Study Notes: Feb 22-Mar 7, 2015: "How Deaf People Think" &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

• Post, "Horror, the Grotesque, and the Macabre: A Christian Appraisal" by SDG
• Article, "How Deaf People Think" by Daven Hiskey
• Article, "Multilinguals Have Multiple Personalities" by Alice Robb
• Article, "Raising Backyard Chickens for Dummies" by Jason Price
• Post, "Multiple Systems FAQ" (& other pp) by Living Plural (Blog)
• Post, "Hermione Granger Versus the Methods of Rationality" by Sam Keeper
• Post, "Hunger Metagames" by Sam Keeper

Problems of Identity

Let's talk about identity.

By "identity" I don't mean some part of a person which remains ever-constant. I mean "that by which one person identifies another person, or even zemself."

Some people will say that the body is the root of identity. As the body is in a constant state of transition, they will say that continuity is important. Others will say that it is the spirit by which identity is assigned. To go with either of these approaches is to say that identity is based on substance. In practice, however, it appears that most people care about something else.

Study Notes: Feb 8-14, 2015: "Religion in the Age of Cyborgs", &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

• Post, "Religion in the Age of Cyborgs" by Egil Asprem
• Post, "Making Sense of the Tenth Doctor's Regeneration" by Morgan Gudgin
• Post, "A Study of Regeneration: The Mind Problem" by Andrew Bohman
• Post, "The Children of the Night, What Music They Make: Horror in Music" by Sam Keeper 
• Post, "The World is a Cruel Place: Theme in Attack on Titan" by Sam Keeper

Study Notes: Dec 7-13, 2014: "How Steampunk Screws with Victorian Gender Norms"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

• Article, "Queer Cogs: Steampunk, Gender Identity, and Sexuality," by Lisa Hager
• Thread, "What's the difference between aesthetic/sensual attraction and sexual attraction?" on Asexuality.org
• Article, "How Steampunk Screws with Victorian Gender Norms," by Molly Westerman
• Essay, "Blooms of Banjeli," by Eugenia W. Herbert and Candice Goucher
• Article, "Monopoly is Theft," by Christopher Ketcham

Study notes: Nov 18-22, 2014: "Philosophy in Prison" and other things

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week:

TED Talk: "The leaders who ruined Africa and the generation who can fix it," by Fred Swaniker
TED Talk: "Is there a real you?" by Julian Baggini
TED Talk: "Philosophy in prison," by Damon Horowitz.
TED Talk: "All it takes is 10 mindful minutes," by Andy Puddicombe
TED Talk: "We can be Buddhas," by Robert Thurman
Blog post: "Contemplating the Red Pill," by Free Northerner
Article: "Fifty Ways to Leave Leviathan," by Max Borders & Jeffrey A. Tucker
Article: "How Long Ago Was Adam Created!?" by Maan Khalife
Blog post: "The Most Useful Mnemonic Technique," by Brienne
Article: "How Climate Change Will End Wine As We Know It," by Sandra Allen
Article: "Latter-day Saint, Latter-day Lovecraft: an interview with W.H. Pugmire," by Theric Jepsen

I have also written notes on David Pulsipher's talk, "Renouncing War: How Mormon Theology & History Lead Us to Nonviolence," and compiled some knowledge from Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Who was on the Lord’s side, who?

(Nutshell for Non-LDS: Mormons believe that everyone alive once dwelled with God before being born. Before the world was even formed there was a war in Heaven, as John’s Revelation made famous, and this war was about whether we should be allowed to make mistakes when that would mean we would suffer, or if our lives should be so controlled that nobody would be able to sin or choose wrongly at all. Satan advocated for the latter, and the rest is mythology.)

If the War in Heaven was a war of words, an essentially missionary war, and nobody was won over from the Bad Side to the Good Side, then it had to have been the most supremely ineffective missionary effort of all time. Which means that we need to consider…

How many of us were once on Satan’s side of that war?

Burning Out & Other Adventures in the Forward-facing Timestream

Or How I Learned to Finally Slow Down & Maybe Not Break Myself. Maybe.

