Catmachine

Kernel Panic Tomorrow morning is when I go into hospital to have a general anaesthetic for the very first time. It's an interesting concept. Looking at the operation of the brain as analogous to that of a computer it's more like a hard reboot, actually being switched off and on again as opposed to mere sleep which is more comparable to being in stand-by or, well, sleep mode. Will I feel any different afterwards? I'm hoping that such a restart will clear out any unwanted program loops, neuroses that have been running unchecked ever since a random combination of circumstances and input set them off. Mentally I should feel better, that is once I've stopped feeling nausea. And, most interestingly, what will happen to my consciousness? I have heard that by all accounts it's as if no time has passed; as the inhabitants of the Dollhouse say " Did I fall asleep? " This makes sense from a materialistic point of view. No new data is entered or data sorting takes...

I've spent the last few blog entries if not explaining it away then at least arguing that an afterlife is unlikely and that this is all we've got. This isn't as cheerless a claim as it might first sound. Many materialists gloomily cry " This is all there is! ", their faces contorted in melancholia (and, not to put too fine a point on it, no small measure of glee at spreading the bad news). I don't subscribe to this point of view; I'm trying to explore and expand my knowledge of our existence. I'm not starting from a traditional position of Heaven and Earth and then scribbling out great swathes of the firmament; I'm starting from a single cell and marveling at how far we've come and what it means to be conscious in the four dimensions of spacetime, and many worlds of the quantum multiverse. However, my subconscious obviously isn't entirely happy with my recent activities as several times over the last few days I've dreamed about the af...

Previously in this blog... I started out discussing borders and ended up defining the shape of our selves in spacetime , four-dimensional mirrorballs cascading through the white water of the time axis. The reflective skin of the edge of self could be thought of as being like a two-way mirror. Information falls onto the boundary of the sensorium and is reflected back as we describe and interact with the universe at large. What others see of our selves is merely our personal reflection of the universe according to us, but on the other hand we probably think of our actual selves as homunculi sitting inside the spherical two-way mirror, observing but invisible to the outside world. But isn't this just an illusion? As discussed before there are no homunculi ; postulating their existence to explain consciousness invokes recursion as we then have to imagine the mechanism whereby the homunculus is sentient and so on... and any theory that invokes recursion or infinity probably has a ...

There is one border we don't usually get to linger on; we only ever cross it twice. That is the border between being alive and not being alive. The checkpoints are one way only, and are named Birth and Death. When we think about it this way, we realise there's no such thing as " being dead ". From a materialist point of view, the state before birth and the state after death are the same thing. And yet there's no way, for example, I'd describe myself as having been " dead " in 1960. Yet logically there's no difference whatsoever. Whatever makes you you is your mind, and even though hardcore materialists claim that's all smoke and mirrors, your consciousness has a definite existence however it's derived. So, unconventional theories of time and mind aside, any time period during which your consciousness doesn't exist is no different from another. So we die, but we are never dead. For instance: Where is Douglas Adams ? He's...

Boundaries can be the most fascinating places in the universe. They come in many kinds. Some are physical borders such as the change from desert to jungle, a river, the boundary between the heliopause and interstellar space. Sometimes they’re territorial or imaginary in origin such as the border between England and Scotland or the Greenwich Meridian. Occasionally the latter try and make themselves the former, as happened with the Berlin Wall , the Maginot Line or the Gaza Strip Barrier . Generally though in the grand scheme of things these political borders are invisible; even the Great Wall of China , originally a territorial border and allegedly visible from space, no longer marks the boundary between the People’s Republic and its next-door neighbours and in the twenty-first century is merely the fossil of Qin Shi Huang ’s ambition. Some borders are a state of mind, sometimes literally. They bisect the fourth dimension of your lifestream, lines drawn between knowledge and ign...