Catmachine

Increasingly these days I find myself waking up in the night and worrying about death. Worry is far too mild a word for it. Blind panic would be more appropriate. Logically of course I know there is nothing that can be done to escape it. Intellectually I can be certain that the idea of an afterlife was only made up, initially to stop people going insane with fear and spending all their time in a blue funk instead of getting on with whatever it was they needed to do in order to be a valuable member of society and perpetuate the species. After a while the concept was adapted in order to control people and make them obey out of a fear of the quality of the place they would be allocated after shuffling off this mortal coil. My fear is not this kind of fear, the fear of Hell. It's just the fear of Not Being. But I'm not quite sure why this fear is so strong. When I cease to be I will have ceased to be and there will be no me. There will be no me to know that I'm not there. ...

In a couple of blog entries near the beginning of the year I discussed the experience of being a member of a visual subculture. The experience of Being Punky (or Gothy or whatever else it might have been called at the time). In part one I revealed that like many things that teenage boys do it all came down to girls, whereas in part two I dug a little deeper to find that it was also the attitude, the music and most importantly what it felt like that appealed. After all if it hadn't I wouldn't have stayed. Any trouble comes with other people's reaction to this difference of appearance. Over the years I've come across a wide range of reactions from amused bewilderment to outright hostility. One person just couldn't accept the fact that I'd been to university due to an idea that was just far too deeply ingrained in his head - all people who looked like I did were stupid. Maybe I am stupid and perhaps I'm reading too much into it.  After all wasn't th...

Wanting to look a bit different wasn't just because of the girls . Once I'd sidled into this subculture I found that there was a lot more in there that was to my liking. There was a certain point of view, an attitude , that I found myself in alignment with. I'm not saying I wanted to Smash the State, far from it (if we descended into anarchy I was hardly going to be assured a regular supply of SF novels and Toyah LPs), but more that I found the different way of looking at things appealing. And the music of course. Yes, we did think we were different, but I wasn't so obtuse as not to realise that the subcultural vogue was a uniform in itself and that I was not so much refusing to conform as choosing to conform to a different (albeit more minority) mode. A common criticism often leveled at me and my siblings in style, especially by lapsed members of the congregation interestingly, was that we " thought we were something special and better than everyone else ". ...

You might not think it to look at me now given that I'm a bit of a slob, but once upon a time I was quite spiky and interesting looking. Well I thought I looked interesting, but then I would say that, wouldn't I? The punky alternative gothy style has always been to my taste. Why is this? I can sort of answer that, although the answer itself only raises a further question. Like many things that happen to teenage boys, it all comes down to girls. Of course. At school it seemed as though the majority of my peers waxed lyrical over the physical charms of Olivia Newton John, Farrah Fawcett and the like, not to mention the airbrushed women in the creased glossy magazines they used to sneak into class. I could never really see the attraction. They all seemed so bloody wholesome . Except for the ones in the magazines who seemed plastic and soggy. Due to my lack of enthusiasm for the traditional teenage boys' fantasies, I was often branded a "bender" or a "mo"...

I am currently confined to my bed by a particularly annoying cold. It seems somewhat unfair that I am suffering at all; as far as flu jabs were concerned, I've had both the Swine and the Regular. Surely that should be the medical equivalent of a Get Out Of Jail Free card? There's nothing that common about the cold. Sure, it's widespread, but there are so many different varieties that it should surely be considered as a family of diseases rather than just one. It may feel as if I've got yet another cold , but this is the first (and only) time I've ever come across this variety, hence it's virulence. Good word that, Virulence . From the same root as Virus of course, the Latin for poison. It's quite a perfect description for them really; in many ways they are more akin to a poison than a parasitic organism. Should they even be considered alive? I've always thought not. There's certainly no method to their mechanism, they just bumble about until b...

I don't know what to say. In the past this used to get me into trouble. I'm not talking about big trouble with a capital T, it was just that when I was placed in social situations I never knew how to engage in small talk and ended up saying nothing. This meant that even the people that liked me found me hard work, and those that didn't thought I was rude and aloof. I wasn't; it was just that in the absence of any guidelines I usually ended up frozen into inactivity. I'm somewhat better now. When placed in a social situation I've observed enough small talk and sociability over the years to be able to come up with a fairly convincing facsimile. It's always conscious though; whilst people may not find me hard work as much any more I still find them harder work than ever. You might think that someone to whom social interaction doesn't come naturally would be cold and uncaring, ultimately selfish, but I would hope I'm not like that at all. It...

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 ...

I realise that in the last entry I made a fundamental error describing the death and birth as a "border" in the sense I was using it. Whilst they are points on a boundary between being and not-being , they're not points on a border that anyone can cross. So I reiterate that there isn't really such a thing as being dead . One could say that not being alive is describable, if only as the absence of an actual state, but actually having a word for it, dead , seems odd when you think about it. After all, we don't have a separate word for not being in pain , despite the fact that (hopefully) it is the state in which we spend most of our lives. You might think I'm playing games with words here. That might be the case, but words themselves are immensely powerful. In my continuing study into what makes us into conscio us , I have discovered (mainly through reading and thought experiments as practical investigation in this field is tricky for the amateur) that in...