

The real point was to all my two readers I thought of an experiment today which everybody can try.

We are governed by words. You're reading this in words; the words are translated to abstract concepts you have learnt to associate them with. This limits our viewpoint to the concepts that words provide us, like presets on an analog synth. So vocabulary is very important; you don't want to make techno with only a bassline. You want lots of crazy pads and leads and effects to spice it up, and communicate what you're trying to say more effectively.

Still, you are limited. So I propose you kill the presets by trying to convey all your verbose thoughts into the abstract concepts they are derived from. Think in those concepts, not in the words. Try to hold your thoughts without any internal dialogue at all - just pure meaning and expression. Obviously this is difficult, as it's a habit breaking sort of thing. So I will try it, and I will see if I come to any success. That's all I have to say, I don't know.

Comprehension

2009-01-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

I hang around a lucid dreaming forum; in it is a lot of mystic gibberish. Thus it has given rise to a thought.

To understand something, you must know all that is behind it; consequently, to understand a person completely, you must know all that is behind them, in their experiences and previous views. Obviously the only person you can do this with is yourself, and even then it's probably impossible; loss of memories is needed, but some things will be lost forever.

So there is the reason why representation of the people often fails; the people representing obviously do not have the same experiences as those represented. You probably know this; it wasn't my original point.

The original point was about the words you might write when you are on drugs. They may seem quite an insight at the time, but come sobriety and they're just nonsense. This is because drugs dramatically shift your viewpoint and view on experiences; without this new view, the insights you have had will lack context.

Strangeling

2009-01-03T01:24:00.000-08:00

I am currently spinning DJ Shadow's Entroducing. It's better than I initially gave it credit for.

Recently, a thing has been happening which I don't really understand. I have been seeing animals everywhere - cats, dogs, birds - but when I turn to look they're actually a bucket, or a post. It has been happening too often, and I wonder why. Perhaps it is that syndrome where you make a repeated mistake; I know it has happened before with me, as I always tend to say right when I mean left. But I don't know.

Take heed of these street animals; maybe they're telling me something.

Pricelessness? HA.

2008-12-19T02:48:00.000-08:00

I am riding again; I see an anti-abortion poster. Someone has torn part of it down and drawn a big red cross over it. But I can still read part of the website address - it has the word "Priceless" in it. Which gets me thinking; would they really consider it a priceless thing if the right price DID come along?

If someone was, by their protesting, opinion or somesuch, stopping one single abortion, how much do you think they could be bought off for?

Take $100,000.

For a goodly number of people that might do it; concerns over their money in future would be soothed. It's one abortion, they can let it go when thousands happen each day even with their efforts. The money could probably be partly used to help their protesting in the future.

But for more fanatical people, that might not be enough. They'd let it stand, possibly to "resist temptation" in the moral code they have. So since we're hypothetical, let's go a lot higher.

$1 million? Probably still wouldn't get quite a few takers.

$10 million? Hmm...

$100 million? I think most opinions would sway by now; but I'm slightly pro-abortion so I don't know that for sure. I think for $100 million you could persuade nearly people to look the other way on one abortion; hardly matters after all. If you're anti-abortion, and disagree with this, feel free to post it; but please consider on whether you would be persuaded if it happened to you. Don't lie to yourself.

All this bargaining talk led me to think of devil's bargains; selling your soul and whatnot. While most people reading this probably wouldn't sell their soul at any price, there's the interesting matter of a different bargain.

Assume the devil, or some other entity if you're an militant atheist, can offer you anything at all in exchange for bending some of your priceless morals; and is good at showcasing it to you too. Consider the thing you want most, your deepest darkest fetish or desire; in sexuality or spaceships or shape shifting or SOMETHING. How many of your morals do you think stand up? Killing someone you know probably stands; killing or torturing someone you don't? Hmm. I can't think on what issues people are fanatical right now (it's a bit late), so can you mention some?

