Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in premlification's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Friday, July 10th, 2009
3:07 am	Torchwood The new season started recently. It's Fantastic! Currently watching the first episode, the storyline is in episode 4 currently, I'll probably watch the whole damn thing tonight. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
4:11 am	Many humans think consciousness is one of the most complex and inexplicable phenomena in the universe. Self-awareness, another word for consciousness, is considered by many as supernatural. -- I just finished watching Terminator: Salvation. I like the Terminator series in general because it touches on the classic scifi fantasies of the machines turning on and overcoming humans. At the end of the film a human/machine hybrid explains to the audience that the human soul can never be programmed into a chip, and that a chip can never contain the depth of the human heart/soul. I agree with this assessment completely, but not with the intent of the argument. A microchip cannot hold within itself the complexity necessary for consciousness, and I think science generally agrees. But the reason, of course, if because human consciousness arises from a technology fundamentally different from current computing technology, a type of technology we haven't achieved yet, but which we will inevitably master. (assuming we make it that far) Humans must escape the illusion that our existence, our identity as "existing beings" is an inexplicable phenomena. Although consciousness has not been fully understood, its existence has been explained, and we do know why it is. The reason I mention this in the context of this movie is the implication of understanding how consciousness arises, and what it means that we will someday be able to create artificial consciousness. Our scifi fantasies, as wonderful and imaginative as they are, are restricted by what we can imagine. Most humans still think that artificial consciousness will come about in a way similar to terminator, or that it will be created in a traditional computer/machine, but this cannot and will not be the case. Artificial consciousness will arrive from as yet discovered forms of information processing and we can only make vague guesses as to the properties of such a technology. I guess and hope that when we develop this technology, assumed "quantum computing", we will enter an era of not only artificial consciousness, but actually the raising of human consciousness. When we develop a more complete understanding of the processes involved in consciousness we will in fact have the ability to augment the human brain to do things we cannot yet imagine. I would love to speculate on the sorts of things that may be possible, but anything I would imagine would pale in comparison to what will be. We stand giddy at the idea of having a computer interface in our mind, talking to people through voip in our head, but these are all ideas spoken in the language of modern technology. -- Some scientists call the language of thought "mentalese". This is not an actual language as it is essentially a word that describes how different parts of the brain are able to communicate with each other to make the body work. A person experiences mentalese as thoughts, and many of these thoughts (such as the thoughts I'm having the millisecond before I type these words) feel like they're in a specific language, in my case english, but that is just a vanishing portion of mentalese. For instance, close your eyes and let your mind drift. If you're at all like me innumerable things will happen within your consciousness. Those that you are aware of will be in the form of images, sounds, perhaps even smells, and physical sensation, and that is because those are the main forms of information your brain was designed to process. However, these "things" (when ones eyes are closed and their mind drift) are seemingly directionless. When I perform this experiment I can easily determine that "I" don't control where my thoughts go or what the thoughts are. The captain of that ship is "mentalese", or just the way your brain works. Many people think, as I once did, that consciousness is all one thing, but this is an illusion the brain creates. Science has known for a while now that there are certainly different parts of the brain that are functionally independent, but cooperative. Every "moment" different brain "organs" interact with each other. It is this interaction that creates human consciousness. The most obvious question in regards to this understanding of the mind is why we experience things at all. If the brain evolved to help us survive, why aren't we simply consciousness-less machines that process information and go about our lives analyzing data and acting based on that data. This is a very compelling concern, and it makes a lot of common sense. But the answer is anything but common. You must escape conventional wisdom to understand why we have human consciousness. And this in some ways speaks to the heart of why I no longer believe in free will. Human consciousness is a side effect, of byproduct of specific neurological phenomena. Human consciousness, and other species like it yet unknown/undiscovered/uninvented are the necessary outcome of our evolution. As our ancestors engaged in new interactions with the environment, new types of analysis were required for productivity. Our minds, our selves, are a side effect of these comparatively more complex ways of dealing with existence. -- This posted start one place, and ended somewhere else, but I'm glad I wrote it. I continue to flesh out my understanding of reality, and the nature of my being. It's quite fun. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
3:48 am	What is the future? Fantasies are a dime a dozen. Everyone has many of every day. Each thought, whatever a thought may be, is in an abstracted sense a fantasy. Ad illusion and example of existence itself. We discern them, however, in a social sense by their content. ----- Futurism can be a meditation on possibility. While predicting the future is prohibitive at increasing levels of precision, fantasizing the future in the creatively human way is an invitation for discussion, but ultimately longs for an action. A cursory understanding of science demonstrates the grand space for design in the universe--the futurist negates the need to conform to preset standards because the opportunities are many, and it seems reasonable to expect outcomes to result better with a different set. No one can say which ideas and standards are best, so futurists must attract, in whatever way, others to their cause and vision. At least, this is my futurism. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 15th, 2009
