The most interesting mainstream, empiricist neuroscience relevant to free will and the perception of time I've found is that of Benjamin Libet. His work seems to show that you’re not immediately responsible for the preconscious neuronal firings that develop into full-fledged conscious intentions and actions if not cancelled out by other preconscious firings before they reach the threshold where they feel free-willed. He included some conscious firings, but I think he was scared of his work being misinterpreted and being labelled pseudoscientific and was being conservative.
In some yoga, there is a postulated phenomenon called "sanskara", essentially unconsciously determined patterns of behaviour and thought that you're born with or develop through trauma. They get worse as you age; your behaviour becomes more pathological. However the theory is that you can use conscious will to erase or diminish sanskara over time through techniques like meditation. So you become healthier, more aware, more in control and self-actualised.
I think the two seem similar.
However, I don't think science can get to the root of the free-will / determinism question. I don't think we can prove or disprove epiphenomenal accounts of consciousness. It's interesting how far we can dig though.
1 October 2012
Madonna, Lady Gaga, Boomerang Plagiarism and Elton John
Elton John has no idea about what's going on with Madonna and Lady Gaga.
Madonna's stance on derivation/emulation/plagiarism is clearly nuanced if you read this article on Confessions on a Dancefloor (2005): "If I'm going to plagiarise somebody, it might as well be me, right? I feel like I've earned the right to rip myself off. 'Talent borrows, genius steals' [laughs]". She rips off Oscar Wilde while laughing about plagiarising herself and others all over Confessions. Including Boomerang-Referencing Stardust's "Music Sounds Better With You" which references her own "Holiday".
Her sampling of "Born This Way" in her MDNA tour version of "Express Yourself" is a compliment, not an attack. Madonna is too subtle for that kind of thinly-veiled criticism. She is defending Gaga, the same way she defended Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears by wearing T-shirts with their names on her during one of her tours. She was erroneously accused of attacking them, and decided to clarify later.
And there are multiple direct- and Boomerang- references to Lady Gaga in Madonna's "Girl Gone Wild" video. At least five or six. Watch it with irony; Madonna hates smoking and could be accused by a casual observer of glamourising it here.
Lady Gaga herself, before "Born This Way", basically made anyone who would throw Madonna-plagiarism slurs at her look like an idiot with her "Alejandro" video. They both have great senses of humour.
As for Elton John, he's since recovered from losing at the Golden Globes this year to Madonna's "Masterpiece" (which Madonna has since dedicated to Gaga). As Madonna predicted at the time, it would be just another of Elton John's multiple feuds over the years, and that in her experience they would be friends again soon.
Meanwhile Madonna and Lady Gaga are in love with each other's work.
Madonna's stance on derivation/emulation/plagiarism is clearly nuanced if you read this article on Confessions on a Dancefloor (2005): "If I'm going to plagiarise somebody, it might as well be me, right? I feel like I've earned the right to rip myself off. 'Talent borrows, genius steals' [laughs]". She rips off Oscar Wilde while laughing about plagiarising herself and others all over Confessions. Including Boomerang-Referencing Stardust's "Music Sounds Better With You" which references her own "Holiday".
Her sampling of "Born This Way" in her MDNA tour version of "Express Yourself" is a compliment, not an attack. Madonna is too subtle for that kind of thinly-veiled criticism. She is defending Gaga, the same way she defended Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears by wearing T-shirts with their names on her during one of her tours. She was erroneously accused of attacking them, and decided to clarify later.
And there are multiple direct- and Boomerang- references to Lady Gaga in Madonna's "Girl Gone Wild" video. At least five or six. Watch it with irony; Madonna hates smoking and could be accused by a casual observer of glamourising it here.
Lady Gaga herself, before "Born This Way", basically made anyone who would throw Madonna-plagiarism slurs at her look like an idiot with her "Alejandro" video. They both have great senses of humour.
As for Elton John, he's since recovered from losing at the Golden Globes this year to Madonna's "Masterpiece" (which Madonna has since dedicated to Gaga). As Madonna predicted at the time, it would be just another of Elton John's multiple feuds over the years, and that in her experience they would be friends again soon.
Meanwhile Madonna and Lady Gaga are in love with each other's work.
30 September 2012
See-Saw Relationships, Strength-Weakness Dynamics and Stepping Stones
In a lot of romantic relationships I've witnessed, including one I was involved in, there is often a strength-weakness dynamic where one quality arising in one partner can cause the other quality to emerge in the other.
I first noticed it the first time I went manic. Up until that point, unless I was clowning for attention/shock value (usually in group situations), or hyperfocusing with a loved one on a subject I was passionate about, I was a consummate one-on-one listener. Probably the most important book I read as a child to prepare myself for the world was When I Say No I Feel Guilty, a book about assertiveness which emphasises constructive listening and calculated self-disclosure in different types of relationships. I think I've had a million people tell me their life stories and things they've never told anyone else. (Embarrassing to admit it but I think How To Win Friends and Influence People helped too.) When manic, for the first time I started talking over the top of people, neglected to express interest in their speech, and the more I did it the more I saw them see-saw into a state where I was sucking all the energy out of the conversation, riding high on my side of the see-saw while they'd flop into a semi-depressive mood. I'd force myself to be silent and see the see-saw recalibrate.
This happens in relationships too, especially romantic ones. It generally happens over periods of months, and can destroy them. The healthier / more stable relationships I've been involved in have lacked this dynamic. When it happened I blamed my partner for excessively burdening me with reactions to problems that are totally out of proportion to the reactions to problems I face when going through my depression. I thought that I was the more supportive one and was rewarded with little support in return when I had problems. I'm probably actually right, because the other people I've seen this happen to have had selfish partners too. I do like to subscribe to the "takes two to tango" doctrine but sometimes people are plain abusive.
There is an extra element to it. In my relationship and a colleague's I'm thinking about now, I think in the first few years the "offender" was in a weak place, especially self-esteem wise, and took great strength from someone they perceived to be a pillar. When the "innocent" party finally lifts the "offender" after years, the "offender" is rattled, disappointed, feels abandoned and even disgusted by the "innocent" when the "innocent" goes through a weak period.
If the "offender" is selfish, they abandon till their next crisis. If they are ambitious (or even slightly sociopathic) they use the "innocent" as a stepping stone. Don't let them back when their next stone turns out to be sludge and they think they can retreat to the stepping stone. Just remember the love. And learn.
I first noticed it the first time I went manic. Up until that point, unless I was clowning for attention/shock value (usually in group situations), or hyperfocusing with a loved one on a subject I was passionate about, I was a consummate one-on-one listener. Probably the most important book I read as a child to prepare myself for the world was When I Say No I Feel Guilty, a book about assertiveness which emphasises constructive listening and calculated self-disclosure in different types of relationships. I think I've had a million people tell me their life stories and things they've never told anyone else. (Embarrassing to admit it but I think How To Win Friends and Influence People helped too.) When manic, for the first time I started talking over the top of people, neglected to express interest in their speech, and the more I did it the more I saw them see-saw into a state where I was sucking all the energy out of the conversation, riding high on my side of the see-saw while they'd flop into a semi-depressive mood. I'd force myself to be silent and see the see-saw recalibrate.
This happens in relationships too, especially romantic ones. It generally happens over periods of months, and can destroy them. The healthier / more stable relationships I've been involved in have lacked this dynamic. When it happened I blamed my partner for excessively burdening me with reactions to problems that are totally out of proportion to the reactions to problems I face when going through my depression. I thought that I was the more supportive one and was rewarded with little support in return when I had problems. I'm probably actually right, because the other people I've seen this happen to have had selfish partners too. I do like to subscribe to the "takes two to tango" doctrine but sometimes people are plain abusive.
There is an extra element to it. In my relationship and a colleague's I'm thinking about now, I think in the first few years the "offender" was in a weak place, especially self-esteem wise, and took great strength from someone they perceived to be a pillar. When the "innocent" party finally lifts the "offender" after years, the "offender" is rattled, disappointed, feels abandoned and even disgusted by the "innocent" when the "innocent" goes through a weak period.
