lugubrious destitution

day 35, season of Discord, year 3175 as it goes. i know its weird, dorky, or eccentric, but it spices up my life a little bit to switch up what i call, and thus how i think about, days and months. Plus someone made a yahoo widget that makes it easier for me to see it everyday ;)

Technology! The advent of possibility striking poise amongst our leading ideas with all the luster of white marble.

I see communication take a different shape; in the past you had to write letters to people you didn't see. These letters took time to get somewhere, whether days or longer by horseback or forever by manback, the conversation wasn't quick enough for single-sentence response, instead one loaded paper up with all sorts of everything you could and would put on it for the intended audience to absorb. So with the greater size of verse more planning and organization took place. Greater effort was applied to achieve proper understanding and graphically immersive description in the overall composition. Correcting yourself would take 3 times as long as getting it right the first time. So conversations were long in the making, and thus long-distance interaction was completely different than everday interaction, and relationships with other humans (from an individual perspective) took on different shapes for different distances. Example:

My nextdoor neighbor interacts with me on a daily basis. I have a constantly updating idea of my neighbor, and over a period of time i have detected the subtle patterns of his behaviour, and my depth of understanding concerning him is rather deep. I feel comfortable in predicting when he's lying or not about something, or when he's using sarcasm; all the little nuances of facial expression, tone and pitch of voice, combined with tested experience of his character have provided me with extensive knowledge of him and its all these things put together that form the picture in my head when i think of my neighbor. most of our conversations are shallow, quick, or just lazily constructed because we share such a vivid undestanding of one another. We are practically telepathic, so there's rarely a need to be grandiose or perform poetic verse, but senses of humor and empathic readings have become heightened.

But over the river and through the woods is grandma, and it takes like 3 months for a letter to get there because grandma lives in Hungrywolf Forest and no sober, sane person gets anywhere near the place. Sometimes it might take 5 months in a bad winter! So my experience with grandma is wicked limited on the same terms as my experience with my neighbor. My grandma may trust me with the most dusty of secrets, and thus the strength of relationship is much more heartfelt and cherished the the one with mine neighbor. But i don't have the experience of her facial expressions or voice, body language, or even sheer amount of finished conversations. So my image of her in my head is much more made up by me to fill in all the stuff i usually think of when i think of a person. The image of her in my head is no less robust, colorful, clear or defined than that of my neighbor, but i made up part of it unintentionally. It has to do with how we think, i'll get to that in a moment.

/moment/

See, we think in pictures and ideas, and our processes work between these variables. Its like computer programming; the idea of a person is built up around all the things you associate with all people (the variable set). But not everyone has a complete set, in fact few ever do. So our thinking process fills these in. Sometimes we forget parts or we just don't know them; it doesn't really matter why it's an empty variable, only that it is. Our useage of "ideas" and how we mentally image them allows for any amount and combination of variables in a variable set to be used. And ideas (variable sets) are all capable of constantly changing, even at the same time. Its called being "alive" and has to do with our processing speed defined as our rate of existence so to speak. Our consciousness would be analagous to computer memory, only instead of space it would be defined in units of time, probably something like 1/10 of a second or whatever length of time our precognition is. (I read this article on how the brain has to make up for the amount of time it takes for it to process input so we can react properly to real-world things i.e. falling items, so if it takes 1/10 of a second for my eyes to signal my brain and then for me to signal my primary motor cortex, then my brain takes all this input from my eyes and then calculates where it will all be in +1/10 of a second before it shows it to me, giving me a "current" view of everything.)