Haha, not really. If the past is any indication this is just a temporary thing and I’ll be back to my old high-pressured over-clocking demands that send me flying into the highs and sinking into the lows with the sort of whiplash that’d rip my head clean off in any other circumstance.

Allow me to explain.

Constructive Complexity, or Posthuman Ethics and Value Systems

George Carlin once asked, "If God loved you, how come He gave you tumors?"

Let's find out.

Table of Contents
I. Background
II. The Rectification of Names
III. The Danger of Wireheading
IV. Beyond Wireheading
V. And Then What Will They Do?
VI. Aren't They Kind of Bastards, These Posthumans?

Productivity Report: I'm slipping behind on this, I am

Well, I can't say that last night was stress free, but I got some important work done. I don't want to get into details, but suffice it to say that I made progress on, ah, fixing some "toxic" (as Magpie describes it, and I agree) mental programming. It's been an issue that I've recognized for a long while and tried to deal with in a multitude of ways, and I'm glad that I was able to step forward and feelvomit about it to someone. I'm even happier that I was overestimating just how bad it would make me look in that person's eyes.

There are a lot of issues that I've got to fix, some of which I don't even know about right now, but just talking about it has taken some weight off and made the job of debugging the code easier for me.

Productivity Report

Two more weeks until my off/preparation month, and boy howdy do I have a lot to get done that month.

The good new is while this month hasn't been as productive as I'd like, and isn't going to be, it's still looking to be reasonably productive. Writing this late Sunday night, I have eight stories complete at this point in time (all lists at the end, for those interested) and another that needs a couple of more paragraphs before it's done. With those nine out of the way I'm aiming to get at least another nine stories in particular done in the following two weeks, for twelve stories finished this month (not too short of my goal of fifteen per month, especially given that this month has also had to devote time to things like generating a backlog of posts, which the next on/writing month shouldn't have to deal with) and eighteen stories in total. If each of the following three on/writing months hit the 15/stories goal then that'll give me 63 stories to bounce around the market for Gosh Knows How Long.

For-market stories currently completed:

1. Finding Ginny
2. Lost Girl
3. The Man with the Bloody Coat
4. Perfect Engine
5. Pickman's Estate
6. The Philosopher's Ship
7. Sedatophobia
8. Thomas Edison's Last Gambit

For-market stories I'm planning on having done by the end of the month: 

1. The Act of Harley Warren
2. The Albatross Came
3. The Buddha in the Road
4. From Kadath Came
5. An Honor and an Horror
6. The Angel in the Basement
7. Percival
8. Scapegoat
9. To Dream a Dream

Happy New Year!

Today I start two new projects. The first is a YA novel called Fox Sense and Circumstances. It's about a young girl who finds a friend in an abandoned, half-dead fairy who turns out to be more Cthulhu than Tinkerbell. But she accidentally ensnared him in a magical contract that's put him on a leash firmly in her hands, and if he wants to act as he pleases then he's going to have to convince her to let him.

In the meantime, they're going to have to deal with a group of straightedge wizards with white trench coats and cold iron straight razors. Her new friend is a walking nuclear bomb, and they aim to put him down like they thought that they did the first time.

So it'll be interesting. I really don't know what it's going to be like tomorrow. It's practically a fairy itself.

The other thing that I'm working on is the 30 Days to a Better Man project from The Art of Manliness.

Whenever it's relevant (there's no point to saying "Today I scheduled an appointment for a medical check-up!") I'll discuss what's gone on. Today was "Defining Your Core Values."

I decided to start with the initial list of suggestions that they offered. If there seemed to be a hole missing then I could fill it, but I thought that it would be mighty silly to spend a few hours working it out only to find that everything was right there on the list.

Right off the bat I could see some things to rule out. Control was a complex of mine, not a value. Assigning it as such would only make it harder to not be authoritarian and controlling. Same thing for Power. Fulfillment, Happiness, and Success both seemed like putting the cart before the horse. Unless you were understanding it as, say, financial success, all of these seemed more like the result of living in alignment with your core values.