If the "offender" is selfish, they abandon till their next crisis. If they are ambitious (or even slightly sociopathic) they use the "innocent" as a stepping stone. Don't let them back when their next stone turns out to be sludge and they think they can retreat to the stepping stone. Just remember the love. And learn.
24 September 2012
Semantic Web, OWL, Policy Aware Web, N3: Aint Gonna Happen
I forgot I learnt and worked in basic SGML for a month or two in late 1998, but the little I remember has just coalesced with other stuff I've just read on the Semantic Web.
Bear with me, I can barely code anything, have no idea about hardware, etc. But bearing with someone with an intuitive overview rather than an overspecialised perspective can be rewarding. Sometimes.
I know some of these people are gods of the Internet, but this paper by Daniel J Weitzner, Jim Hendler, Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly smells desperate. At least from what I can decipher - and I haven't thrown out a totally unsubstantiated, purely intuitive claim on my blog for a while so it's about time - the proposed Policy Aware Web based on the supposedly nascent Semantic Web is a scarily insane dream half-slept through in front of PC screens by people who should retire before they expire. Like as wired as I am tired right now. Can't stop rhyming when it's time for bedtiming.
This article points out some of the problems with "Metacrap" ("A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities."). There is something telling me, "no! no! no!" with respect to the possibilities of Web Ontology Language (OWL), XML variations, N3, let alone their desirability when pushed through your mind's privacy/security/general self-preservation prism, whatever that may be. For reasons I can't go into here, Artificial Intelligence (don't ask about "Ambient Intelligence" - can't you people Google for yourself?) is a dream of lunacy I can't believe people even bother to entertain. Again, both in terms of possibility let alone desirability. You'd pretty much have to be Autistic to think AI is possible (a big disease in Silicon Valley). And I don't mean that in a nasty way; I think I've got Asperger's. It's just not gonna happen. You'd have to be a total Spime to get sucked in.
Then you've got people like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) involved and you're kind of thinking, Fuck even reading about it. Just Google "Semantic Web: I Told You So" in ten years' time. I'm so sick of telling people so; gets boring, lacks triumph and becomes just pure frustration with accumulating occurrence. The Supranet should freak you out; it'll likely have an IP address for every square metre of the Earth's surface one day.
Meanwhile I'm lodging my blog with Swoogle Semantic Web Search just in case I'm wrong. While sitting at my computer with quite a fetching tin-foil hat perched on my head.
Bear with me, I can barely code anything, have no idea about hardware, etc. But bearing with someone with an intuitive overview rather than an overspecialised perspective can be rewarding. Sometimes.
I know some of these people are gods of the Internet, but this paper by Daniel J Weitzner, Jim Hendler, Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly smells desperate. At least from what I can decipher - and I haven't thrown out a totally unsubstantiated, purely intuitive claim on my blog for a while so it's about time - the proposed Policy Aware Web based on the supposedly nascent Semantic Web is a scarily insane dream half-slept through in front of PC screens by people who should retire before they expire. Like as wired as I am tired right now. Can't stop rhyming when it's time for bedtiming.
This article points out some of the problems with "Metacrap" ("A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities."). There is something telling me, "no! no! no!" with respect to the possibilities of Web Ontology Language (OWL), XML variations, N3, let alone their desirability when pushed through your mind's privacy/security/general self-preservation prism, whatever that may be. For reasons I can't go into here, Artificial Intelligence (don't ask about "Ambient Intelligence" - can't you people Google for yourself?) is a dream of lunacy I can't believe people even bother to entertain. Again, both in terms of possibility let alone desirability. You'd pretty much have to be Autistic to think AI is possible (a big disease in Silicon Valley). And I don't mean that in a nasty way; I think I've got Asperger's. It's just not gonna happen. You'd have to be a total Spime to get sucked in.
Then you've got people like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) involved and you're kind of thinking, Fuck even reading about it. Just Google "Semantic Web: I Told You So" in ten years' time. I'm so sick of telling people so; gets boring, lacks triumph and becomes just pure frustration with accumulating occurrence. The Supranet should freak you out; it'll likely have an IP address for every square metre of the Earth's surface one day.
Meanwhile I'm lodging my blog with Swoogle Semantic Web Search just in case I'm wrong. While sitting at my computer with quite a fetching tin-foil hat perched on my head.
23 September 2012
Depression Insults and People Who Bully Depressives
I'm fucking sick of people who insult people with depression. No, depression isn't sadness or anything 90% of the population ever experiences, ever. So if you don't have it you don't know anything about it. It's simply qualitatively different. It's not a matter of degree. I experience grief and sadness. And major depression. They don't feel anything like each other. As this article points out, people who try to "just snap out of it" actually end up with heightened emotional activity. I will never let anyone who doesn't have basic depression-compassion in my emotional world ever again, the same way I wouldn't let someone affect me who was offensive enough to blame me for say, cancer and tell me to just get better. I thought I'd been around the block enough to have worked this out earlier, but I think the always-difficult-but-necessary-to-draw line between choice and biological determinism has held me back. In addition to the self-esteem problems that flourish during bouts of depression. Sometimes you get so lost in the fog (extreme depression entails psychosis) that you'd let someone convince you the sky wasn't blue if that would fix it. No more. They can fuck off from now on. The sky is blue.
I hope at least one person with major depression reads this and stands up to people who, for varying reasons depending on who they are, bullies them. It doesn't mean taking your hands off the wheel, except when you have to give one of them the finger.
Here's a few of my favourite insults I've had:
"It sucks you did so many drugs in your 20s."
[Yoga teacher says to a comrade that she's never seen anyone work so hard at an intensive in her career. Comrade replies without realising there might be a hint there.] "Yeah, he knew you were behind him."
[Same comrade] "Why don't you ever let anyone help you?"
[Same comrade] "I'm sick of your self pity" [pause for internal laughter]
"Try getting up at sunrise every morning and walking in the direction of the sun for half an hour."
"I'm not a Scientologist but...[fill in gap]."
I'm going to go looking for a website that collects quotes that are insulting to depressives and/or dismissive or the gravity of the physical illness. Ha, and people who don't believe in "agency", "soul" or anything non-physical (a "self") controlling your behaviour demanding you "take more responsibility". Especially when they have no idea the effort you may or may not have put in. The effort part of tackling depression is the hard bit, not the pain. Pain just happens to you and you take it passively. Putting in effort is such a worthy and moral thing you have to generate from within, actively.
I'd love it if just one person somewhere in the world with a family member with depression reads the following. Depressives aren't looking for pity; it's counter-productive and can lead some of us to ease the foot off the accelerator and take a rest on your shoulder for a while. Just be nice, admit you can't empathise or work out how to help, suspend moral judgment, and just express a bit of love/support when the occasion arises, unless the depressive is a professional victim, in which case distant nods of recognition are more appropriate and safe for yourself.
I hope at least one person with major depression reads this and stands up to people who, for varying reasons depending on who they are, bullies them. It doesn't mean taking your hands off the wheel, except when you have to give one of them the finger.
Here's a few of my favourite insults I've had:
"It sucks you did so many drugs in your 20s."
[Yoga teacher says to a comrade that she's never seen anyone work so hard at an intensive in her career. Comrade replies without realising there might be a hint there.] "Yeah, he knew you were behind him."
[Same comrade] "Why don't you ever let anyone help you?"
[Same comrade] "I'm sick of your self pity" [pause for internal laughter]
"Try getting up at sunrise every morning and walking in the direction of the sun for half an hour."
"I'm not a Scientologist but...[fill in gap]."
I'm going to go looking for a website that collects quotes that are insulting to depressives and/or dismissive or the gravity of the physical illness. Ha, and people who don't believe in "agency", "soul" or anything non-physical (a "self") controlling your behaviour demanding you "take more responsibility". Especially when they have no idea the effort you may or may not have put in. The effort part of tackling depression is the hard bit, not the pain. Pain just happens to you and you take it passively. Putting in effort is such a worthy and moral thing you have to generate from within, actively.