Point no. 12

2008-12-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

I was riding in the city to get some crickets, and it struck me how damn close we live to death now. Half a metre, two or three seconds; and BAM, you could be run down. Death has always been close throughout history - a few meals lost can mean an end - but we take it for granted nowadays that we'll be okay with new healthcare and technology, while completing ignoring that we've shaved the line closer than ever before.

But if that's not a reason to feel alive then I don't know what is.

In lieu of something proper

2008-11-06T02:38:00.000-08:00

Some random shit I found on songmeanings.net, about the song One Of These Days by Pink Floyd.

I don't know what this song means, but I know what this song means TO ME.

Children often have crying in the night or have sleep terrors (night terrors) or nightmares. Many attempts have been tried to find the cause of them, but the mystery is never solved.

Changing the subject, I often had same nightmares when getting a fever in childhood (before I listen to Pink Floyd). I was a globe floating in dark space and was run after in always another big globe. The periphery was like weird photomicrograph. Because it looks as if I am going to be swallowed in a globe momentarily, I escaped desperately having difficulty in breathing on account of wheezing. Many people said they have same experience. I and they said unanimously that since we grew up to be a man we got never to have a nightmare somehow. That is an oppressive feeling as if being suffocated or being sucked in to a tunnel. I set up a hypothesis that it is a prenatal memory, birth trauma.

Don't you have such experience? That nightmare's atmosphere was exactly like _One of These Days_. The big globe shouted while closing in on me: "One Of These Days, I'm going to crush you as flat as a pancake!" I believe that is why Songmeaningsuser wrote that "Lying in bed at night is probably the best way to listen to Pink Floyd". Also I believe that is why band used great pig's balloon. And so I feel it is the origin of Comfortably Numb. Sorry about my bad English....

Thoughtforms Part 1.1

2008-10-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

Everything being real has an interesting side effect; it turns out that some "fictional" characters are in certain ways more real than you or me.

Take Harry Potter for instance. Now, to you of course you're a lot more real; there's a lot more detail in your life. You read, you write, you go to the bathroom properly instead of just fighting trolls in there. But take a thousand rabid Harry Potter fans on the other side of the world. Actually, make that ten thousand; I'm sure there's at least that many, and probably a lot more. That's probably more than all the people you know, and that know you as real. If you're a famous celebrity disregard that, but otherwise it's fair. Now, Harry Potter is a heck of a lot more real to them than you are. They have no conception of your life, and plenty of his. So it would not be unfair to say that he is much more real to them than you are.

You can apply this further; even people who aren't rabid Harry Potter fans are likely to have heard of him, and thus he's still more real to them than you are.

Now, for the flaws in that.

Reality is not a thing based on how famous you are. I know I exist, and Harry Potter doesn't.

Well, you always know you exist. But if you don't know of someone or something they do not actually exist in your worldsphere; and that's the only one we have, so it might as well be for all reality as applied to us.

But Harry Potter has no self-awareness!

If we are in some sort of story, then perhaps it just picks some details and leaves the rest of the living to us. I often think that I might be a bit character in some teenager's story, and I wonder if my part has happened yet, and who it's happening to.

The Only Way; or Thoughtforms Pt. 1

2008-10-17T02:59:00.000-07:00

EVERYTHING IS REAL; EVEN THE STUFF THAT ISN'T.

Okay, we've got the point out of the way. Now, let us consider.

Say you are at your computer (which you will be, unless you're on your phone or have printed this). It's real; it's real because it exists, and you know it exists. It's there, you can touch it and use it. I might ask "But what if it's a computer simulation of some sort; we're all in the Matrix, blah blah blah". Well, one sec.

Imagine a computer in your head now. What gives this computer any less reality than an actual physical one? You may not be able to touch it physically, but it's still there. If you were to think hard enough, it would have all the details of a real computer. If you could think REALLY hard, it could probably do the same things. I know looking like a duck and quacking like a duck is not really a fitting mallard test, but there is still something there in both cases.

