On the Cube (And a dozen other topics)

I think I've got a handle on a more visual description in my ongoing attempts to understand myself (and surely others).

Have any of you guys played Psychonauts? I grabbed it on Steam a good while back and played it through. It's incredibly imaginative and fun. One of the core gameplay elements is the ability to enter someone else's mind, usually to help them in some way. There are levels about paranoia, fear, ambition, and sadness, and they're all great. One level in particular I am finding relates to the idea I'm trying to get across. (Ignore the giant boss.)

This level is a giant cube that, when you activate certain buttons, releases a representation of a traumatic or formative event on that particular side. (Remember that this is a person's mind you're traipsing on.) It's hard to show in just a few images, but it's really only a loosely-fitting example. What I'm getting at with this is that I feel the way I carry myself resembles this level.

When I finish a show or book or movie, I think I process much more slowly than other people. I have a hard time getting up, leaving the theater in an instant, and giving an immediate summary of my sentiments, unless it's overwhelming positive or negative. And even then, I'm still pondering. Obviously, this applies more to something like The Matrix over Kung Fu Panda. I fucking loved Scott Pilgrim, and said so right afterward. But to this day I'm still thinking about how it represents the gamer generation I'm in.

What I'm doing when I'm reclusive and pensive is sorting out just what the work is doing to change my opinions and perceptions or enlighten me to something. Sometimes the most innocuous statement by anyone can have me extrapolating to deep philosophical questions like a well-crafted book would do.

What I visualize is happening is something like a Rubik's cube, shifting and sliding around, and sometimes expanding to accommodate more tiles. Reconfiguring and shifting to the new position that will represent me. What are these tiles, though? I think they're little bits of experiences that I've had that I take with me.

This is why I feel a compulsive need to, well, say or do something about great experiences I have. To put them up in written word for no one to read. (I certainly haven't reread all that Xanga stuff from years ago.) I don't think I'm alone in this regard. When you watch a great TV series, you want to talk about it, to share the experience with someone else who understands. Often, I choose to share it with the anonymous Internet.

I wouldn't look too much into this cube thing, even though I've set it up so much. What's really going on here is that I'm identifying the many things that make up who I am that come from specific places. I know I like to chock as many references or inside jokes about the specific set of media I have consumed all over my online persona. Check out this list of random things that used to be up top on my Facebook profile:

BLACK TIE

Gibson EB-0, 1961 model

The Golden Winged Ship

"Nursery rhymes to a generation"

01189998819991197253

POTATO BACON BOMBS

Phrases like "black tie" from the ZZ Top song "Sharp Dressed Man" or a famous Patton Oswalt punchline or the Engineer as my avatar in many places or the creation of an SOS Brigade headquarters in the Minecraft world I frequent are all examples of me carrying around my experiences, what I value.

Really, though, I want to sort out Haruhi Suzimaya. It's an anime series that is on my brain at the moment. I finished the shows and movie maybe two weeks ago now (buying the first light novel after much deliberation, as well), but I'm still catching myself drifting off, considering the implications of the story. It's all is based on a girl who is dissatisfied with reality. She's unhappy with the normal world, i.e. the one we all exist in. That notion makes me uncomfortable, I think. I've long taken the stance that ignorance is not bliss. That reality is always better than delusional fantasy. More and more, however, I'm seeing little instances where that position is hard to hold. Mathers in House made me think about this plenty. I tell little lies to make the world turn smoother, like anyone. But what I fear most are the implications on immersion into a story or fictional setting.

Is there a fine line between enjoying a story and wishing it were real? This just seems so childish, but it won't leave me. I begin to visualize one of the questions posed in my first philosophy class, wherein a simulation is offered of a perfectly normal life that you could live and experience in real time by wearing some sort of helmet. You're supposed to reject it, saying that the real world is better. But what if the simulation were better?

This is not a new question, of course. It's a question of fanciful delusion. But then you start asking what makes up the human experience. Chemical reactions creating pleasure and pain? Does it matter if the stimulus is a physical person or someone on a screen? I don't want to say I'm fortunate to not have to deal with this, since technology hasn't risen to this point yet. I want to have a decent answer, or at least not completely relinquish responsibility to answering it eventually.

Ugh, this post is becoming a jumble of topics. Really, this is all revolving around the Haruhi series, which stemmed or reignited a lot of these thoughts. I don't think I want a world full of the crazy stuff in that anime. Even if I did, that's not what's really troubling me. It's on so much more of a simpler level.

This is a very simple image, but it represents a lot of what I find missing in both my present and recent past. The present I can work on, but I feel like I'd have to get lucky. Or start searching. It's not like it'll get easier when I move away from the place where everyone is my age. At least the ratio might be better.

The past I have to sometimes convince myself is not so devoid or bereft of interpersonal relationships. But it really is. So what I have to do instead is realize that what I didn't have then is not something so irreplaceable that it should be lamented. I mean, I value maturity and intelligence, which only increase over time. But did I miss something crucial by not passing notes in class or participating in any of the other, more innocent aspects of infatuation?

