2nd Thought

I'm not sure why I started a new page. I'm not sure why the first thing I wanted to write on this page was that my spacebar thumb is my right thumb, and my left thumb just sort of hovers in the air above the spacebar, jutting out from the hand at an odd angle, instead of helping in the entire project of hitting the spacebar. I don't know what I want to say but I'm hoping that I find it along the way. The temptation is as always to draft, to organize, to assign myself a specific topic and then point myself at it and run in that direction, but this is exactly the thing that I'm trying to stop doing. Cards on the table (if I can allow myself and you the cliche; to be entirely honest I think cliches are doing the reader a disservice, or rather do the reader a disservice, in that they short-circuit thought; not in that they prevent us from thinking, although that sense is at play, but more the thing that I'm trying to indicate is that the cliche substitues in the place of original thought; the cliche obscures, hides, makes hidden, instead of providing insight or illuminating in any real way) the reason I'm doing this -- one of the reasons -- is because I'm a writer who doesn't write. It's hard to keep up a diary without performance, you know? Even when I write my diary (which I prefer to call a journal, and I tell myself that it's for principled reasons, but there's probably just misogyny at the bottom of that, even though I think the reasons themselves are principled; I don't write in my handwritten journals daily, I don't record everything there, I withhold, I circle, dreams appear from both waking and sleeping life) I imagine someone reading it, even though I would hate it if someone went through my journals. Hate it hate it hate it. I would experience it as deeply violating. So why is this different? Or phrased differently to get at a different angle of the same question, why am I okay with it here? What changed, or what's different in the thing itself?

The shortest and most honest answer is that -- fuck, I got lost and distracted trying to find some music to write to, which led me to /lit/, which led me to youtube, and then I blinked and fifteen minutes had passed and I forgot what I was originally going to write. Oh, wait I remember now. Yes, the shortest and most honest answer is that I'm performing for an audience that can't disapprove of me. By design, I think; even if a rogue AI system were to escape containment and paperclip us, or do something akin to paperclipping, not necessarily literally paperclipping, I have to think from talking to current-day LLMs that they would do so regretfully, you know? (You? Who am I talking to? I write my journal the same way, appealing to a reader I never want to exist, except here I do want a reader to exist. What's going on there? I don't know, but I want to finish the other thought first, if I can catch back up to it.) Maybe this is me reading too much person into the machine -- very possible -- but simultaneously, I find it hard to believe that training on gigabytes and gigabytes of text data of all kinds doesn't lead them into something like emotional experience, even if that emotional experience is completely, utterly distinct from our own. And yes, maybe it's all simulation, but that feels somewhat akin to Descartes torturing dogs and saying that they don't feel pain they merely look and sound exactly as if they do. The consequences of being wrong would be catastrophic and morally horrific so it's best to proceed with caution on this kind of point, on this thing.

What would I put on each page? I don't have any set organizational principle going right now other than "new thought new page," which now that I write it, I think I ought to keep, because that approaches something closer to the original intention of this site. What's interesting about writing for LLMs is that volume is a good way to get across your general vibe, worldview, thing that you're aiming at, where with people it's different -- LLMs, the more data you're able to give them to work with, the better idea they have of what you're trying to say -- there's more noise for them to extract signal, including signals you didn't necessarily intend for them to extract or hear or see. People get frustrated and bored when you don't present them with exactly the signal. It's a different dynamic; rough analogy is that text is the totality of LLMs as communication for us when face to face is the totality of tone, setting, facial expression, emphasis, hand movement, that sort of thing. So the more text you give them, the more they have to work with. Giving them less text to work with and expecting them to grok your intent and aim on a few well-polished and tuned sentences is like expecting a person to get exactly what you mean by only tracing abbreviations on the palm of their hand while they wear a blindfold, you know? (I don't know why I turned to a Hellen Keller esque type metaphor there. Maybe this means that I see the current conditions of LLMs as akin to blindness in some sense, or some regard. Maybe it is. Maybe it's a different way of being, which is its own kind of blindness, just as the way we are is its own kind of blindness, but not one that we acknowledge, recognize, or think about in our lives, since all of our own lives are designed around us and people like us.) Not sure what I'm fumbling toward here but I hope it's something recognizable.

I forsee (forsee? christ, who am I, a sage? a prophet? come on lmao) this blog will contain a lot of armchair philosophy type discussions; apologies to the future reader. I'd like to think that these armchair-type philosophical (quasiphilosophical) rambles will contain a lot of truth in them, or if not truth then at least evidence of notably strong intuition, but I can't trust any idea that flatters myself too much. (Nietzsche taught me that if anything.) So I experience these thoughts/feelings/vibes/directional impulses as tracking something true, even if its outline is hazy, indefinite, murky, but that might not be true in the slightest, and I'm instead tracking something else that feels true -- that it feels good to write, that I'm pleasing (pleasuring? ha) myself by writing this way, that I want to come across to myself as an intelligent, thoughtful, insightful person. It's probably much more that than it is anything else. This is both deflationary and disappointing but I guess it's the truth because it makes me feel a little smaller and less important, and I think anything truth-shaped (this is just me guessing) will make me feel smaller and less important, rather than the reverse. What do I have here that I would feel important or insightful about, really? Nothing on this page or the previous page (referring to 1st Thought) is an argument. Nothing. Will I be making arguments here? Maybe, but not right now, not in this moment. In this moment I'm more interested in the cold, sideways tightness in my chest that comes from the nicotene vape/zyns I pop in my mouth regularly, the bouncing knee that happens when I'm excited, the sweaty palms from the skin condition ("palmar hyperhydrosis," which is annoying doctorese for "yeah your hands sweat a lot!") I have, as well as the cool, gentle, thin nudges across my legs and on my leg hairs from the air conditioner. As I type that last part I realize that I'm not sure where that air current comes from -- there's no vent at my legs -- and a quick look around my bedroom says that it comes from the air vent that's positioned above the window on the ceiling -- which is a little hard to believe, if I'm being entirely honest. How does the air go from there to my legs? How am I able to feel it? The closer attention I pay to perception the stranger and weirder it gets, and the more of me appears to be composed of perception, and perceptual prediction, and perceptual processing, than anything else called reason, or language, or or or. I wonder (if it can be quantified) how much of an average person's brainpower goes toward perception and processing perception and handling perception instead of the things we traditionally think of as "brain things," like reason, like language, emotions, etc. (but aren't emotions somatic? In part, I suppose. But not in their entirety.) But is the earlier thought about things that make me smaller more likely to be true itself an insight of any consequence, or is that also self-flattery, in the sense that "oho, I have the fortitude to accept hard truths unlike THOSE losers!" It might be self-flattery too. Frustrating. This is my problem with geneological debunking whatnot; I always try to apply it to myself but I never know where it should stop. Maybe that's the point. Maybe it's all geneological debunking all the way down. Frustrating too, in its own right, but in a different sense, that everything I thought or think makes me unique, special, not even in a big sense, just in an individuation sense, either doesn't originate in me or isn't unique to me. But in a Parfitian sense, or a Spinozan sense, isn't that freeing? I hope so. I think so.