I'd love it if just one person somewhere in the world with a family member with depression reads the following. Depressives aren't looking for pity; it's counter-productive and can lead some of us to ease the foot off the accelerator and take a rest on your shoulder for a while. Just be nice, admit you can't empathise or work out how to help, suspend moral judgment, and just express a bit of love/support when the occasion arises, unless the depressive is a professional victim, in which case distant nods of recognition are more appropriate and safe for yourself.
Inherently Fallacious Thought, Language, Logic and Reason; Meditation and Silence
To me, structures that necessarily inhere in thought make language, logic and reason problematic to the extent that they aim to uncover truth (however indirectly or without the thinker's realisation). I doubt there are modes of human thought that don't suffer; I'd be blown away if a cultural relativist could show otherwise. We can’t get inside subject/predicate structures, show why Modus ponens is a valid move, or even think about The Law of the Excluded Middle,etc (I'd add the relationship between Noam Chomskyish - Platonicish Forms and objects, but know it's irrelevant to most people's philosophy). And we can't stop using them.
I can't imagine being able to defeat a decent argument that posits, for example, language as a higher, parallel or alternative "realm" (for lack of a better word) to thought. But I just have to run with the assumption that thought comes first. Anything else would be dishonest of me.
Thought, and therefore honest language, logic and reason, reaches toward the physical and any metaphysical "world". Yet it can't breach its own realm. All physics and metaphysics are beyond the reach of pure thought. Thought can only think itself. "Itself" includes epistemology of course, but nothing else besides phenomenology qua phenomenology in its conceptualisation as being virtually part of thought.
So it leads me to this: why have I continued to write non-fiction for the past decade I've known this? Because I love it. I'm (literally, in my opinion) pathologically addicted to reason and argument. And to a lesser extent, non-fictional language. I know the more I write the further I get from the truth, but I can't stop, the way I have to have a cigarette within an hour of doing yoga when I usually don't have cravings for a few hours afterwards. True insanity.
So the next step should be fiction. Or a vow of silence combined with thought-withdrawal-type meditation.
Like Depeche Mode said, "Words like violence / Break the silence... Words are very / Unnecessary / They can only do you harm". Or Bjork: "Words are useless / Especially sentences / They don't stand for anything / How can they explain how I feel? ... All that you've ever learnt / Try to forget / I'll never explain again."
I can't imagine being able to defeat a decent argument that posits, for example, language as a higher, parallel or alternative "realm" (for lack of a better word) to thought. But I just have to run with the assumption that thought comes first. Anything else would be dishonest of me.
Thought, and therefore honest language, logic and reason, reaches toward the physical and any metaphysical "world". Yet it can't breach its own realm. All physics and metaphysics are beyond the reach of pure thought. Thought can only think itself. "Itself" includes epistemology of course, but nothing else besides phenomenology qua phenomenology in its conceptualisation as being virtually part of thought.
So it leads me to this: why have I continued to write non-fiction for the past decade I've known this? Because I love it. I'm (literally, in my opinion) pathologically addicted to reason and argument. And to a lesser extent, non-fictional language. I know the more I write the further I get from the truth, but I can't stop, the way I have to have a cigarette within an hour of doing yoga when I usually don't have cravings for a few hours afterwards. True insanity.
So the next step should be fiction. Or a vow of silence combined with thought-withdrawal-type meditation.
Like Depeche Mode said, "Words like violence / Break the silence... Words are very / Unnecessary / They can only do you harm". Or Bjork: "Words are useless / Especially sentences / They don't stand for anything / How can they explain how I feel? ... All that you've ever learnt / Try to forget / I'll never explain again."
14 July 2012
Rich People’s Aesthetics
Check this article about rich people's bad taste. The psychology driving financial (not metaphysical) materialism or attraction to the look of raw numbers in your bank book is incompatible with the kind of psychology that allows appreciation of music, art, aesthetically pleasing people etc.
The only artistic thing I truly, deeply, immediately understand is music. And I don't give a damn about others' opinions' of my own opinions with respect to music, the same as any genius in any field doesn't give a damn. If they think you're uncultured for thinking that Katy Perry's last single was a triumph of melodic craftpersonship, soul and gloriously attentive and restrained production it might just show their own lack of understanding / immediacy of relationship with the art form.
It's hilarious to see culture wannabes read what they're meant to appreciate and fork out stacks of cash to watch neo-jazz (the original jazz artists were renegades who would be doing avant-garde electro music if they were around now, not reprising admittedly beautiful stuff from a century ago) etc and wank on about it. One way you can tell whether someone gets music is how they dance, or whether they start dancing in their seat without realising it. Once I caught a family member trying to work out how I was moving my feet under the table when I was unconsciously dancing in my seat while simultaneously talking about a high-concept issue.
There's no shame in not getting an art form. I don't get visual art unless a genius in that field explains it to me. Apart from that, it's enough that I like a picture. I don't know why or what's going on at a deeper level, or have an immediate, arresting, physical relationship with it, but I just relax and admit it rather than being dishonest, which is what wanking essentially amounts to. Why make people feel unincluded unless there is an important, usually information-imparting reason for it? Feigning immediacy/physicality of reaction is not cool and is an embarrassment when there's actually a genius at experiencing that particular art form in the room who is quietly having a laugh or getting angry that you're making third parties feel inferior.
Someone I know has two very intelligent sisters who are incapable of watching "Kath and Kim" because it mocks their world view and actions. Hilarious. If you don't get a certain type of comedy, you should always consider whether that's a result of just crap comedy or your own personal hang-ups. Things you can't confront. John Howard convinced a whole generation of working-class people (particularly in places like the North-West of Sydney) that they were middle class. The whole "Aspirational Class" thing. They didn't realise their lives were still being controlled by the ruling class. It's hard to have sympathy for the ones that knock other working people over in their rush for crumbs from the table. Have some pride. And guts to admit what you are.
The only artistic thing I truly, deeply, immediately understand is music. And I don't give a damn about others' opinions' of my own opinions with respect to music, the same as any genius in any field doesn't give a damn. If they think you're uncultured for thinking that Katy Perry's last single was a triumph of melodic craftpersonship, soul and gloriously attentive and restrained production it might just show their own lack of understanding / immediacy of relationship with the art form.
It's hilarious to see culture wannabes read what they're meant to appreciate and fork out stacks of cash to watch neo-jazz (the original jazz artists were renegades who would be doing avant-garde electro music if they were around now, not reprising admittedly beautiful stuff from a century ago) etc and wank on about it. One way you can tell whether someone gets music is how they dance, or whether they start dancing in their seat without realising it. Once I caught a family member trying to work out how I was moving my feet under the table when I was unconsciously dancing in my seat while simultaneously talking about a high-concept issue.
There's no shame in not getting an art form. I don't get visual art unless a genius in that field explains it to me. Apart from that, it's enough that I like a picture. I don't know why or what's going on at a deeper level, or have an immediate, arresting, physical relationship with it, but I just relax and admit it rather than being dishonest, which is what wanking essentially amounts to. Why make people feel unincluded unless there is an important, usually information-imparting reason for it? Feigning immediacy/physicality of reaction is not cool and is an embarrassment when there's actually a genius at experiencing that particular art form in the room who is quietly having a laugh or getting angry that you're making third parties feel inferior.
Someone I know has two very intelligent sisters who are incapable of watching "Kath and Kim" because it mocks their world view and actions. Hilarious. If you don't get a certain type of comedy, you should always consider whether that's a result of just crap comedy or your own personal hang-ups. Things you can't confront. John Howard convinced a whole generation of working-class people (particularly in places like the North-West of Sydney) that they were middle class. The whole "Aspirational Class" thing. They didn't realise their lives were still being controlled by the ruling class. It's hard to have sympathy for the ones that knock other working people over in their rush for crumbs from the table. Have some pride. And guts to admit what you are.