Spirituality and Faith got folded into "God. Honesty and Integrity got folded into Truth. Marriage and Friends got folded into Family. My closest friends are family to me, and otherwise the Friends category isn't a core value for me. Education and Wisdom were folded into Knowledge. The former contributes to it, and wisdom is a kind of knowledge, not this thing that's totally distinct from it. Independence was folded into Freedom. Progress was folded into Growth.

With thirteen less options to choose from, I did what the article suggested and started pitting them against each other. For simplicity's sake I did it in alphabetical order, and this left me with Balance (over Adventure), Creativity (over Confidence), Forgiveness (over Fun), Kindness (over Humor), and Knowledge (over Peace of Mind, which I thought was an apt conflict), and Truth (over Strength).

There were a few conflicts that I couldn't resolve, and I saw that Reason needed to be folded into Knowledge, and both Financial Security and Self-reliance needed to be folded into Freedom.

From the fifteen possibilities remaining I narrowed it down to Knowledge, Discipline, Creativity, Freedom, God, Growth, Family, and Truth. I liked the rest, sure, but I couldn't include them in the Top 5.

But ohhhhh... Knowledge, that sneaky weasel. Hadn't I realized that prioritizing Knowledge was a Bad Road for me months ago? Apparently I was starting to forget, but I chopped it out readily enough. I liked it, but if it were endorsed by a Top 5 position then I might never fix the complex that that obsession had given me.

With that out of the way I got it down to Creativity, Freedom, God, Family, and Truth.

Then I had to prioritize them in anticipation of conflicts between my values:
1. Truth
2. God
3. Family
4. Freedom
5. Creativity

I tried to view these in a Wu Xing kind of way. One value wasn't superior to another so much as it allowed another. Without Freedom I can't exercise my Creativity, so choosing Creativity in a conflict between them is only going to hurt it in the long run. Similarly, I can't have Freedom if Family isn't accounted for.

Truth comes before God because no matter how I try to get away from it what fills the "God" spot is ultimately going to a flawed conception. I don't know everything and I don't perfectly process and accept everything that I do know. What God is in this list is "My understanding of God and what God requires of me." Where it's right, it's still incomplete, and there are many things that I "know" about God that are totally wrong.

By putting Truth above "My understanding of God" I hope to ensure that I will never turn down the opportunity to update my knowledge of God because the information runs counter to what I think that I know right now. Without my chief priority being Truth, I'll only ever serve God-as-I-think-God-is and never God-as-God-is.

I Read: Animorphs #1, #23

And it feels like coming home.

I think that it hit me when I read one particular passage, where Jake is wondering if his parents don’t want him to ever cut through the construction site because they’re afraid that he might run into an axe murderer. I read it and, in some way that I can’t describe, I remembered, vividly, reading that passage before, many times. I mean, I know when I’ve read something before, but it wasn’t just knowledge. It was feeling it, and remembering how I had felt when I had read it before, and, too, how I was now feeling about having read it.

It was something in the neighborhood of nostalgia. A cross between that and what you feel when you know, without anyone telling you, that what’s happening right now is a good thing and that you’re exactly where you belong.

It’s like coming to love someone again, without ever having stopped loving them before.

What struck me the hardest was just how depressing the series could be. I mean, it’s like Baby’s First Grimdark, and I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. It really should be required entry-level reading for the stuff that makes you cry. Before your kid reads Lovecraft, give her Animorphs. And then, after she’s read Lovecraft, tell her to read Animorphs again.

I mean, in the first book Tobias gets turned into a hawk forever because he was in morph for more than two hours, and it’s implied then and throughout the series that he did that on purpose because his home life was so terrible that even life as a hawk was better. Not to mention Visser Three describing to Elfangor how the war was basically over now, just as soon as the Yeerks finished infesting Earth, and Visser Three was going to personally oversee the infestation of Elfangor’s family and looked forward to hearing their screams.

The Pretender only escalates it. Tobias has to resort to eating road kill because another hawk has moved in on his territory and he can’t kick it out. Just as it seems that Tobias has finally found a non-crappy family member who might actually care about him, it turns out that she’s Visser Three in disguise. And because he’s forced to interact with humans besides the other Animorphs a major theme of the book is how distanced he’s become from humanity. He can’t remember his birthday. He doesn't even remember to make facial expressions.