I see our consciousness as a combination of our inner voice, and a memory logging device that can relate seemingly any amount of information to any other amount of information in a growable, editable ever loop. It is like if your memory was a tape that could get longer or shorter in any particular spot, and any information on any spot on the tape could be connected to any amount of other spots on the tape. Your inner voice also holds your view, your percepted reflection of the world, you're minds eye so to speak. For instance i use my senses as basic variables for logging memories. So we think in accord to our senses, we can think in pictures, we can imagine music, or hot or stinky or anything! We can think in any combination of things we experience as input, whether temperature or emotions. But our inner voice is wired to our imagination as sound and emotional input, so we can think in pictures with a voice-over if we want. some people talk to themselves, in fact i imagine we all do in some degree, its how we mull and process information sometimes, by turning it over in our perverbial mind-hands. And our behaviour is like a list of all the activites we partake in and is organized by this done the most to least. You do some things more than others, and these are the things that you can do with less conscious effort because you've done it so many times before.

so back to how we think of eachother, we hold mental images, constructions of our total views of eachother. So the people we interact with and converse with more often all share similar variable sets, and since these people are all interacted with more often, these variable sets become habitual and require little to know concious effort to employ. this means when we think of someone that is unusually different than the "norm", we might makeup things to fill in the gaps we are so used to using when normally thinking about a person. Then these things we makeup get stacked up in our memory, rolling over onto eachother and getting folded into the things that we don't make up, making them just as real to us; indiscernable after enough time has passed.

so my grandma might seem more Legendary than my neighbor because her memory is not only lacking tarnish from my ignorance of grandma's cocaine habit but has been polished by my addition of gleaming adjectives over the years. If all my grandma ever tells me in our letters that she conquered and subdued, so thus when i imagine my grandma doing things i have never actually seen her do, like stand in line at the mini mart or step in poo, i imagine her just as majestic and queenly as my other memories of her. We all do it to some degree, its just part of how we are made.

and we think of ourselves on the same level as we think of other people (we think of ourselves and person's, so to speak, we have self-images regardless of how made up they are)

So back when long-distant communication was more prevalent, the unknown practice of filling in gaps in our ideas of people was also more prevalent. But now...


But now technology has it so we can chat or text message anyone on the planet practically instantly. You can keep up with anyone like they were your neighbor regardless of geographical differences. So i get to hear grandma whine about how lonely Hungrywolf Forest is all day because we have verizon's family spam plan. All my relationships with people fall into about the same category now, they all share mostly similar variable sets, that is i think about them all in pretty much the same way. So the practice of exersizing my imagination in terms of my ideas and images of people in my head might be waning? Am I, as a current human, compared to my ancestors who wrote letter, losing mental agility due to the advent technology? How much is it changing us? Greatly, i say. And i do not in any way think its bad. Or good. Its just different. And all i want to do is get a greater picture of it so i can better predict what to do to ride the wave. I'm not here to judge, i'm here to ride.

But in the precognitive sense, i imagine that technology is making up for our growth as a population. We aren't that far away from anybody else anymore, and our technology reflects that. And so some our thinking processes are going to be affected, in this case the way we think of eachother. With the loss of our far-away hero's lustrous shine, we might need to learn how to shine ourselves so to see it in the mirror, at least. There's a safe bet there is going to be somebody somewhere nearby, so you might as well be as awesome as you want because someone's bound to see you. And that thought might well help us to behave ourselves as well. We are all of us a sweater, but each of us threads. Or maybe we're a blanket, that's not the point.

the point is we are all some kind of total unit defined by a large set of individual pieces, those being each and every one of us. All of us humans make up a humanity, and our treatment of eachother and ourselves defines us as a whole. Our growing population and technology is marking changes in how we communicate and think about eachother. And how we talk and think about eachother belies how we act towards eachother (and ourselves). It would be prudent for us to use this knowledge of our current changese wisely. Right now we are permeating our communications with advertisements of sale. something i think is a waste of time but could be being used to slow us down before we tear-ass down the wrong road. or it might be a product of ignorance to our situation from the view of the masses. I might be the only person who has readily noticed that changes in basic and prominent human communication are only small ripples showing up before the larger waves. And like any wave, i imagine you would need an idea of where the wave was going before you could ride it. right now all i know is that it's going "that way" and i'm trying to position myself accordingly.

oops! its 5:55 am. time to go.