Higgs Field Ontology, Dark Matter and the Zero Point Field: Interpretation
CERN physicists' announcement a few weeks ago with respect to their belief that they have enough evidence that there are/have been particles with properties considered sufficient enough to qualify as the proposed Higgs boson is a total game-changer. For all of humanity. But especially for me because I was the centre of a couple of occurrences that I have since named "The God Particle Synchronicities". And it was the day I found out soy chai lattes have 600 calories. I had been drinking them everyday.
First, I believe, along with some physicists, that any description of a phenomenon or law is subject to reductio ad infinitum. For instance, even Richard Feynman believes that the concept of "force" itself is incapable of conceptualisation or definition. This idea is linked with the belief, which I also hold, that all systems/theories are ultimately circular - they proceed from arbitrary, self-confirming ansatzs. I reckon everyone should think "Zeno's Paradox" when thinking physics.
I'm reading an intellectually honest but sadly compromised book called Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad: A Journey from Burning Man to the Akashic Field by James Oroc. There are two chapters in which Oroc gives Quantum Physics and Zero Point Energy respectively quite muddled and overly-inferential interpretations, both of which are "mystical". (I hate that word in this context because it's manipulatively derogatory, delineates orthodox from non-orthodox with sleight of speech, is intellectually repressive and conveys to the layperson the impression that there is nothing "mystical" about the most standard interpretations of physics. "Spiritual" might be more appropriate.) I'm not attacking him; he writes from an honest, inquisitive place. Anyway, he ultimately seems to come to a conclusion that all particles derive their mass from the resistance created by their acceleration through "the" Zero Point Field but then self-contradicts by going off on Lynne McTaggart rants about light. He also says that Einstein's relativity theories imply that, to a photon, there is no such thing as time or space. This is a fundamental misunderstanding, but I also think that Einstein was merely giving a useful, tactical switch in perspective but along the way made the mistake of privileging light (through claiming that its vacuum velocity is insuperable) in its relationship with space and time.
I had been thinking of writing a kind of thought-experiment piece removing time from Einstein's Universe, thus creating a "vector-less" or "scalar" Universe in which mass and energy still exist, but the equivalent of e=mc2 is changed to e=mk (k being a random constant). Motion would be impossible, there would no light except for static photons, etc. Without motion, would energy be possible?
When I studied physics at university I was surprised at the alacrity with which lecturers (who, rightly, all said chemistry was just a minor branch of physics) would both "prove" equations and make unwarranted parallels to ontology without questioning assumptions at all. There was only one who was not like that. He was clearly suffering extreme depression. He showed us a two-page slide of a version of Schroedinger's Equation and just skipped it, telling us not to bother because his graduate students couldn't even understand it.
When I studied the physics of electricity both theoretically and experimentally, I was blown away by the fact that the concepts involved are a priori beyond human comprehension. None of my tutors could explain and didn't seem perturbed that they couldn't. Carry on, robots. And I thought there was nothing controversial anymore about electro-magnetism.
Everyone should read Paul Davies' The Mind of God. He's a decent mainstream physicist/philosopher; far superior to Stephen Hawking.
Einstein was so humble: he was embarrassed by his cosmological constant and called it his greatest blunder. With increasing knowledge about dark matter and dark energy, the past five years has seen increasing acceptance that Einstein's "blunder" was no such thing.
Everyone should also know that an electron has never been directly observed (much less other sub-atomic particles like quarks). It's impossible by definition because of the massive difference in wavelength between photons and electrons. Electrons are "observed" by throwing other electrons at them. Hilarious. So physicists have the hide to misinform the public about the fact that their "observations" about sub-atomic particles (and even molecules) are mere intellectual inferences from measurements of other phenomena that are observable. Question a biologist about receptors, neurotransmitters etc. When you push, their embarrassment is palpable. It must be distressing to have the foundations of your entire system of thought on which your career is based thrown into doubt by a few questions. All scientists should be forced to study a substantial amount of the philosophy of science.
With quantum physics, the simple fact is that there are about 20 or so conflicting and hotly contested interpretations that the community deems to be non-pseudoscience. The rest are laughed at. And there is no criterion through which the distinction is made except blind reverence for certain physicists' reputations. There are some who are good enough to declare their agnosticism but you just can't help but fall into a camp.
Similarly, mathematics lecturers have no issue with imaginary numbers. Wow.
Then the Higgs boson story hit. So a model of the Universe in which there is a pervasive, unobservable field with which otherwise massless particles interact, imparting the particles with mass, looks like an even nicer model than before (when you submit your thinking to standard assumptions in physics). The Standard Model of physics looks tighter.
An interesting thing about this is most people's intuitive equating of mass with being. This means that, especially, or only, materialists now have a level of explanation of ontology one step up from before. But only one step. Where does the Higgs Field derive its mass-bestowing power from? It goes on ad infinitum, as I said.
All of these things (the Higgs field, dark matter, the Zero Point Field, etc) are flawed models but seem to be pointing in the same direction. We've made real progress. What we need to make progress with is the epistemological issue. The simple fact is that all human reasoning takes place within frames that are inherently unprovable themselves. Interpretation is a matter of personal taste. Propositions in logic, mathematics and physics are as unfalsifiable as propositions about "god". So Popperian "that's not falsifiable" nazis are clueless and scientistic. Falsifiability itself a ridiculous concept. If theory A cannot be disproved through observation, then theory not-A is also unfalsifiable. Which means dismissal of a proposition on a Popperian basis is an act of unwitting self-contradiction. You can't falsify an agnostic stance. Therefore agnosticism is "religion".
First, I believe, along with some physicists, that any description of a phenomenon or law is subject to reductio ad infinitum. For instance, even Richard Feynman believes that the concept of "force" itself is incapable of conceptualisation or definition. This idea is linked with the belief, which I also hold, that all systems/theories are ultimately circular - they proceed from arbitrary, self-confirming ansatzs. I reckon everyone should think "Zeno's Paradox" when thinking physics.
I'm reading an intellectually honest but sadly compromised book called Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad: A Journey from Burning Man to the Akashic Field by James Oroc. There are two chapters in which Oroc gives Quantum Physics and Zero Point Energy respectively quite muddled and overly-inferential interpretations, both of which are "mystical". (I hate that word in this context because it's manipulatively derogatory, delineates orthodox from non-orthodox with sleight of speech, is intellectually repressive and conveys to the layperson the impression that there is nothing "mystical" about the most standard interpretations of physics. "Spiritual" might be more appropriate.) I'm not attacking him; he writes from an honest, inquisitive place. Anyway, he ultimately seems to come to a conclusion that all particles derive their mass from the resistance created by their acceleration through "the" Zero Point Field but then self-contradicts by going off on Lynne McTaggart rants about light. He also says that Einstein's relativity theories imply that, to a photon, there is no such thing as time or space. This is a fundamental misunderstanding, but I also think that Einstein was merely giving a useful, tactical switch in perspective but along the way made the mistake of privileging light (through claiming that its vacuum velocity is insuperable) in its relationship with space and time.
I had been thinking of writing a kind of thought-experiment piece removing time from Einstein's Universe, thus creating a "vector-less" or "scalar" Universe in which mass and energy still exist, but the equivalent of e=mc2 is changed to e=mk (k being a random constant). Motion would be impossible, there would no light except for static photons, etc. Without motion, would energy be possible?
When I studied physics at university I was surprised at the alacrity with which lecturers (who, rightly, all said chemistry was just a minor branch of physics) would both "prove" equations and make unwarranted parallels to ontology without questioning assumptions at all. There was only one who was not like that. He was clearly suffering extreme depression. He showed us a two-page slide of a version of Schroedinger's Equation and just skipped it, telling us not to bother because his graduate students couldn't even understand it.