I'm not claiming they are the same thing; just that they are both real, albeit in a different way. There's no such thing as imaginary; the distinction would be mental to physical, and whatever other states there are.

Part 2 will be about my imaginary friend Rax, when I get to writing it.

A parable

2008-10-08T04:23:00.000-07:00

A wise man was sitting on the street, soaking a golfball in a cup of water. A passerby asked him why he was doing such a thing. The wise man replied "Because it is the fashion." The passerby then asked "If it was the fashion to jump off a cliff, would you?" The wise man responded "No, of course not."

You are now entering the HARMONIC DOOR....

2008-10-03T04:22:00.000-07:00

Oh hay, I'd forgotten about this. A shame really - I don't actually think very often, I just dull myself with computer and shit. Bleh.

I read Slaughterhouse 5 recently, a good book which I recommend. It got me into a nice weird slo-mo state where I was considering things quite strangely. A good idea I got out of it was, to quote from my notebook; "A circle needs no explanation." It is a very nice figure, the circle, and in my mind resolves the big question of where we came from. We have simply come from ourselves somehow. But I went over that in my last post, so anyway.

Two other random things to say - one, I think my mind has been rather dulled by computer addiction and anti-depressants. Any suggestions for some spiritual activities I could do to get back to myself?

Two; I'd probably be counted as otherkin. This means, if you were to look it up on Google, that I consider myself to have a spirit of some mythical creature, and possibly be reincarnated from one. But that's not it, or I would have just let you look it up. Really it's just a figment of my imagination, but one that helps define my sense of self. Quite stupid, but it's not hurting anybody or impairing my knowledge, so why not?

But why am I mentioning this exactly? It's a nice segue (do you pronounce that seeg or segway?) into the ramble for today - subjectivity. Otherkin are a prime example of this because their whole belief is a completely subjective experience - it happens within their own heads, and thus is rather hard for others to prove or disprove. Obviously people will respond to such a subjective absurdity with disbelief; often the people having the experience as well. When it comes up with something that cannot be proved or disproved, you just have to go with the intuitive validity or not of it.

But that's not going anywhere. I've just thought of a new, random point anyway; magic. Magic, and its more common counterpart in astral projection, seem to be among the most subjective of experiences. This pretty much kills them in a scientist's eyes - when it's all based on feelings, intuition, dreams and visions, then there's nothing to test; nothing to make it more than self-delusion. But this dismissal is slightly unfair. Perhaps magic and the like is only ever a subjective thing, to be done within your own sphere; without experimentation we cannot know, and scientists won't go near it, failing the test as it does.

So basically we need more scientists performing magic. We need them to do the subjective things, and take them apart, looking for other explanations even as they continue. If we find those explanations then we know why it's a fraud, instead of dismissing it out of hand; and if we don't we may find something interesting.

This conclusion can apply to your life too. Don't dismiss things out of hand because they seem ridiculous from your perspective; try them, get immersed in them, and then dismiss them again, this time from an informed viewpoint.

And a shout-out to my first commentator, bob001 (very generic name!) and Ramses IV, a watcher on the XKCD forums. That's one of the two places this is linked, along with DreamViews. I should link it a bit more...

Creating the universe through time travel

2008-07-16T06:24:00.000-07:00

It's a big problem, the universe beginning. Why did it start? Moreover, how? If there was nothing there...

But I have a solution. There is a way you can create the universe without having a start point - time travel.

Solution A - something went back before the big bang or whatever started the universe, and the non-universe, having nowhere to put the matter, exploded out into the universe where eventually something would go back and make it.

Simple, no messy starting points. But there is a problem with it - time travel may indeed be impossible. The Grandfather paradox and related things argue against it a bit too much for the theory to stand up. So we come to solution B, which I came up with after reading an article on how new universes could be made through black holes. That may indeed be false as well, but it at least seems more possible than time travel.