11:31 pm	Teachers Unions I'm watching some videos now on Al Jazeera about the monumental budget crisis in California. Particularly some interviews about the effects on education, which will lose large amounts of money. However, education all over the nation constantly faces budgetary issues and it makes me wonder about teachers unions. In many counties, Miami-Dade included, teachers unions hold a large amount of power in regards to decision-making about education. Teachers unions have failed in their responsibility for educating the future of the nation. They've ignored the wealth of information coming from research done over the last 50 years regarding the most efficient and effective educational programs and practices. The educational system in the US has changed so sparingly since the implementation of compulsory education, and that's exactly how the teachers want it. They constantly demand more money and benefits for the generally paltry services they perform, but have done nothing to offer solutions to the long-standing issues that affect all students. They want more money, but refuse to vilify union-members who suck at teaching. They want more intellectual freedom, but rarely put forth the personal effort to ensure they're knowledgeable of contemporary "best practices" of teaching. They complain of the stresses and burden of standardized tests, but fail to recognize that those tests exist because their students are coming out stupid. Fuck teachers unions. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 13th, 2009
3:59 pm	I recently created an account on twitter, and although I've done nothing with it have already acquired three followers. Odd. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
5:30 pm	friends in the righ places I got 90 points of 100 on the first test in Physics II, which covered electricity. Whew! I wasn't expecting to do so well considering how much I was stressing the damn test, and had forgot my calculator at home. The professor likes me a lot too, which always helps. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 1st, 2009
5:37 pm	just my luck I didn't buy myself my monthly bus pass before the month let out, so I had to pay regular fair to get to campus today where I planned to buy it. I called the bookstore in the early afternoon to ensure they'd be open when I arrive, and it confirmed that the bookstore would be open until six pm. I didn't find out until I got here that the message is outdated, and they closed at four. Shit on me. I didn't bring money for getting back. (Comment on this)
12:48 pm	While I don't support the funding mechanisms for NASA and any government programs, I am quite a fan of space exploration and discovery. In that vein I'm excited that sometime next year will mark the tenth year of humans living in space. By living in space I mean that since 2000 there has always been someone occupying the ISS, and in another decade or so we'll build a station on the moon and it just keeps going from there. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
5:43 am	On Sleep I have nontraditional sleep habits. For the past few weeks I've been going to sleep after 5 am and waking up some time in the afternoon. This drives my mother up the wall. My mother is very traditional. She has no sympathy for my claims that I am, and have been since at least my early teens, unable to sleep at any "reasonable" hour. I can hardly recall the last time I went to sleep before 11 pm. You can imagine she wants me to "fix my schedule". No threats yet, but they're sure to happen soon enough. As it were. The reason my mother is so aware of my sleep patterns is that she wakes up various times throughout the night, often to use the bathroom. What the hell is up with that? Do you wake up during the night to use the bathroom? Or for anything? The point of this post is to explain that once I fall asleep I don't wake up until the next "day". At worst I wake up shortly before I would expect to wake up, and I just drift in and out of dream-sleep until I finally get the hell up. Gah! I need to get her to sleep the whole damn night through! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
1:32 am	I know I say this every few months, but I'll say it again, and perhaps this time I will be telling a truth: I want to make changes in my life. I think I'll start by cutting down on certain types of sluttery. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, May 8th, 2009
5:36 am	my mother must think i'm insane when she leaves her room for water at 5 in the morning and sees my computer monitor lighting up a corner of the apartment. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 20th, 2009
1:57 pm	Once as a bastard I don't violate people's privacy much, but on occasion. I once looked at Bruno's text messages, when he'd left his phone and went away. The only text of interest was where he told a boy that he appreciated his physical affection, but he wanted him to tone it down so as to not make me uncomfortable. What could make me more uncomfortable than this notion that I need to be babied? I had a pretty extensive dream last night involving Bruno and some fantasized boy he started seeing. I'm going to skip all the inappropriate parts of the dream because they apparently weren't inappropriate enough to result in a nocturnal emission. However, at one point in the dream I confront him about how secretive he is, and how it's driven a wedge in between our friendship. Art imitates life. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
4:35 am	A time in my life When I first moved back to Florida I encountered and found very little excitement or craziness as I had few connections awaiting me. Within three months, however, I planted various quick growing seeds which now, not a year since, stand tall and pervade almost every aspect of my daily goings on. But I won't go into all that. What I did today. I woke up sometime around one, and sat around on the internet until about six when I left to fill out a personality questionnaire at Office Depot in my occasional search for employment. Jason and his father picked me up from there. We picked up Fallout 3 from Blockbuster and played until around two, when I skateboarded to Yasmin's house to pass a little time with her. I left her house around three and just my luck to find a bus coming my way. The bus after midnight doesn't drop me off in front of my house the way the bus before midnight, which is why I was skateboarding. Jason lent his to me. The bus dropped me off at the 163 Street Mall, 2.1 miles from my place of residence. That would normally be a walk lasting over half an hour, but it took me about fifteen minutes, and was a pleasant experience. At one point I fell off the board and tumbled a bit. No damage to my person. I feared for my laptop, which didn't function properly when I first lifted the lid, but it put itself back together after a forced reboot and I'm thankful for it. Now it's almost six am, specifically five and thirty minutes. Good night (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