When I studied the physics of electricity both theoretically and experimentally, I was blown away by the fact that the concepts involved are a priori beyond human comprehension. None of my tutors could explain and didn't seem perturbed that they couldn't. Carry on, robots. And I thought there was nothing controversial anymore about electro-magnetism.
Everyone should read Paul Davies' The Mind of God. He's a decent mainstream physicist/philosopher; far superior to Stephen Hawking.
Einstein was so humble: he was embarrassed by his cosmological constant and called it his greatest blunder. With increasing knowledge about dark matter and dark energy, the past five years has seen increasing acceptance that Einstein's "blunder" was no such thing.
Everyone should also know that an electron has never been directly observed (much less other sub-atomic particles like quarks). It's impossible by definition because of the massive difference in wavelength between photons and electrons. Electrons are "observed" by throwing other electrons at them. Hilarious. So physicists have the hide to misinform the public about the fact that their "observations" about sub-atomic particles (and even molecules) are mere intellectual inferences from measurements of other phenomena that are observable. Question a biologist about receptors, neurotransmitters etc. When you push, their embarrassment is palpable. It must be distressing to have the foundations of your entire system of thought on which your career is based thrown into doubt by a few questions. All scientists should be forced to study a substantial amount of the philosophy of science.
With quantum physics, the simple fact is that there are about 20 or so conflicting and hotly contested interpretations that the community deems to be non-pseudoscience. The rest are laughed at. And there is no criterion through which the distinction is made except blind reverence for certain physicists' reputations. There are some who are good enough to declare their agnosticism but you just can't help but fall into a camp.
Similarly, mathematics lecturers have no issue with imaginary numbers. Wow.
Then the Higgs boson story hit. So a model of the Universe in which there is a pervasive, unobservable field with which otherwise massless particles interact, imparting the particles with mass, looks like an even nicer model than before (when you submit your thinking to standard assumptions in physics). The Standard Model of physics looks tighter.
An interesting thing about this is most people's intuitive equating of mass with being. This means that, especially, or only, materialists now have a level of explanation of ontology one step up from before. But only one step. Where does the Higgs Field derive its mass-bestowing power from? It goes on ad infinitum, as I said.
All of these things (the Higgs field, dark matter, the Zero Point Field, etc) are flawed models but seem to be pointing in the same direction. We've made real progress. What we need to make progress with is the epistemological issue. The simple fact is that all human reasoning takes place within frames that are inherently unprovable themselves. Interpretation is a matter of personal taste. Propositions in logic, mathematics and physics are as unfalsifiable as propositions about "god". So Popperian "that's not falsifiable" nazis are clueless and scientistic. Falsifiability itself a ridiculous concept. If theory A cannot be disproved through observation, then theory not-A is also unfalsifiable. Which means dismissal of a proposition on a Popperian basis is an act of unwitting self-contradiction. You can't falsify an agnostic stance. Therefore agnosticism is "religion".
12 June 2012
HIV Bugchasing: Cost to Taxpayers and the Dawn of the Next HIV
I'm about to slam HIV-positive men who have bareback sex with other HIV-positive men thinking the damage has already been done - and Bugchasers - in their moronic heads with the truth no-one else is brave enough to.
Except when writing about future HIV-like epidemic(s), Superinfection and drug-resistance, there will be some hypocrisy on my part. During a manic episode two years ago I went on a crystal meth bareback frenzy, was exposed to HIV and cost the NSW Government $1600 for a course of Non-occupational Post-exposure Prophylaxis ("PEP") - medication comprising half thereof and ancillary support the other half. It worked because I took every pill with zealous discipline and precision regarding time of day and length of time before and after meals. The official line is that NPEP/PEP has an 80% effectiveness rate, but just like many other facts surrounding the HIV/AIDS disaster, data and information is buried or hidden, and obscured/manipulated in its simplification and interpretation for presentation to the public in educational material. At the end of my course I was still in high panic mode so my counsellor at the sexual health clinic let me in on the secret that there has never been a single transmission of HIV after a proper application of the entire, current PEP protocol in NSW.
By the way, scumbags who fake exposure and procure a course of PEP meds in the week before Mardi Gras weekend so they can go wild should be prosecuted for fraud.
That leads me to the first subject of this article: the question of whether it's possible, desirable and morally right to withdraw government-funded assistance from people found to have deliberately infected themselves with HIV. For heteros, these freaks are called "Bugchasers". There is actually a movement out there that denies there are such people. I haven't tried to find out their motivations for pushing this myth but I'd assume they relate to not giving heteros any more ammunition for homophobia and the prevention of the publication of articles like this. If you want to verify it for yourself, join a gay bareback website like http://barebackrt.com and click on a link to a list of upcoming "Conversion Parties" in your local area. Or read the blurbs on bugchasers' profiles on gay dating websites. Or trust me that, as someone who has been an openly gay man in Sydney (one of the Big Three gay cities in the world) for 12 years, 6 of which I spent doing sex work in a brothel, and had possibly up to 1000 partners in my spare time, I know what I'm talking about. One of my ex-boyfriends once looked me in the eyes while I was making love to him and said "If anyone gives me HIV, I'd want it to be you" and went into a frenzy of lust which needless to say, killed my erection. He's now positive and charging $250 per hour for safe sex and $400 an hour for bareback sex in his sex-work. There are many reasons for Bugchasing including fetishisation of disease, wanting the fear of contraction to end, desire for victim status, isolation and wanting to belong to a community, being sexually excited by the taboo etc, etc.
It's extremely difficult to dig up reliable data that helps individuals make their own minds up about various issues surrounding the HIV/AIDS holocaust. One reason would probably be delay in action and funding for research caused by homophobia, especially in the US till the mid-1990s. There's also issues with differences between the developing world and developed world, straights/gays/bis and the drug-injecting population. But anyone who has spent time searching for, or looking at, statistics pertaining to basic and sometimes widely-asked questions (which should be available to everyone so can they choose their own courses of actions viz-a-viz sexual behaviour) knows that there has been a deliberate obfuscation campaign going on for a couple of decades now. Sometimes you can wade through mountains of tables and explanations of methodology, protocol and and the absolute plethora of interpretative models out there, link the information together, do your own calculations and adjustments through your own personal prism of analysis but it's exhausting. So sometimes you've got to just give a ballpark figure and be unable to source it.
Allocating public funds - especially those that don't facillitate economic activity that delivers future revenue or fail the cost-benefit analysis on some other count - is a matter of competing choices. Sometimes it's just a simple moral crime to spend $1m on training an elite athlete over the course of their career instead of providing public housing for say 10 people from the cohort of 100,000 homeless people in Australia. End of story.
It's extremely difficult to quantify the amount of taxpayer money sacrificed per person with HIV, especially per year. HIV+ people cost money in a bunch of ways. The obvious one is paying for the medication they are actually given, whether it be Antiretrovirals (ARVs) or medication for secondary complications (in countries that actually have decent health systems where meds are virtually free for everyone). HAART is the standard treatment (combinations of ARVs) and from various sources (try finding a straight answer on it) I've calculated that in the US and Australia this costs over $10,000 per year per patient. Allied health care in Australia costs another $10,000 (paid by the States). HAART takes up 2% of the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (PBS) budget despite being used chronically and indefinitely by 0.01% of the population of Australia. Costs escalate as the disease progresses and patients develop secondary illnesses and then skyrocket in the lead up to death. The cost of HAART is offset by a resulting drop in new infections by 3%, and benefits like giving HIV+ people an extra 8 years of life during which they're well enough to live normally, work etc ("Quality Adjusted Life Years" or "QALYs"). They extend people's actual life expectancy from 10 years to 15-30 years from point of infection, although this would imply that the health system would have to care for them for the years between when they become incapacitated with things like early-onset dementia. There are a multiplicity of other costs involved in dealing with HIV+ including provision of housing, HIV/AIDS research, education and the like. These costs are not amenable to analysis in terms of price per HIV+ person but have to be acknowledged. Overall, general estimates of the cost to taxpayers of caring for HIV+ people are between $500,000-$750,000 per patient for the remainder of their lives.
