Contrast

Recently I had two poles apart ideas, both probably symptomatic of my recent mania, but please forget  their nativity, please look at them without that. Although I can only describe this way.

So one was “Always ON”. I’ve been a bit blabbly forever, enjoyed having a blog. Rare original ideas, but loving to tell people about the nice things I’d seen

Then concurrently I had two things going at my head at once. My lovely girlfriend had come back after some bad times, and I had a friend Julian staying. With the girlfriend, we would have those stupid rows, where you’d end up saying “I didn’t say that!”. So you wish you had a tape recorder to say, yes you did! She also suggested we get a dictafonic thing, record stuff to note down later.

Same time, I would see Julian doing his music stuff, and he’s do it all day. Seriously, he’s practice the same song for about 12 hours a day, and only tweak one little phrasing or a note somewhere from one day to the next. He’d often get worried about his progress, and I just wanted to say “listen!”. today – yesterday. Diffs.

The idea of Always ON. You record everything, audio, visual, fall back on a pen and paper. I’f you can’t do surround, just do audio. The dictaphone I got, bought something like a 16G card in it, with that, crappy voice compression stuff going on, that’s about a year’s worth of audio.

Why not video everything all the time? Record everything all the time? Share it all, show other people that we are human just like you. Ooops.

This is so obvious, and I know all those Californians have been there already. But when you start applying to your own life, thingz getz a bit weird.

The bits you, he, she or I might feel bad about. The relationship I have with this woman is about our interpretation of it, not the literals. Fairly sure I recorded a few rows, and no doubt inappropriate grunty noises at other times, then felt obliged to delete them. You just can’t do that. Not even if you are GCHQ, as if they’d ever ask first.

Also I kept losing dictaphones, oh dear.

Always ON. Get everything recorded, so I won’t miss that bit of birdsound, for my ambient CD. If anything ever happens to  that woman I love, I’ll have this lovely history, warts & all, to refer back to.

I’ll come back to this, but imagine reality has a timeline.

So that is Always ON, an idea I guess I’ve been building up to for decades.

But in the space of a couple of hours travelling, I came up with the Contrast.

Always OFF.

Not some nihilist bullshit, but actually quite a positive idea.

I’d been down to pick my mother up from Pisa airport. She been flying, so was knackered, I’d been up early, after a manic phase, so I was a bit tired too.

We’d done all that “no seen you in ages” hugs things, she’d already told me a Friend of a friend had said my father had said I was depraved, over some rubbish I’d said on Facebook.

Forget that. I wanted to know how to make some nice conversation, mental huggies.

So, how are you getting on with your novel then?

She, like me, has struggled with such stuff forever. Both have the same kind of hangups, would prefer to teach other people how to write than actually doing something original. Oddly enough, me dad has done a novel, hopefully published one day.

I’m thinking how the plot & characters move, but couldn’t be arsed getting pen & paper out. As little FOAF (gloggle it!) faces. Pretty much sorted it all out in my head.

Hang on, all in my head. Like the novel I’ve written. My own little virtual world, just internal to my skull. Except…

Maybe a bit in the rest of my body. Might have been that Michael Mosly rang to say that if you add up all the neurons in a human digestive tract, it works about the same as a cat brain.

My point being that the things that happen in all the synapses, it is just as real as the rest of it. Eyes might deceive a bit, but this is the VM we’re in.

Slightly distracted there, but it is very like the Geoff Hinton thing, compress the whole of the human race’s texts down to about 4 bit, you can reconstruct it the other side. I reckon that’s how mammalian, possibly saurian/chicken sexuality works. It just gets compressed down, to tell the front end bits whether to expand or not. Go on, Sex and Deep Learning, that has to be 9 column inches in The Mail…

I do think our current notions of what the universe is like owes more to bad 1960’s science fiction. cf. Matrix. But in one form or another, we do exist as information, somewhere, sometime. Which is kinda nice for atheists like me, all those nice things that have happened still exist, if you give the universe a timeline. Even works for the dietary-botherers. Same universes.

None of the universes cares at all, but there is satisfaction to be to be had by being in a flash of existenz when you hand your doggies a handful of peanuts. Jua-du-arrrrr-vive, as the French pirates say.

Even your every thought is there. Don’t get paranoid otherwise I’ll tell you why my dad thinks I’m depraved.

We don’t need to be always on or always off. Many teenage philosophers have reached that understanding already. Without a hard life, then sitting under a tree for a while.