Dealing with Depression

I try to make my public profile a 'progressive, positive' one, but sometimes my frustrations with, in maintaining as much integrity as I can, eking out a living in an increasingly shallow, between-(programmed)-classes-exploitative world: we should be helping each other overcome our weaknesses, not using them as leverage to gain control over each other and all (and all the ill-gotten 'reward' that that brings).

And in this 'survive by imitation (so jump through these hoops, or else!)' society (henceforth STI), I tend to be out of even the out-group; my seeking to understand in-group behaviour itself seems to be enough for any STI to put me into the out-group, and I have never learned to just 'fake it' (and since I can't read minds, that is probably an impossible task). And when I explain to my clients the solution for a relatively simple problem (so they won't have to call me next time), I get looked at like I'm from another planet, but my message through doing that is simple: 'Anyone can do this, so save your money for real problems'... but when things get tight, I've learned to do that less (but always feel bad about it).

My underlining integrity also saddles me with an inability to compete with others in the market: I still fondly remember the day where some 'gung-ho' new employee in one of my client companies would rather call someone else (less aware?) than face up to their fucking up a system I built for said client company... not only did I eventually have to witness that sort of manipulation, but I had to witness the lie-filled play-acting of 'the other guy'... and had to watch my clients falling for it (because, as they new nothing about 'how' it worked (only that it did, then didn't), how could they tell the difference). And from then on the gung-ho grudge-holder tried tapping every ensuing problem on me (but it was really a chain reaction based in their fuck-up)... I have no weapons against that sort of dishonesty, so I ended up just dropping them from my client list (which is what gung-ho wanted anyway).

But by doing that, I'm short-changing myself in another way: the brain needs 'reward' situations for motivation, and normally taking home a paycheck should be one of those, but through my added level of thought (understanding), I tend to cancel that, or 'sabotage' it, as some may say... but once one spreads their net of awareness about what effect they have on others around them in an even wider area, there's no going back. 

So, even though today my survival-experience has given me abilities far above that any education could provide, I find myself unable to be 'taken seriously' because of my 'not jumping through the same hoops, the same way, as everyone'... and I say that because I even thought to seek refuge in supposedly-high-minded, rational academia (where I initially felt very fearful and small), but that presupposition turned out to be illusion, too.

So, at present I'm in a very, very, very reward-less world. Not only that, but I'm also blocked from exiting that dilemma by... 'powers' beyond my control (a single person taking advantage of their legal status (and mine being dependant on theirs) to make me pay their work-less, ignorant (expensive!) space-filling ways). I was already in a depression before this new supposedly 'new start' apartment (and my ex-drug-pusher-more-than-anything-psychiatrist thought that I've always been depressed; I'm supposedly unable to even process 'reward' (meaning that I have no experience with it), meaning that the drugs they prescribed would never work, either (they didn't), yet they continued to prescribe them (€192 every two weeks, on average)... this makes no rational sense, but I digress).

I used to depend on alcohol to 'boot' me out of a depressive state, or to make me numb enough to ignore those reward-killing 'details', but even that stopped working once I found a better understanding of what it does to the brain (and that I learned while doing research about why the antidepressants were fucking me up so much) and saw it for the 'fake reward' it is. And there, too, there's no going back (side note: so why do alcoholism 'support' programs never include the critical thought (lessons) required to overcome/re-program our 'default' reactions and instincts?). All the same, I would sometimes resort to my 'knock out remedy' when the depressive bout was particularily bad, but even that stopped working to the point where drinking itself seemed... a sad and pointless exercise. I can drink socially again, but I can't really say that I like it anymore... in any case, it's not what it was before. I feel about alcohol today as I always felt about weed before: one (rational) part of my brain being concerned about another part not functioning 'correctly'... not a positive experience, and it's like watching myself twice (in everything I think and say while 'influenced'), in a way.