Solution B - We have two universes. Let's call ours Universe A, and the other Universe 1. In Universe A, a black hole or something is formed, and creates Universe 1, which splinters off. Then later in Universe 1, a black hole is formed which creates Universe A. Both universes are created without the need for a starting point.

Now how exactly did that happen? You'd think that U1 couldn't really create UA - it was made by it, and it can't go back in time. BUT; who says time has to flow the same way in both universes? They are separate - they don't need to share time. And the connections - the "space between them" isn't really affected by time either. Time is something inside the universe, and things outside it can ignore our time.

My apologies, that last paragraph was not very clear. Basically; time is different in both universes, so they can get into a time loop as there is no causality between them to break. No starting point, very clean.

Infinity and parallel universes

2008-07-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

Hello, and welcome back to winterastral. Of course, nobody is reading this, but what the hell. It's just a vehicle for ranting. Also, the spellcheck cannot spell vehicle, and neither can I.

Anyway, onto infinity. I don't like infinity of late. It's getting on my nerves, with its parallel possibilities and all.

Now, I'm assuming you're vaguely familiar with the infinite universes idea. For those who aren't it's basically that whenever a decision or observation is made that the universe splits into an infinite number of realities with all of them different. From this I'm assuming that in the infinity of universes there is everything that is possible, due to different initial starting conditions and such, which are decisions of a sort. Everything has to be included, because it is infinity, and thus has every given value.

But now here comes the thought experiment problem. In at least one universe - in fact an infinity of them, although a small infinity - there is a bomb which will blow up every reality, and it will go off in seven seconds. It doesn't really matter how the bomb works - the important thing is it can be imagined, which means it is possible. Now, seven seconds have gone by; why aren't we all dead? Something seems wrong with my ideas.

But! In an infinity of universes, there will also be something that stops every bomb. We're saved? Not quite. Because there will also be something that stops what's stopping the bomb; and then there will be something that stops that; and so on. And this is where the problem is. In the infinity of universes, the prevention of this bomb exploding will never come to a resolution. Things will be canceling out each other forever, leaving no state for the bomb to be in.

I am unsure where this leaves us. It seems that in our infinity of universes, things cannot happen, for they will not resolve. But we are here now, and actions seem to do things. So one of the starting conditions is wrong. Either there is not an infinite number of universes, or there is not an infinite number of possibilities.

But then again, infinity is weird. If there is infinity, then there is everything, all of the time, always. And in that everything there will be a little aside somewhere of our reality as we know it. So who knows how it might come to an end, or a new beginning. Anything could happen; and hopefully it will.

heaven and hell

2008-06-11T01:57:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about heaven and hell today. Not about whether they exist - for that is relatively pointless to consider, as they can never properly be proved or disproved - but rather what they are.

Recently I went back to my door...
I'm sorry, let's try that again.
Recently I had quite a revelatory thought. The universe is the way it is - which is that it can always get better and always get worse - because of the battle between the possible and the impossible. If there was only possibility then everything and anything would be happening, and if there was only impossibility then there would be nothing. But we have a deadlock as it stands, with possibility and impossibility forever canceling each other out (it's possible that it's not impossible but it's possible that it's impossible as well) and so we are left with this middle universe. Sorry for the overuse of the word possible but other words don't really work.

Anyway, this train of thought sorta got me to thinking. Heaven (with a capital H), by definition, is a place where no thing can be better. And on its opposite, Hell is a place where no thing can be worse. But how can either of those be possible? If you take any situation there is always something that can improve or worsen it. So logically Heaven must be everything all at once always, as then nothing can be added to it. But then there's a problem. There are many painful and sorrowful things in life; and often there is also an upside to these things.

So how can you include or not include these things? If you include them, there will be a painful bit that makes things worse than the best - but if you don't include them, the situation could be better by their inclusion. And you cannot separate the good part from the bad part, because often the bad part is what makes the good part good.