Oh. My. Heart.

What am I reading?

The rest of the series is no better. I remember when Elfangor had to leave his wife and unborn son forever to rejoin a war that he had spent years trying to forget about. I remember Alloran justifying war crimes- and I remember a war that just maybe was so terrible that he was right. I remember Dak Hamee’s guilt over making warriors out of a people so peaceful that they had never before conceived of purposely intending to kill someone.

I remember a story about six kids that were forced to fight a war on their own, and I remember the trauma that they incurred over three years and fifty-odd books of desperate guerrilla warfare against a foe that outnumbered them and could be anyone at all.

I remembered how depressing it was before I started to read the series again, but reading it again was like the difference between hearing about the Rocky Mountains and seeing them.

It’s no secret to anyone who’s read some of my stories that I like the really depressing stuff. Other stuff is good, but sometimes nothing will satisfy but something that cuts to the heart and bites down. Reading Animorphs again, I wonder how much it affected my future development; like that years-ago dance with that girl who was going to boot camp in a month. The first dance of my youth, and her last, and without even trying I can think of half a dozen qualities I find attractive in a woman that can be directly traced back to her. Same way, Animorphs is the yardstick by which I measure YA stories, both mine and others'.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of the books.

Experiments

I went back to 4chan.

Maybe they'll inscribe that on my tombstone.

I had a short-lived weekly thread there a few years ago, where I'd take story requests and make something out of them. I'd write right there, which led to my stories being crappy. I'm taking it back up again and trying something different: taking the requests then but writing throughout the week and posting the stories the following week. I hope that it'll work out better than last time but I suspect that it'll take a couple of weeks to get underway. Right now I have one request, which I think that I'll be able to turn into something decent.

While I didn't plan it that way, Monday was also a day for figuring out just a little bit more about my acrophobia/fear of falling (I think that it leans more toward the second than the first). I could file it away entirely as an inexplicable phobia but I know that there's something more to it, something underlying it, and I want to get at it and find out what that something is.

Going to Pioneer Park on Monday was the first time in a long while that I felt a really visceral fear, stomach churning to the point of making me feel ill. Me-at-Moab found the experience undesirable, even if part of me was even then coldly monitoring the situation and assessing the information that I was gleaning, but present!me is grateful for having had the opportunity. Accurate conclusions can't be reliably drawn without raw data, and this is a matter for which I would appreciate drawing an accurate conclusion.

Just while we're his blog is an experiment in itself. As you can tell I'm sort of just spitting words onto the screen. I'm editing, yeah, but I'm still trying to figure out my groove, find what I'm really writing and when and why, and how to do it. Just, stuff. If I'm lucky I'll be able to figure out exactly how to roll with this blog. if I'm even luckier, I'll be able to do it sooner rather than later.

Edit Oops. Pioneer Park, not Moab.

Dead Missionary Report

I’m writing this in the car on the way between two DIs. Mom found most of the volumes of The Work and the Glory, which has sent us on a quest to find Volumes 6 and 9 to complete the series.

In missionary parlance I’ve been dead for three days now, which means that you’ve got the privilege of reading the words of a ghost. If this is the Spirit World, though, then it looks remarkably like Utah, which isn’t really what I was expecting.

Utah really is an inescapable black hole.
 
Dead Missionary Life hasn’t been as restful as I imagined. There are a lot of people to see before I go home, and yesterday we went up to tour BYU-I. I’ll be living there for most of three years, so it’s a good thing that the campus appears to be a place that I’d be content to live at. It feels a lot like the campus at Schoolcraft College, which is nice.

By far the most curious thing to me is that I don’t feel a great and pervading shock over the transition. What I’m doing now feels as normal as what I was doing before. I would wonder if this was a sign that I wasn’t going as far as I should in my mission, but the transition into my mission felt just as natural, and the same when one of my companions genuinely died (and not just in the parlance of missionaries). It seems more likely that I just adjust very quickly.

The anticipation and worry over how I would take the change were worse than the change itself. Which, honestly, I should have expected. I had had enough information on hand to anticipate that.