2:21 am	oh shit-moment I don't really know much about cosmology yet, certainly, but I just had an interesting thought that I'm writing here so as not to forget about later. Could dark matter/energy have existed before the big bang? Could the matter and energy that we believe were created by the big bang simply be moving throughout a universe of things that were here before our universe began? I've been thinking about the expansion of the universe the last few days. All the galaxies in the universe are moving apart from each other, but where are they moving to, what are they moving through, and what's filling in the space previously occupied by all the galaxies being closer together? (Comment on this)
1:31 am	without love i wither and die it makes me cry to think you move on so easily and with so little regard for all the hard work I did to appease you. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
2:42 am	Do you notice it when people take the same pose for just about every photo they're in? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 30th, 2009
1:26 am	Will I ever graduate college? I got my first computer in the 5th grade. I don't quite remember when, but it was before I began masturbating. I think. Unlike many other people, who I suppose for most of history simply lived with the awkwardness of puberty, I came of age with the internet. Internet socialization and exploration made up a large portion of my experience of puberty. The first internet pornography I watched was cheesy heterosexual porn: women with fake breasts making funny poses. As I lost interest in silicon bosom and gained internet in male phallus I also used the internet to cope with being queer. It wasn't until I was 14 that I got the nerve to talk to my father about it, and that didn't go well, so from about 13 years of age until the present I've relied on the internet for expressing the different facets of my queerness. I used youth oriented internet chat rooms as a means of socializing with others, and to express/explore my sexuality without worry of punishment or being ostracized. Although most of my internet socializing was innocent, some of it was sexual. With no where else to turn, and finding the glories of the internet more gratifying than the mundanity of a shower, I'd jack off to porn. I started using webcams because my father had one and I'd borrow it when he wasn't using it. Again, although most of its usage was innocent, some of it wasn't. Starting at around 14, and to this day, I masturbate[s] with people I meet online using a webcam. Once I got to high school many of the new people I would meet had their own thriving internet lives, and this was something (at least in part) we could share with each other. With these people, and with faceless personalities, I would socialize on the internet. Before facebook and myspace were all the craze I would spill my soul at http://premitive1.diaryland.com/ I shared that diary with my closest friends and it was how, for a long while, I told them what I wanted them to know. In some ways I think the great breadth of my interaction with the internet has desensitized me to so much, particularly the ease of multitasking on a computer. Since I sit here in my box and you somewhere else in yours, it's easy, almost mandatory, that carry on conversations with friends and family about who-knows-what while I'm doing who-knows-what and watching who-knows-what. But particularly, the internet streamlines sexuality a lot. There is no courting process when all you want to do is get off. It's still a process though, and depending on your poison there are various rituals one must be accustomed to for optimal indulgence. Anyway I got my kicks over the internet. All of them. And it's created this sick situation where I find myself (quite often) sitting in front of a computer for the sake of sitting in front of a computer. All my E-mail checked, youtube videos watched, porn consumed. But there's always something. How many times must I check myspace for friend requests (which I rarely get), or craigslist for tricks (which I rarely follow through with), hulu for new shows, livejournal for new friend posts, google reader for a new bit of information, before I have to kill myself for shitting all over my life? I don't get anything done. I sit here and get nothing done, despite setting time for it and preparing all necessary things for it. It sits there and shrivels. My live shrivels. What queer burdens we face. We're pioneers of the mental illnesses to come. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
6:37 pm	Sometimes I go through my E-mail spam folders and remove E-mails that although I have no interest in reading are not themselves spam. I wonder if I'm making the world a better place. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 20th, 2009
12:38 am	Space Man '07, a meditation Art is amazing in that it lives and breathes in a way much similar to "living" things. Or I mean the artistic process. The process of creating art is a beast all its own. You push and it pushes back. You scream and it ignores you for having a bad attitude. Space Man '07 is an emotional autobiography. Which, as you might imagine, is difficult to write. Especially since it's not necessarily chronological. Well, let me explain what I mean by emotional autobiography. Unlike traditional autobiography which details the lives and thoughts of an author, an emotional autobiography details specific sentiments I've experienced. When faced with a series of factual events different individuals, invariably, experience different things. That's how individuality works. But there's a sense that certain types of information, events, notions, will at least give most people a similar feeling. Think of disgust, jubilation, confusion, isolation, &c. In this idiosyncratic emotional autobiography I try to get the audience to feel in a way similar to how I felt about certain things by presenting seemingly arbitrary events/tidbits/facts whose sole purpose are recreation of that sentiment. Does that make sense? I hope so because this is the first story (maybe the only story) I'll finish. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:13 am	over it We have ants and cockroaches in this apartment. It doesn't really bother me any more. It did a lot when I was younger. My mom complains about the both. I don't even bother with the ants, and rarely kill the cockroaches. The cockroaches are usually very small: infants. Maybe I should kill them because we clean up very well here and I know they'll never grow up. They'll all starve to death if they live here. (1 Comment |Comment on this)