While they might have been nice at the time, I don't think it's something I should worry about. Everyone's experience is different, and I had plenty of great ones in other areas. There's a whole 'nother topic on the benefits of school when it comes to friends and meeting people, though. It's an aspect that I worry I won't be able to replicate when I'm out on my own. I'll definitely post about that sometime.

It's becoming more clear why I watch shows that take place in high school situations. It might be filling a gap I perceive I have. At most in part, though: Haruhi really is fantastic, some of these personal quandaries aside.

On Inability

Every day is another one filled with other things, preventing me from getting out what I need to.

I'll just throw this out there to remind myself and perhaps give a little intrigue...

Such a catchy little thing.

On Looping

This song is absolutely beautiful. I could listen to it over and over. And I do. And I have. And I am, right now. I listen to it so many times in a row that I lose count. The plays meld and mix with the time, only briefly differentiating themselves at the ending pause.

I'm thinking a lot about The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimaya. I finished watching the "Endless 8" episodes, which were a profound waste of time. They could have taken it to such greater heights, but they did not, and ultimately left it as a prime example of filler.

But the looping motif only serves as a distraction from the real issue that won't leave my brain. It's the longing for such an ideal world, full of excitement and enjoyment and strange occurrences.

I think I'm more similar to Haruhi that I realize, except that I don't always have the same outgoing nature, much less her more... eccentric abilities.

I'm constantly battling with myself over admitting that I would prefer such an imaginary place. I would prefer to know someone like her. I refuse to use the word "escape" when referring to any fictional place I would immerse myself in. I don't want to be dissatisfied with the real.

Maybe I just haven't met the right person or found the right way of living. I just hope that my last year of college life isn't the last where I am among friends, where I am inclined to do fun things. I'm not afraid of 8-5, but I am afraid of the desolate weekend.

On Storms

I'm late to the game on this one, but this poem and video are absofuckinglutely amazing and funny in describing the human skeptical condition.

Favorited and cherished forever.

On Dropping Oranges

Another lovely reply in an ongoing religious debate. I think it's got some good stuff in it.

The more we know, the more we know we don't know.

There are areas of science, especially in advanced theoretical physics, where we are reaching the edges of what human minds can comprehend. The universe wasn't made to cater to us, after all. We're just working with what natural selection has provided over millions of generations.

It's entirely possible that the very foundation by which all laws of nature are founded, basic logical components, are mutable. 1+1=3 or True=False might not be outside the realm of possibility! You're right.

But when you're willing to disregard the absolute most basic aspects of existence, you're opening the floodgates to all sorts of ideas. Solipsism, for example, says that nothing can be known but that you exist. This is the most extreme case of trying to wean off assumptions. There are two issues I have with tackling these problems:

1. It's pointless. It solves nothing to assume nothing. You are left questioning every conclusion as invalid. If you think we could have everything wrong, where do you start anew? Where do you have the justification to cling to anything?

2. It's unwarranted. No evidence has surfaced to suggest that a reconsideration of basic logic should be under way. The LHC is causing people to rethink physics (again), but True=True without dispute.

This is not to say that they're interesting thoughts; they're just dead-ends. So, the intellectually productive chooses to assume these cases, while possible, are wasted energy. The intellectually honest doesn't bring up this kind of argument, because it only serves to derail into the severely basic and mundane.

But what does this have to do with a god existing? Well, you're trying to create a space for your god to exist in that is outside the realm of both science and logic. You're calling into question everything that we know for the sake of a supernatural being (that must really suck at making rules for the universe if he can't abide by them himself).

You have no evidence to support this claim, no more than a "what if" postulation that might let something supernatural creep in. I could just as easily say that I have a pet neon dragon at my house. She's allowed to violate all knowns laws of nature, which is why she can weigh nothing, occupy the space of a house, and be invisible. She can also make False into True for kicks.

Hey, this is kinda fun!

Anyway, on to free will. How a person thinks about anything affects his or her actions. What I'm really saying in all this free will conversation is not that you should be "acting" or "faking" anything. You're going to weigh the pros and cons of every decision like you always have.

My point is that just because there exists only one outcome doesn't mean that it will just land in your lap. The universe isn't going to choose between New York and California for your move; you're going to go through a complicated analysis of what's better for you, just like the universe expects. If you sit on your ass and don't choose, you don't consider your options and take action... then, well, that was your choice, obviously. It's not "acting" like we can change it; it's operating within the constraints of the universe like we've always done.

Free will is testable. With a proper definition, it can be considered, verified, or refuted. Say it's the ability to choose from among a set of possibilities. Since the Big Bang, we have understood all particles to be moving along a path that could be predicted (based on our basic laws of the universe that have yet to be disproven). This means all the way to today that the chemical reactions and the firing neurons in your brain were inevitably going to read this sentence and understand it. There are also ideas of universes splitting off with each decision made, of course, but they are without evidence. No truly "random" aspect of the universe has been discovered, to my knowledge, that can allow for such decision space. If you want to say it has to do with a god, you'll have to prove the god first.

You try to make a distinction between arguments of evidence and arguments of persuasion. All arguments of persuasion are based on some sort of likelihood or preponderance of evidence one way or another.

If you want to talk about secular moral systems or the (lack of) limits of science or the value of life without a supernatural deity, I'd be happy to, but only if we can close another one of these arguments.