So should we divert such massive amounts of money away from the homeless, international aid, education and health for Bugchasers? Make your own mind up but think of the sheer selfishness involved here. At least cigarette smokers more than fund their drain on society through tobacco taxes.
The only problem with withdrawing care for Bugchasers is that of practicality: how do you determine who's an innocent HIV+ person and who's just filth? The only thing I can think of is monitoring barebacking websites, but it would be intrusive. Barebacking websites should be banned and held criminally liable for not taking down Bugchaser-facillitating material.
Now to HIV+ people who have bareback sex with other HIV+ people. Wake up. It took 50 years from the time of SIV's mutation into HIV and cross-over to humans before the first cases of AIDS were diagnosed. With the increasing contact of humans with previously untouched wilderness and the advent of widespread air-travel, it's only a matter of time before a similarly fatal STI jumps into the population, spreads like wildfire through the gay community (amongst others - but we're far more sexually adventurous and anal sex is simply far more conducive to STI transmission than other forms of sex) and wipes out another generation of us. We have enough to deal with. It's probably happening already.
Then there's Superinfection: when someone acquires more than one strain of HIV, accelerating the march to AIDS and death. And drug resistance. Drug resistance can occur within a host through non-compliance with their ARV program. It can also occur inter-host. Everyone's HIV is at a different stage of mutation under the pressure-cooker of years of exposure to medication and journey through various people's bodies.
Finally, there is a possibility that the current economic upheavals rocking the world and the inevitability of global warming will cause disruptions to civilisation as we currently know it, cause civil unrest, and cause problems with the ability to acquire and distribute anti-HIV medication. It'd be like the 1980s era of the epidemic again where everyone drops like flies.
For negatives, remember that 12% of openly gay men have HIV.
Gay men that convince other gay men that having HIV is like having a cold for the purposes of luring them into barebacking are scum, especially if they do it to young guys who don't remember the absolute annihilation of gay life, culture of utter fear, ignorance and discrimination in the 1980s. And Giftgivers should be incarcerated, have their assets seized and wages garnished to pay for their crimes against all of society.
And I hope people have noticed I haven't used the term "People Living With HIV" ("PLWHIV"). No, they're dying. Be honest. We needed to destigmatise HIV/AIDS in the 1980s-1990s but the well-documented increase in bareback sex in young gay men needs to be halted. In my experience men over say 35-40 are generally extremely vigilant with using condoms because they remember all their friends dying in agony in the early days while many young guys jump on anyone's cock without the slightest hesitation.
This article will piss off just about anyone who reads it but the truth needs to be told. Bring it on, bitches, if you have the balls.
Some lingo for any research you want to do:
"Giftgivers" = HIV-positive men who like to infect other men.
"Poz" = (adjective) HIV-positive. (verb) to give someone HIV.
"Conversion Party" = orgy where there are various configurations of numbers and proportions of Bugchasers, Giftgivers, Tops and Bottoms.
"Bug Party" = ditto.
"Seed" = to ejaculate up someone's anus.
"Load" = the entire volume of semen from one ejaculation.
"Neg" = HIV-negative.
"Convert" = to infect someone.
"Bug Juice" = [I'm starting to feel sick so I'll leave it to your imagination].
Some websites:
A taste of the irresponsibility and cronyism in gay organisations like ACON - who should be publishing statistics like probability of HIV contraction from various sex acts instead of patronising the gay community with signs like "Get Tested!" under pictures of cartoon characters - where careerism and upward mobility in the gay world are often the primary motivators for those involved:
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/row-over-hiv-health-cash-20110115-19rvu.html
Criminal transmission of HIV:
http://www.halc.org.au/downloads/crim_transmission.pdf
The Impact of HIV/AIDS in NSW – Mortality, Morbidity and Economic Impact :
http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/resources/publichealth/sexualhealth/pdf/ImpactStatement.pdf
Tracking Down the Next HIV:
http://www.aavmc.org/Careers-in-Veterinary-Medicine/Veterinary-Spotlight-Dr002E-Jonna-Mazet.aspx
An example of the irresponsibility of authorities and some advocates in dealing with the HIV crisis:
http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/news/news-2/6344-australia-urged-to-follow-us-lead-on-hiv-prevention-pill.html
A history of the development of anti-HIV medication and an example of how authorities and big pharma get things so wrong that they do things like hasten the death of HIV+ people with supposed "medication" (here, AZT):
http://www.irinnews.org/InDepthMain.aspx?InDepthId=12&ReportId=56080
Except when writing about future HIV-like epidemic(s), Superinfection and drug-resistance, there will be some hypocrisy on my part. During a manic episode two years ago I went on a crystal meth bareback frenzy, was exposed to HIV and cost the NSW Government $1600 for a course of Non-occupational Post-exposure Prophylaxis ("PEP") - medication comprising half thereof and ancillary support the other half. It worked because I took every pill with zealous discipline and precision regarding time of day and length of time before and after meals. The official line is that NPEP/PEP has an 80% effectiveness rate, but just like many other facts surrounding the HIV/AIDS disaster, data and information is buried or hidden, and obscured/manipulated in its simplification and interpretation for presentation to the public in educational material. At the end of my course I was still in high panic mode so my counsellor at the sexual health clinic let me in on the secret that there has never been a single transmission of HIV after a proper application of the entire, current PEP protocol in NSW.
By the way, scumbags who fake exposure and procure a course of PEP meds in the week before Mardi Gras weekend so they can go wild should be prosecuted for fraud.
That leads me to the first subject of this article: the question of whether it's possible, desirable and morally right to withdraw government-funded assistance from people found to have deliberately infected themselves with HIV. For heteros, these freaks are called "Bugchasers". There is actually a movement out there that denies there are such people. I haven't tried to find out their motivations for pushing this myth but I'd assume they relate to not giving heteros any more ammunition for homophobia and the prevention of the publication of articles like this. If you want to verify it for yourself, join a gay bareback website like http://barebackrt.com and click on a link to a list of upcoming "Conversion Parties" in your local area. Or read the blurbs on bugchasers' profiles on gay dating websites. Or trust me that, as someone who has been an openly gay man in Sydney (one of the Big Three gay cities in the world) for 12 years, 6 of which I spent doing sex work in a brothel, and had possibly up to 1000 partners in my spare time, I know what I'm talking about. One of my ex-boyfriends once looked me in the eyes while I was making love to him and said "If anyone gives me HIV, I'd want it to be you" and went into a frenzy of lust which needless to say, killed my erection. He's now positive and charging $250 per hour for safe sex and $400 an hour for bareback sex in his sex-work. There are many reasons for Bugchasing including fetishisation of disease, wanting the fear of contraction to end, desire for victim status, isolation and wanting to belong to a community, being sexually excited by the taboo etc, etc.
It's extremely difficult to dig up reliable data that helps individuals make their own minds up about various issues surrounding the HIV/AIDS holocaust. One reason would probably be delay in action and funding for research caused by homophobia, especially in the US till the mid-1990s. There's also issues with differences between the developing world and developed world, straights/gays/bis and the drug-injecting population. But anyone who has spent time searching for, or looking at, statistics pertaining to basic and sometimes widely-asked questions (which should be available to everyone so can they choose their own courses of actions viz-a-viz sexual behaviour) knows that there has been a deliberate obfuscation campaign going on for a couple of decades now. Sometimes you can wade through mountains of tables and explanations of methodology, protocol and and the absolute plethora of interpretative models out there, link the information together, do your own calculations and adjustments through your own personal prism of analysis but it's exhausting. So sometimes you've got to just give a ballpark figure and be unable to source it.
Allocating public funds - especially those that don't facillitate economic activity that delivers future revenue or fail the cost-benefit analysis on some other count - is a matter of competing choices. Sometimes it's just a simple moral crime to spend $1m on training an elite athlete over the course of their career instead of providing public housing for say 10 people from the cohort of 100,000 homeless people in Australia. End of story.