So, today I have neither alcohol or antidepressants to 'help me though' depression, and my understanding of my state seems to be just another obstacle; ignorance could be bliss, but only in an ignorance-exploiting world (like today's). My only remedy is to make my own rewards, and that solution seems, for me, to cut myself off from the world entirely, and do some sort of humanities-service task that will remain in human memory. I would also like to develop my AI research (and I think I'm on to something there, but convincing someone to finance non-tech-educated me, good luck) and RDF development (my at-once utterly simple and horribly complex 'fact engine'), but I just can't support myself that way.

At this point I find solace in working with both my mind and my hands (and this apartment was that at one point - I did get a new kitchen-countertop technique invention out of it), but what I really need is to invest myself into something that I've evidently not yet had in my life: something for me.

Critical thought (or not): Autonomous-thought survival in a 'survive-through-imitation' world.

There's really something to say about the Dunning-Kruger effect: I'm constantly fighting to overcome it, and because of it, I'm not even sure how successful I am to that end. I keep going on about the importance of critical thought, but because of the above, I don't think I'm even very particularly good at it: those notions of self-doubt ground into me through my entire childhood plague still my every thought process (albeit, today, to a lesser degree), and that probably causes me to miss options and certainly to doubt outcomes (second-checking), and that lengthens what should be a 'normal' thought process enormously. Re-routing around early-life indoctrination ('programming') is a long process and takes sometimes decades of work.

And I got into it in the worst possible way: something happened to me in early life that 'flipped the switch' for autonomous thought... but I only can speak for my own mind, so perhaps this happens to everyone, and it eventually gets ground out of them. Anyhow, it seemed early on in life essential to my (subconscious idea of) survival that I understand everything happening around me; if something (I was told to do/imitate) didn't make any sense, I simply couldn't do it. What made things even more confusing was the obvious evidence (that no-one seemed able to see) that the 'ideal' goal of 'simply obeying' was a stressful, unsatisfactory, unhappy, and unfulfilled life. And the goals everyone was striving to 'fulfil' were almost never their own.

And when presented with an 'example' to follow, I soon found that the very act of questioning was enough to destroy, interrupt, 'poison' what was supposed to be a 'normal' social process. Yet not only did I not understand this, I had no answer for it (once one knows enough to question, how can one not question (especially things obviously questionable)?). That was a divide that I was never able to overcome, and one I only recently began to understand.

The root of that difference is in the 'survival' I mentioned earlier. It sounds strange and almost cliché said like that, but that is actually how our subconscious works: every decision we make is rooted in, and depends upon, that survival instinct.

And there is a 'switch'. How does one 'survive'? Whether we are familiar with our environment or not, we have the options of a) learning about everything that environment contains, and making our own decisions about what's good and bad in it, or, b), should we observe others already 'surviving' in that environment, imitating them (based on their overall healthiness and happiness).

But again, to one that has always taken the second option, the first option does not even exist... or, at least, it would most likely not come to their mind as a choice of action.

And therein lies the divide. To one that relies on imitating others for survival, any deviation from the (group) 'survival model' is 'different', and this can even mean 'danger'. So questioning the survival model is, in itself, already enough for a survive-through-imitation-er (have to think up a term for this) to 'out-group' anyone doing it... and once out-grouped, a person so deemed will probably always be mistrusted at a deepest level... unless of course they make some display of total submission. And this 'same or not' pattern-matching comparison (that the non-critical-thinker seems condemned to), too, is a 'switch'.

So how is one to negotiate with one who knows (or cares) not to reason, but only to imitate?

The thing with people able to make their own value judgments (think critically) is that they're persuaded that everyone else can think critically, too. Yet to find the answer to the above question, they have only to think back to the time (probably their childhood) when they couldn't think critically, or were still new it... and this is a hard thing for some to do.

Convincing someone who survives through imitation to deviate from their 'chosen' (often 'programmed' by others) behaviour pattern is almost an exercise in manipulation: either we have to convince them that an option 'outside' their comfort zone (programming) was a) their idea, or that b) everyone else in their 'in-group' has already opted for it (making it look like they are 'behind' or 'different', and this would make them even eager to adopt the new model (to conform)). And if one needs evidence of this and evidence that some, if not many, are already aware of it, one has only to look at almost any and all advertising.