So a Heaven like that cannot exist.

I have said in a previous post that heaven is nothingness, and it is a reasonable point. But to me it does not ring fully true, as real perfection would include this viewpoint of nothingness as well as everything else. So have I disproved heaven? Where have I gone wrong?

three levels of reality

2008-06-06T19:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's something.

There are three levels of reality, and between them they encompass everything that ever can be.

First, we have the base level. This is probably our reality now, the physical world of things. However, we may be in the second or third layer, and the base lower down. It's impossible to tell. But there is a bottom layer.

Next is the world of things that we can directly imagine, which includes abstract concepts. Many things can be imagined, and they are all in this way real, even if they only exist in a thought, for a thought is as real as anything else. This world is substantially bigger than the base reality, as the number of abstract concepts can be infinite. (If you can imagine a number, you can imagine a higher number, and those numbers exist in this second layer as well. So there is already an infinite number of concepts in it with numbers alone.)

Finally, we come to the world of things we cannot imagine, these being so foreign from our understanding that they could not be comprehended. This is the biggest of the realities, and at first it may seem inaccessible. Do they exist if we cannot ever comprehend or know of them? The solution lies in an interesting sidestep. We cannot imagine them directly, but we can imagine ourselves imagining and comprehending them. Thus they exist without us ever knowing directly what they are.

I do not think there are any more layers. If you think there are, please tell me.

the sleep of no dreaming

2008-06-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

waiting...to be disappeared..

hi, i'm signify, and I'm depressing yet wonderful.

anyway

When we think about death, we may consider a heaven or a hell or both or whatever you subscribe to with your religion. If you're atheist, then ignore that bit, and if you're agnostic, either become an atheist or start your own form of spirituality. But anyway, most religions have a heaven or hell sorta judgement. And while this may seem better than nothingness on the surface, it's actually not really.

Consider being nothing. You can't, it's okay. But if you are nothing, you are free from all the cares and desires of the world forever, and you do not mind that you are missing the good things such as love and ice cream and all that stuff because you do not want for these things. It may sound pretty bad on the surface, but it's really just Buddhism. Freedom from desire and all that stuff. So all you atheists, you are correct. We don't need a heaven. Nothingness is in its way better than any heaven we can dream up. Of the heavens we can't dream up, obviously I can't make that point, but that's not what I am arguing.

And remember kids, the brainwashed do not know they are brainwashed.

The Trouble with Language

2008-06-03T04:20:00.000-07:00

Welcome to winterastral. This is not anything significant.

The trouble with language is that language is truly very limited. I read a book of philosophy questions, and one talked about what it was like for a bat to be a bat. We might be able to imagine what it would be like to be a bat for us, but it's not possible to directly imagine what being a bat as a bat is like. It's an utterly foreign experience for us. This is what happens with language. Imagine a facial expression - a grimace perhaps. Now, imagine describing this grimace to someone who has never seen one. (Not that unlikely, actually.) You can describe all the fundamental features of this grimace, and the effect it would have on other people viewing it, but the actual impression - your personal view - is lost. There is something that cannot be defined using the words we have; an abstract concept floating, left behind in translation.

And even ignoring this first point, there is the much more pressing point of simply not having words for something. This is not entirely the fault of language itself - it is instead the fault of individual languages not having the words we need, or sometimes the word simply not existing in any form. Making up new words is not really a solution - when a concept or experience is an individual and personal one, what is the point of making up a word if nobody else understands what it properly means?

It's nicer to think abstractly as well. This has become difficult due to the nature of our culture, so our thoughts are often limited by the words we use so often. This certainly makes it easier to express things to others, but so much harder to get a better picture of the world, of everything.

I wish I could think in these abstracts. For now poetry will have to do.

I wish I'd hallucinate more. Every home is wired. No, this isn't poetry, if you were thinking that then

winterastral - 24 may

2008-05-24T00:23:00.000-07:00

A week remains.