It's extremely difficult to quantify the amount of taxpayer money sacrificed per person with HIV, especially per year. HIV+ people cost money in a bunch of ways. The obvious one is paying for the medication they are actually given, whether it be Antiretrovirals (ARVs) or medication for secondary complications (in countries that actually have decent health systems where meds are virtually free for everyone). HAART is the standard treatment (combinations of ARVs) and from various sources (try finding a straight answer on it) I've calculated that in the US and Australia this costs over $10,000 per year per patient. Allied health care in Australia costs another $10,000 (paid by the States). HAART takes up 2% of the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (PBS) budget despite being used chronically and indefinitely by 0.01% of the population of Australia. Costs escalate as the disease progresses and patients develop secondary illnesses and then skyrocket in the lead up to death. The cost of HAART is offset by a resulting drop in new infections by 3%, and benefits like giving HIV+ people an extra 8 years of life during which they're well enough to live normally, work etc ("Quality Adjusted Life Years" or "QALYs"). They extend people's actual life expectancy from 10 years to 15-30 years from point of infection, although this would imply that the health system would have to care for them for the years between when they become incapacitated with things like early-onset dementia. There are a multiplicity of other costs involved in dealing with HIV+ including provision of housing, HIV/AIDS research, education and the like. These costs are not amenable to analysis in terms of price per HIV+ person but have to be acknowledged. Overall, general estimates of the cost to taxpayers of caring for HIV+ people are between $500,000-$750,000 per patient for the remainder of their lives.
So should we divert such massive amounts of money away from the homeless, international aid, education and health for Bugchasers? Make your own mind up but think of the sheer selfishness involved here. At least cigarette smokers more than fund their drain on society through tobacco taxes.
The only problem with withdrawing care for Bugchasers is that of practicality: how do you determine who's an innocent HIV+ person and who's just filth? The only thing I can think of is monitoring barebacking websites, but it would be intrusive. Barebacking websites should be banned and held criminally liable for not taking down Bugchaser-facillitating material.
Now to HIV+ people who have bareback sex with other HIV+ people. Wake up. It took 50 years from the time of SIV's mutation into HIV and cross-over to humans before the first cases of AIDS were diagnosed. With the increasing contact of humans with previously untouched wilderness and the advent of widespread air-travel, it's only a matter of time before a similarly fatal STI jumps into the population, spreads like wildfire through the gay community (amongst others - but we're far more sexually adventurous and anal sex is simply far more conducive to STI transmission than other forms of sex) and wipes out another generation of us. We have enough to deal with. It's probably happening already.
Then there's Superinfection: when someone acquires more than one strain of HIV, accelerating the march to AIDS and death. And drug resistance. Drug resistance can occur within a host through non-compliance with their ARV program. It can also occur inter-host. Everyone's HIV is at a different stage of mutation under the pressure-cooker of years of exposure to medication and journey through various people's bodies.
Finally, there is a possibility that the current economic upheavals rocking the world and the inevitability of global warming will cause disruptions to civilisation as we currently know it, cause civil unrest, and cause problems with the ability to acquire and distribute anti-HIV medication. It'd be like the 1980s era of the epidemic again where everyone drops like flies.
For negatives, remember that 12% of openly gay men have HIV.
Gay men that convince other gay men that having HIV is like having a cold for the purposes of luring them into barebacking are scum, especially if they do it to young guys who don't remember the absolute annihilation of gay life, culture of utter fear, ignorance and discrimination in the 1980s. And Giftgivers should be incarcerated, have their assets seized and wages garnished to pay for their crimes against all of society.
And I hope people have noticed I haven't used the term "People Living With HIV" ("PLWHIV"). No, they're dying. Be honest. We needed to destigmatise HIV/AIDS in the 1980s-1990s but the well-documented increase in bareback sex in young gay men needs to be halted. In my experience men over say 35-40 are generally extremely vigilant with using condoms because they remember all their friends dying in agony in the early days while many young guys jump on anyone's cock without the slightest hesitation.
This article will piss off just about anyone who reads it but the truth needs to be told. Bring it on, bitches, if you have the balls.
Some lingo for any research you want to do:
"Giftgivers" = HIV-positive men who like to infect other men.
"Poz" = (adjective) HIV-positive. (verb) to give someone HIV.
"Conversion Party" = orgy where there are various configurations of numbers and proportions of Bugchasers, Giftgivers, Tops and Bottoms.
"Bug Party" = ditto.
"Seed" = to ejaculate up someone's anus.
"Load" = the entire volume of semen from one ejaculation.
"Neg" = HIV-negative.
"Convert" = to infect someone.
"Bug Juice" = [I'm starting to feel sick so I'll leave it to your imagination].
Some websites:
A taste of the irresponsibility and cronyism in gay organisations like ACON - who should be publishing statistics like probability of HIV contraction from various sex acts instead of patronising the gay community with signs like "Get Tested!" under pictures of cartoon characters - where careerism and upward mobility in the gay world are often the primary motivators for those involved:
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/row-over-hiv-health-cash-20110115-19rvu.html
Criminal transmission of HIV:
http://www.halc.org.au/downloads/crim_transmission.pdf
The Impact of HIV/AIDS in NSW – Mortality, Morbidity and Economic Impact :
http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/resources/publichealth/sexualhealth/pdf/ImpactStatement.pdf
Tracking Down the Next HIV:
http://www.aavmc.org/Careers-in-Veterinary-Medicine/Veterinary-Spotlight-Dr002E-Jonna-Mazet.aspx
An example of the irresponsibility of authorities and some advocates in dealing with the HIV crisis:
http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/news/news-2/6344-australia-urged-to-follow-us-lead-on-hiv-prevention-pill.html
A history of the development of anti-HIV medication and an example of how authorities and big pharma get things so wrong that they do things like hasten the death of HIV+ people with supposed "medication" (here, AZT):
http://www.irinnews.org/InDepthMain.aspx?InDepthId=12&ReportId=56080
9 January 2012
Singularity, Infinity and Asymptote
A year and a half ago I relayed the content of an intense, heavily symbolic dream with obvious pregnancy of urgently-needed deciphering to a colleague. Several months afterwards I learnt of its startling prescience and its clever depiction of a complicated situation involving five people's emotional stances towards each other. This colleague was in a position to realise the gravity of some of my dream but declined to inform me of its literally life-threatening meaning because of his loyalty to a mutual friend. He did so despite the fact that we had both previously collaborated in ensuring that this mutual friend didn't finally succeed at one of his many suicide attempts. I didn't know at this point that the colleague had deliberately wiped the entire contents of my external drive holding years of work and memories at the behest of the mutual friend who was in the grip of crystal meth- and opiate- induced psychosis. The colleague's response to my dream-retelling was, "I'm glad you've reached a singularity." I only knew the meaning of the term "singularity" from my knowledge of physics and mathematics so found the reply baffling - I just immediately sensed pretentiousness and misapplication of a scientific term to the human/psychological/societal/cultural sphere a la Alan Sokal, especially since the colleague is an English major and cultural theorist. Yeah, I'd deck him if I ever saw him again. Gratifyingly I've since read a dissertation by him and was surprised to learn that he can't write and fundamentally misunderstands some basic concepts in the fields of philosophy and law, both of which I'm trained in. The mutual friend had lead me to think he might be a genius. The mutual friend has also told me things that would destroy the colleague's academic career on revelation. But I'm nice.
That was a bitchy little rant. Anyway.
Today I simultaneously, synchronistically stumbled on the concept of "singularity" in two different contexts: the metaphysical and the technological/futurist. This was after a period of re-evaluation of my opinion about the validity of the technical use of the designator "infinity" in mathematics.