Still working on renovating the site. I hope to have it all finished by the end of next week but, you know, working on that in between everything else. 

Revisiting Bedbug Haven

In the eight weeks from the middle of June 2012 to July 2012, I and seven other missionaries lived in what was referred to by the mission office as "bedbug haven." It was an apartment built for four but, as mentioned before, there was twice that number living there. Plus bedbugs.

Quarters were cramped. There were three rooms, none of them very big, and connected them was some sort of hallway that managed to have kitchen appliances, a sink, a washer, a dryer, and an ironing board stuffed into it. Common it was to need to squeeze by someone (or several someones) as they were working food or laundry in order to go from one room to another. Eventually my companion and I relocated to the third room, along with all its weight equipment and other random junk, but before that change I slept on a couch and another missionary slept in a large closet.

And there were bedbugs. Can I stress that enough?

Understandably, tensions were high, and all of us did at least one thing that we later regretted. I carried a chip on my shoulder against some of them, and so did they, until a little while later when we were able to get some fresh air and reflect. One by one we bumped into each other again and saw that we were very different from how we had remembered each other, and we apologized and moved on.

There are two missionaries from Bedbug Haven that I have yet to bump into and may not ever have the chance to (both went back home before I was able to) but I don't- I can't- hold anything against them.

What I'll always remember from this episode in my life is that people get better, and even when you live with them for eight weeks you still don't always see the best side of them. People are who they are, but when their circumstances get the worst of them don't mistake that for who they would be in a better situation.

The Redemption of Shemesh

Note: I apologize for my lateness in posting this. I was caught up in wanting perfection for this story. 

There once was a young man, or a horror shaped in the likeness of a young man, whose name was Hastur. He was the moon, or, in other words, his light was not his own. He had light, but it was only a light that had been taken from others, and he gave nothing of his own in return to she that had loved him. His true name, spoken only in the wild places and in terrified whispers, was Darkness, and the name of his dominion the same.

Everything in five words

To Moses God stated, "I am what I am."

This is both announcement and declaration. He teaches that He exists. He tells that He is eternal.

But contained within this statement is also a lesson that we can take to heart for ourselves, not in reference to God's nature but to our own, not for the future but in this moment. This is God's revelation of His existence and nature. And it is in the selfsame message that He refuses to make excuses.

He is. He is what He is. He does what He sees to be good, and does not what He sees to be bad. And whether He moves hither or thither, raises the sparrow or lets it strain and grow, calms the storm or steps away, He will not be browbeaten. He may be questioned. But He will not break under pressure and go the easier path, nor apologize for doing exactly as His knowledge leads Him.

Would that we could all be so! How great that we can, and how miserable that so many do not. But in following the example of our God we see the way that is better than the capitulation of our wills. Walk the path that your combined experience- knowledge, faith, and all other things- leads you, and never stray from that guide. When it passes to another road change your course swiftly, and regret not the loss of face that may come, nor apologize for abandoning your friends.

Your true and polar star is your own, and where you follow it you are sure to triumph. They have not your star, nor know the roads that it has brought you to. Where is their excuse to mock or make afraid?

Now, this is not to say that you have license to be, as the scriptures say, a law unto yourself. But the Holy Spirit is to be part of your guide, and it would be foolish to claim that your history and learning- other parts of your combined experience- do not affect how you interpret its guidance. When you take all these things together to walk by the light of the Spirit or to feel your way when God leaves you to your own devices, as He does from time to time, then you have your star and this you should neither disregard nor ask forgiveness for following. You have the guidance that you have been given, and they have not been given it, nor you the guidance given them. To each their own road, let it bring them where God will.

Blink and you miss it!

Once upon a time I am walking through the doors of the Missionary Training Center for the first time. Once upon a time I am being transferred to West Valley City. Once upon a time I am eight years old, and I am being baptized, and I have never heard of a small town named Magna.

I speak in the present tense because these events are still very tangible to me. My memories, or my reconstructions of them, are not less tangible than the present moment but are differently tangible. There are times when I think back on them and almost feel whiplash from the recognition that these moments, real though they may be, are no longer my present place of habitation (but then there are times when this moment seems almost like a vivid hallucination, and the past no longer so much like a soap bubble universe).

