Wednesday, December 15, 2010

thinkin' away

Who am I? Okay, let's tone it back a little. Or dial it back. Say that in the future this god stuff is going to happen. The masks aren't important, the feeling of being that thing is important. I walk around, what do I do? What am I? I'm a force that connects things.

What about people? How do other people treat me? I don't know if I can figure that out because the other people are going to be really strange too. Would everybody be like me? Would everybody be a force who connects things? Off the top of my head I would think not, I imagine going back and forth between people who are really stationary and focus on just one thing. I don't know why I assume those kinds of people are necessary though. Why would human energy and attention be necessary there? Couldn't that just be automated? I guess I'm sort of imagining a completely post Hegelian humanity. Basically human beings wouldn't do anything without understanding what and why they were doing it. You wouldn't have researchers. You would just have makers. So basically we, as people, would exist in a world of pieces, and we would understand the nature of those pieces (if we didn't then we would go about measuring their nature until we did) and connect them to eachother to create machines. People wouldn't randomly connect pieces. They wouldn't have any motivation to. Instead people would think about what they wanted to make and then figure out what pieces they needed to connect in what way to make that thing which they had imagined, and then they would make it. Sometimes they might have to travel or spend some time collecting the different pieces that they needed, or they might realize that the particular piece which they needed didn't exist so they'd figure out how it was supposed to work and they'd make it, before they could make the machine which they had imagined. That's pretty fucking inspiring to me, that sounds really cool to me.

How can I make this happen? Well, what are the steps? People imagine something that they want to make. That's no problem. I can get inspiration from anywhere. Then I would need to figure out the pieces I needed to make what I imagined. It seems like I would need to have some kind of searchable database of pieces. I would imagine that it would be impractical for me to try and remember all that stuff myself. So one step would be that once I imagined a machine that I wanted to make, I would have to be able to break it down somehow into its pieces. I would have to be able to break it down into a language that allowed me to find pieces that had that functionality. Would I have to understand where the parts are? I mean, I think that's sort of a no brainer. Maybe it isn't a no brainer though. Like say I have, okay, is machine the right word? Yes. Because everything that I make would exist to serve some purpose. That's kind of cool actually, if I did that. I could be relaxed sometimes and just be doing whatever, chilling with Amanda, but then when I made something, whenever I worked, it would ALWAYS be to serve a very specific purpose. I would work to create a machine which did something that I couldn't do unless that machine existed. And then I would use that machine once I made it because I wouldn't have created it just to add to my "toolset" I would have created it because I needed to use it for something. Then I guess maybe using machines themselves wouldn't have to be work? Because in just using the machines I could change things for no reason. Does that make any sense? I feel like I just might not have the right words here.

So, what is the purpose of these machines? The machines let me do something that I couldn't do otherwise. That's not exactly right. If these machines existed, there wouldn't be anything that I couldn't do. Making the machine would just be another step in the process of doing it. Okay. So it really does come back to intention. That's what I need to have. Hah. How would I make a machine that would let me manufacture intention?

Okay, okay, what would the processes be? Um, well, where would the intention come from? Ah, so the machine would need ingredients right? Where would it get the ingredients from?

Okay, that's interesting. I would say then that there are two kinds of machines. Well, no, that's an overgeneralization. I guess in this instance there's two scenarios that I could be describing with the words I used to describe my original idea, and one of them isn't what I want. A machine that manufactures intention, would it need to create intention once or would intention be something that the machine would have to continually generate? Well. Intentions are ideas. It's possible to talk about different intentions. So I could have the intention to do this and the intention to do that. In that sense, would I want my machine to be able to generate intentions to do multiple things, or would I only really need my machine (at this point) to create an intention to do one thing? Because if the machine only needed to create an intention to do one thing, then I wouldn't say that the intention needed ingredients to be manufactured. The ingredients would just be pieces of the machine. So then when the machine turned on it would generate the intention and maybe those pieces would be transformed into the intention, some parts of the machine would disappear, but the intention would exist so that would be that. I also would consider not saying that parts of the machine "disappeared" but that the machine went from being at rest to being in motion.

Okay, okay. That's interesting. That would be another fun thing to think about. Can I use this metaphor of a machine for figuring out what I want to do in the future? Hmm.

Okay, let's look at what the idea is supposed to be first. Do I need more than one idea of what to do in the future or just one? Ideally it would just be one. But then you definitely start to get into stuff like "how concrete are ideas?" I guess part of the requirement would be that, say this idea existed which satisfied what I wanted, I would want to have it compressed in a way that I could experience it consciously, symbolically in a relatively short period of time. Okay. And an idea is really just information. So I can say things about the kind of information it would have to have without knowing exactly what that information might be? Yeah. So I would say that it needed to have the information in it that, hmm. Okay, maybe I'm not saying what the information would say, but what it would allow me to do? I don't know if that's exactly it either. Okay. So I would need to have a piece that would allow me to think through the idea of what I wanted to do with myself in some kind of process that would eventually lead to concrete action on my part that would lead to this thing that I wanted to do with myself existing. So that's, say, the ability to plan. This compressed symbolic representation of the idea of what I want to do in the future would have a piece of information that would basically let me make an action plan. Another component would be some kind of informational piece that through whatever form of communication allowed me to really believe that this plan for the future was the right thing to do. Let's just call it the argument for now. So this compressed symbolic representation of what to do with my future would have an informational piece that would allow me to make an action plan that I believed would succeed, it would have an informational piece that convinced me that this idea of what to do with my future was something which I really wanted to do, I don't know if it would be another piece or if it would just be the symbolic packet itself, but it would also probably need to have an informational piece that gave me the ability to unpack the idea over the course of an hour or two into an adaptable conception of the pieces of the idea that I could use to communicate the idea in the most time efficient way possible to anyone I might need to explain the idea to.

Are there any other pieces that it would need to have? If I had the ability to believe that the idea was the best thing to do, I would have to understand the idea completely, right? I guess if it's a compressed symbolic representation of the idea, the things that I was getting might not be a complete logical argument because basically that would be refutations of a lot of common sense questions that I would ask. That would have to be something I'd get later when I spent some time unpacking the idea into the adaptable argument. For the part that would convince me, if it's really the right thing for me to do, I think it would just have to be a vision, basically a signifier collage, that gave me enough details about the state it was arguing for that it would be impossible for me to confuse it with any other state. If I saw it and there was tautologically no possibility that I was not being shown something that I could be convinced of being the right thing through a less compressed symbolic argument, then basically I would have to be experiencing something that gave me the exact same feeling I'd have once the state existed. That's how I would be able to be inspired. Then as I carried out the action plan which I was also able to create because of a piece of information in this compressed symbolic idea, I would have the reward of satisfaction once I got to the point in time that I was shown via the argument because I would be becoming more and more confident that the feeling I had from the arguing signifier collage was something real and not just some kind of "pipe dream." Then once I got to the point in the future where the state was realized, I would experience the excitement of everything I could do once I got to that state, even though that was something that I had been communicated in the original signifier collage. What I would have in addition to the feeling of excitement would be the satisfaction of having got to that point and the ability to actually act on the excitement, which had basically been frozen into a kind of anticipation after being transferred in the argument.