Even more maddening, since the survive-through-imitator can/will not judge the value of anything for themselves, is the fact that they will continue to refuse to change their minds even when buried in evidence; when one knows not to judge the value of something, how can the value of that evidence be determined? In short, it can't (and all that is left/that 'registers' is the 'default' comparison (to an existing survival programming/model)).

Ridicule doesn't work, either, unless their 'in group' somehow joins in against the targeted... but, again, any critical thinker with any moral values would hesitate to resort to that sort of manipulation.

(side note: therein lies a point of irony in, the sheer disingenuousity of those who deem themselves 'masters (programmers) of morals': if one doesn't measure the value of anything, no moral judgements are even possible, making those 'moral lessons', to those who lack the will/ability to understand them for themselves, nothing but dictate to imitate (or else!), so it's hard to believe the gall of those who call that sort of dictate-serving carrot-and-stick (or else!) manipulation 'morals'?).

And what to do in face of this sort of divide? There is a frustration to both sides of it: the survive-through-imitation-er feels frustration in not being able to get the critical thinker to simply conform (and, subconsciously, sees the same's behaviour as even a danger (to survival)), and the critical thinker feels frustration at the former's inability and unwillingness to reason, and apparent dishonesty.

And when communication doesn't work to overcome this divide, what remains? Yes: violence. Overcoming/squashing this (primal!) urge depends upon the duress of the situation and/or the education/programming of both parties, but the critical thinker has the distinct advantage of being able to rein in their emotional responses, whereas the non-critical-thinker has only their fear (strength comparison, strength in numbers, 'thou shalt not' (or else!) programming, etc.) to hold them back.

If that's not enough, even the concept of honesty seems lost on one with no value judgement abilities of their own: if the only means of determining value is comparison, then, in any given situation, only the options comparable (beneficial) to the survival model will be considered (and everything else, especially things countering or questioning the same, rejected). To the critical thinker, who quite often is used to assessing the maximum available elements in any situation before making a decision, this looks like 'cherrypicking' to the extreme, but they have to understand that, to the non-critical-thinker, the concept of 'cherrypicking' can't even exist.

So, to 'work' with a non-critical-thinker, only is it necessary for critical thinkers to mask their thought processes (which would (subconsciously, even) trigger an alarm in their interlocuteur), it is necessary to avoid all attempts at reason and ridicule. But since the critical thinker will almost certainly fail at one or all of these challenges, and will certainly become 'out-grouped', the only means remaining is a long, arduous, one-on-one building of trust (acceptance as a 'reliable survival model') before even lessons of (how to) reason can even begin to set in.

Oh, the genius of the immoral those who set up the world this way: once set into motion, the survive-through-imitation machine perpetuates, almost immutably, itself, and its masters (the shepherds) have only to program the in-group survival-model 'leaders' (sheep-dogs) to propagate change through the rest of the imitation-or-else society (sheep).

That has been the model almost since humanity began to gather in greater numbers; it has worked thus far because our inability to communicate over long distances has contained 'packages' of humans into managable, isolated 'in-groups'. Yet it is becomong increasingly hard to maintain these, and it will soon become necessary to cut a dictate-able (survive-through-imitation) group from any other (competing group) influence entirely... and it's hard to imagine that those who would opt for this could ever become a world majority (at least, in the near future).

So, how does a critical thinker survive in a non-critically-thinking world (if they are not already an immoral part of the sheep-dependant 'shepherd' clan)?

Find your own autonomous as-away-from-public-as-possible means of survival, keep your cool, and have patience.

RDF (the 'Semantic Web') and the Human Brain

I was introduced to the RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model by the chairpeople  (waving to Paul Rouet ; ) of the "Paris Time Machine" project; they were sorely in need of a 'tech guy' (and I was the only one on the 'team'), but it was the only computer-oriented thing on their 'cahier des charges' that I wasn't qualified for; not only had I no experience with RDF, but I was totally unaware of its existence until then. I'm wondering how I managed to miss it: it's been around since 1999, created almost in tandem with the XML format (that is only beginning to seem 'more value than noise' for me), but it never took off, and is still far from anything approaching a standard (use) today. Now that I've looked into it, its potential utility is, well, amazing, but it's going to require a lot of work to implement: either the whole of the web is going to have to be re-factored to accommodate it, or we're going to have to develop an AI that can reliably read and extract data from all forms of publication (print and web). I'm working towards, and vying for, the latter.