Once upon a time I realize that I have only three months left on my mission, and I feel like it really is the end of my life. The Fifth of November hurtles toward me like a train, and I can't move away.

I don't have much time left, and that disturbs me. It reinforces the need to make every minute count, but even when I do so the strain is only barely lightened. On November 6th there will be something that I could do, but cannot, because I will be in a new life, and no matter how much I do now, there will still be something to do then.

Once upon a time I am dead, and the night is come, wherein no man can work.

Honesty over knowledge

Of what value am I, without my mind? Whether my value is great or small, it exists solely because of the things that I know and how I use them.

Or so was my thinking for most of my life until recently. I recognized that tying my value to my intelligence was not going to be good for me in the long run. There were too many opportunities to be "proven" unintelligent (I use quotation marks because what was necessary was not for my lack of intelligence to actually be proven but only for me to convinced that it was, which is rather different) for me to ever have something stable to stand on.

Worse, what was tied to my self-worth shaped my concerns over my reputation. Did I care whether someone thought that I was too concerned with money? No. I was thrifty, and if it looked differently to someone else then that was their issue. But I did care if I said something- or didn't say something- that led them to judge me as unintelligent. Which led me to behaviors that I didn't approve of, such as sometimes holding back from speaking because I was afraid of being wrong (or of them thinking that I was wrong and never being convinced otherwise).

I finally made a concerted effort to change when I noticed that it was also affecting my ability to change my views, admit defeat, etc. Curiously enough, while this shows to me that even then I placed a higher priority on having beliefs that corresponded with reality, it still took time before I was able to settle on something else to tie my self-worth to.

Thus far (and it's been a couple of months), basing it on honesty hasn't had any bad side effects. Even reputation-based concerns are more helpful than not, because it encourages me to change my views as swiftly as possible when presented with evidence of sufficient quality and quantity, and to speak my mind and volunteer answers readily when questions are asked. I may be wrong, I may look stupid, but no-one can doubt that, if I don't agree with you, it's genuinely because I don't see the evidence for your point of view, not because I'm too prideful to admit a mistake.

Fiction: The Restoration of the Nerf

A legend of our fathers:

In the days before God organized the West Mission, and divided it from the Mission from which it had been organized, there was but one Mission, that was the Utah Salt Lake City Mission. And there were many Mission Presidents that were called to it, and many elders that were called to it, and also many sisters.

Ice Cream Trucks

In my second proselyting area there were many ice cream trucks in a small area. It was not uncommon to look down one end of a long street to see an ice cream truck and then to look down the other end to see another operating at the same time. In my current area we do not have so many ice cream trucks, but we do have a more memorable one.

There are two ice cream trucks that I am aware of, to be exact. One is much like every other ice cream truck that I have come across. Imagine an ice cream truck in your mind, and it won't be far from this one. The other is run by a woman from India, and it is, I must say, a very sketchy ice cream truck. It is a regular van, actually. Pictures of ice cream are crudely pasted onto the side of the van, and the passenger seats have been removed to make room for a large cooler. Her approach is heralded by music, as all ice cream trucks are, but she plays Silent Night, Jingle Bells, and other songs.

I am pretty sure that she is playing a single Christmas CD over and over.

It is the music that she plays which strongly convinces me that this woman does not know very much about why ice cream trucks do what they do. She has decided to run her own business, and that is to be lauded, and for some peculiar reason she has decided to sell ice cream. Unfortunately, the extent of her research seems to have been looking at ice cream trucks already in operation and copying what they do without understanding the principles behind these actions.

Similarly, when we act without understanding, we can look just as ridiculous as this ice cream truck lady. Of more concern is that we can at times be ineffective, sometimes to the point of actually hindering our purpose. There may be someone who is concerned about the quality of the ice cream, because of the appearance of her truck, and so does not buy (I myself must say that the ice cream is just as good as anyone else's, however), just as we may not always get the result that we want when we do not know how it will get us that result.

It also makes it difficult to not sacrifice the spirit of the law when we do not know what the spirit, or principle, is. Without understanding the principle, we cannot adapt to changing circumstances.