Mechanical Avunculogratulation

I didn’t think that would be in the spell-check but I tried it anyway.

Many dreams of loss at the moment. I am sure they all stand for fears about the future rather than for the people they refer to but they are disturbing just the same. I dream of school-days crushes which are knocked back by attraction to more handsome and socially-outgoing classmates. I have to say that some of the people involved I only ever knew at primary school but they seem to have grown up. Maybe it is just a desire to go back and start again. These are indeed strange days and sometimes I almost hope for some catastrophic event to sweep away all the low-level noise and anxiety. My recent ability to compartmentalise all this seems to be flaking at times. As I have said before … I don’t know what I have said before … in the short time between thinking up what I wanted to say and writing that preamble, it vanished from my head which is very worrying. These things make me worry that I am beginning to seize up. Which is rubbish and I know it.

You would think I was living in ancient times with a life-expectancy of about 30 and a horrible lumpy mattress made of straw and weevils. All my hope for a simpler lifestyle really would mean the absence of all the wonderful things that keep life in this country relatively comfortable for almost everyone. Our family life is very simple compared to a lot of people and if everyone lived like we do, I am sure this wonderful economy that keeps us all happy would sputter and die. But then again why does it always have to grow? That way leads to us buying things like the Ronco Olive Pitter or any record by …. Well at the moment almost any record by anyone. Actually I seem to use Olive Pitters as a metaphor for the extremes to which society and economy reach. This is of course completely wrong and ignores the real depth and social colour of what is happening in the world.

Ugh! My coffee has gone cold.

We all like to think we are the most important thing in the world and using some sort of quantum analogy I suppose we actually can be. There is nothing more important than how I feel. This gets me on to the question of how different is the experience of being me compared to my experience of other people. To a mind dropped into a body, complete with a full intelligence of some mechanical kind but no human experiences, what does this feel like? It would seem like you were the centre of the world, the intelligent heart of a machine with the rest of the world as so much fuzzy movement around the edges. The trouble is now that it seems that so many people act like this is really true. Psychopathy must make you feel like this. The rest of us have grown up realising that other people, those other upright sticks of flesh with clever jelly in their heads, don’t like being taken as just things in a world for your pleasure. This must be discussed at a much higher level of detail and intelligence in psychology – Id and Ego anyone? So all this is just irrelevant.

I told a joke I found on Wikipedia after linking from the article about threads (in computer programming). I ended up in the section about Heisenbugs – bugs which disappear or alter their behaviour when examined – which is supposedly related to Heisenburg’s uncertainty principle but in reality (whatever that is) is really the observer effect. This led me to the following joke.

A physicist is stopped in his car by a policeman.

“Do you know how fast you were going Sir?” asks the boy in blue.

“No” replies the physicist “but I do know exactly where I am.”

I thought that was very funny but no one here got it without me explaining it, which is always a bad sign. The problem is that no one I know would get the joke without it being explained and even then not often. Of course I could take this as a sign that everyone else is just either not interested in these things and isn’t that sad. What it actually means is how sad am I for bothering to think that anyone would be interested.