RDF at its base is not a complicated affair, and its syntax took only a couple days to master. Basically, each bit of data is a 'subject-predicate-object' "triplet", for example: "Bob=><-->last_name=>Smith', or "Bob=>address=>25 maple lane' or "Bob=>phone_number=>0 (145) 628-5400'. So if we were to do a search for (subject) 'Bob', we would get all the data 'attributed' to that subject: last_name, address, phone_number. Of course, in larger data collections, 'Bob' would be a bad 'central node/identifier' choice (because that what it becomes in this context), but I'm sure you get the picture: in this way, it would be possible to attribute any 'type' (dictated by the predicate) of information to that subject, without any limitation and possibility of conflict (Bob can have two phone numbers: both will have a 'Bob=>phone_number' subject-predicate, and a query for 'Bob=>phone_number' (or just 'Bob') will return both). Furthermore, one triplet's object (data) can be a subject with data of its own: for example: "0 (145) 628-5400=>phone_number_type=>land_line' would turn up as a 'second level' of data in an 'all about Bob' simple 'Bob' query. So with this method, data linked to data linked to data... the possibilities are endless.

But that's not what excited me about it: I've always been fascinated by neuroscience (basically: understanding my own (brain's) quirks), and as I learned more about RDF, my thoughts, with bells ringing, returned increasingly there: there are a lot of similarities between the workings of RDF and the human brain.

Granted, RDF is a step 'above' our 'fired-or-not' basically-binary synapses, but the organisation seems the same. If we were to think of 'Bob', our brain would return all the data it contained that could be attributed to that entity. Our brain 'identifies' "Bob" by a group of synapses ('identifier'), and that is where I thought the difference with RDF was, but if we were to examine a more complicated RDF dataset,  easily-conflict-prone subjects such as 'Bob' would have to become unique identifiers as well (and 'that particular Bob's' first name would become, say:10001010=>first_name=>Bob (and 10001010<-->=>address=>25 maple lane, etc.). In reality, to avoid conflicts, most likely every 'thing' in existence should have a unique identifier (save, for example, our most fundamental elements (atom-types, fermion-types, etc.)... so if we reductio ad absurdam our computer's 'unique id', it will be a collection of 'on or off' binary values... the same as our brain's.

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Just a footnote here to underline that this 'binary cocktail' outline most likely does not describe the entirety of the brain's thought-memory-recall process; probably other chemical 'filters' figure in there too (and this is how we give 'value' to retrieved memories (over others)). This is yet something else to explore (and perhaps even exploit, if it can be re-created technologically), but for the purposes of this what-is-supposed-to-be RDF perusal, going there would be but a distraction.

There are no Gluons, Bosons, Gravitons, Weak or Strong Force... or 'magnetism', while we're at it.

...Not as individual 'things', anyway. All of these are the effects of the energy-gravity battle between particles at different energy levels... the varying degree and state of every particle (super-gamma split, sub-gamma photon, polarised-bound (quark) or unpolarised (lepton) make for the different 'effects'.

Magnetism is simply 'synchronised gravity'... of atoms whose outermost electrons are in that 'sweet spot' that is just to the inside of the overall atom 'event horizon': while being retained by the atom itself, that outermost electron(s) can 'broadcast' its gravitational signature while being affected by other similar atoms; the gravitational effects of electrons deeper within an atom's sphere of influence tend to be 'stifled' (negated) by the atom itself.

The centre of both gravity and magnetism (and this is no coincidence), 'negative squared' rules everything. Weak and strong forces are simply the 'proximity factor' of two particles, or the difference between two (bound) particles and another.