My approach to the metaphysics of mathematics is a bit unusual. I think it could be described as "Kantian". I definitely have to elaborate because I don't think there have ever been many philosophers that have actually ever come close to understanding the thoughts of Kant that are relevant here, including Kant himself. I don't care how revered they are/were. Kant's writing itself feels like he was aware that he was touching the boundaries of human comprehension, and that he knew humans are strictly confined to a certain type of rationality that honestly reaches out to truth, but in a particular way that prohibits access to objective/universal/ultimate truth. But this isn't relativism. The first thing to try to understand is that empiricism vs rationalism/idealism is a false dichotomy. I think Hegel got this. Space-time, the physical universe and consciousness are both real and human constructs, as if human consciousness and perception interact with the objective field in a way that structures this field in a particular way for us, but just for us. And at the same time, because we can't exceed the strictures of reason and perception, which are in turn real, it's worthless to speculate about objective reality; we have our own true reality. Again, don't confuse this with relativism. I think Aldous Huxley got this. I definitely can't put it into words. The second thing is that I think even Kant himself underestimated how much of our thinking is synthetic a priori. I really don't think people can intuit even the most simple arithmetic or even small natural numbers. I've written about this before. When I was a kid I was amazed that maths, which proceeds from whole reams of assumptions that are unprovable but intuitively commanding, could proceed in abstract obliviousness to anything outside itself and yet matched up with the physical world, and that some mathematical proofs would just lie around for centuries before some genius applied it to something in nature. Maths is never wrong! So obviously empiricism is out of the question. Strict Platonism was always more attractive but I was still in the darkness of lack of imagination exhibited by those who counter that there is no way the abstract can interact with the physical. Kant finally gave me more of a concrete way of elaborating what I thought was code written into the Universe of which our physical brains are a part, and thus share the same code. Learning maths never felt like learning, it felt like remembering, like inheriting our evolutionary birthright sitting in the depths of our brains all along. But now I'm a Platonist in a Kantian way. Mathematics is written in the sky, but in our sky. And that's where exploration of the ontology of maths ends. I can imagine things like Dialetheism being valid, but not in our Universe.
So I've always had a problem with infinity and asymptotes. They just can't be grasped by human reason, and of course not experienced. And yet they're absolutely essential concepts for a lot of maths, and a lot of that maths in turn is verified by the existence of parallels in the natural world that are beyond any probability of mere coincidence of the abstract with the physical. Infinity isn't something you can even just be agnostic about precisely because it exceeds comprehension. I think Levinas rambled something about this. You simply can't have an opinion about infinity. Full stop.
Then there's Goedel's Theorem.
A word on recursion, which applies both to Goedel and proponents of technological singularity theory. We need to use it but be aware that it's epistemologically problematic.
"Singularity" in metaphysics is the "Omega Point". It's basically an unprovable, spiritual idea that is quite attractive. It's teleological, but I don't personally have a problem with that. The concept of infinity don't present a problem here.
Infinity causes problems for believers in the Technological Singularity. By definition an asymptotic curve cannot reach - let alone progress - past its asymptote. Therefore it's ridiculous to speak of reaching a singularity, or the future beyond a singularity. Time (the x-axis) will not slow down or stop or something when computers' processing power goes into hyper-growth (the y-axis).
A side note on Technological Singularity and Artificial Intelligence: believers mustn't have much understanding of neurology and the nature of human intelligence. The brain is the most complex known system in the Universe. Its functioning involves chemical, electrical and magnetic transmission. It's a chaotic system. There are all kinds of crazy things about it I won't go into. We know next to nothing about it, and by definition, being constrained by the consciousness it produces/facilitates, will never be able to understand it in totality. Computers crash because they're made by fallible humans and rely on insurmountably fallible systems of logic. They'll get faster than us but will always be limited by our limitations.
One last thing: Stephen Hawking makes all kinds of inferential mistakes from his mathematics. Don't take the current theories on event horizons of black holes seriously.
That was a bitchy little rant. Anyway.
Today I simultaneously, synchronistically stumbled on the concept of "singularity" in two different contexts: the metaphysical and the technological/futurist. This was after a period of re-evaluation of my opinion about the validity of the technical use of the designator "infinity" in mathematics.
My approach to the metaphysics of mathematics is a bit unusual. I think it could be described as "Kantian". I definitely have to elaborate because I don't think there have ever been many philosophers that have actually ever come close to understanding the thoughts of Kant that are relevant here, including Kant himself. I don't care how revered they are/were. Kant's writing itself feels like he was aware that he was touching the boundaries of human comprehension, and that he knew humans are strictly confined to a certain type of rationality that honestly reaches out to truth, but in a particular way that prohibits access to objective/universal/ultimate truth. But this isn't relativism. The first thing to try to understand is that empiricism vs rationalism/idealism is a false dichotomy. I think Hegel got this. Space-time, the physical universe and consciousness are both real and human constructs, as if human consciousness and perception interact with the objective field in a way that structures this field in a particular way for us, but just for us. And at the same time, because we can't exceed the strictures of reason and perception, which are in turn real, it's worthless to speculate about objective reality; we have our own true reality. Again, don't confuse this with relativism. I think Aldous Huxley got this. I definitely can't put it into words. The second thing is that I think even Kant himself underestimated how much of our thinking is synthetic a priori. I really don't think people can intuit even the most simple arithmetic or even small natural numbers. I've written about this before. When I was a kid I was amazed that maths, which proceeds from whole reams of assumptions that are unprovable but intuitively commanding, could proceed in abstract obliviousness to anything outside itself and yet matched up with the physical world, and that some mathematical proofs would just lie around for centuries before some genius applied it to something in nature. Maths is never wrong! So obviously empiricism is out of the question. Strict Platonism was always more attractive but I was still in the darkness of lack of imagination exhibited by those who counter that there is no way the abstract can interact with the physical. Kant finally gave me more of a concrete way of elaborating what I thought was code written into the Universe of which our physical brains are a part, and thus share the same code. Learning maths never felt like learning, it felt like remembering, like inheriting our evolutionary birthright sitting in the depths of our brains all along. But now I'm a Platonist in a Kantian way. Mathematics is written in the sky, but in our sky. And that's where exploration of the ontology of maths ends. I can imagine things like Dialetheism being valid, but not in our Universe.
So I've always had a problem with infinity and asymptotes. They just can't be grasped by human reason, and of course not experienced. And yet they're absolutely essential concepts for a lot of maths, and a lot of that maths in turn is verified by the existence of parallels in the natural world that are beyond any probability of mere coincidence of the abstract with the physical. Infinity isn't something you can even just be agnostic about precisely because it exceeds comprehension. I think Levinas rambled something about this. You simply can't have an opinion about infinity. Full stop.
Then there's Goedel's Theorem.
A word on recursion, which applies both to Goedel and proponents of technological singularity theory. We need to use it but be aware that it's epistemologically problematic.
"Singularity" in metaphysics is the "Omega Point". It's basically an unprovable, spiritual idea that is quite attractive. It's teleological, but I don't personally have a problem with that. The concept of infinity don't present a problem here.
Infinity causes problems for believers in the Technological Singularity. By definition an asymptotic curve cannot reach - let alone progress - past its asymptote. Therefore it's ridiculous to speak of reaching a singularity, or the future beyond a singularity. Time (the x-axis) will not slow down or stop or something when computers' processing power goes into hyper-growth (the y-axis).
A side note on Technological Singularity and Artificial Intelligence: believers mustn't have much understanding of neurology and the nature of human intelligence. The brain is the most complex known system in the Universe. Its functioning involves chemical, electrical and magnetic transmission. It's a chaotic system. There are all kinds of crazy things about it I won't go into. We know next to nothing about it, and by definition, being constrained by the consciousness it produces/facilitates, will never be able to understand it in totality. Computers crash because they're made by fallible humans and rely on insurmountably fallible systems of logic. They'll get faster than us but will always be limited by our limitations.
One last thing: Stephen Hawking makes all kinds of inferential mistakes from his mathematics. Don't take the current theories on event horizons of black holes seriously.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
