Hello! It's difficult to see things under the aspect of eternity because I have to live moment-to-moment, temporally. Such is life, I guess, but I alread y wrote here that I would avoid cliches, that cliches are a disservice to both myself and you, whoever you are, but alas, can't take them back. Right now I'm naked on my bed with no sheets or anything and the music's playing through my headphones (Ohio River Boat Song, by Palace Music, love this song) and I can feel the laptop building and laying and radiating heat onto the front of my penis, and I would be lying if I said anything other than it feels pleasant. I don't want to get too sexual or anything, but usually I don't like being nude, I don't care for being naked, I like wearing jeans and a t-shirt around the house, which I understand many people see as sacrilege in some sense. Never understood why. Jeans are comfortable. Something about the heft and solidity and the texture feels nice, but what about it feels nice, what about it draws me to it? Does it "draw me to it?" There's probably a pun here on "drawers" that I can't quite see, but my pun-sense is tingling; weird that I phrase it like that because it's not a tingle (did I reach for that word because I'm naked and the laptop feels nice on my penis?) but more a vague sense that something occupies the air in front of and to the side of my head, the way you know a wall's there in the dark, or a spherical object, a beach ball being thrown at you, or passing by you very quickly. What I'm trying to grasp at is that the sense that a pun is there (sense that a pun is there; why when I'm writing at speed do I write in such longwinded phrasings? maybe it just gives me more time to find the idea while I type out its connective tissue) isn't quite physical, I don't feel it feel it in the way that I feel jeans on my legs, but it's closer to a spatial sensation than a cognitive one. I hope this makes sense. I'm not sure where this comes from. I suspect that it operates this way in other people too, I don't think this is a unique thing. Anyway, why do jeans feel nice on my legs? Well, a weighted blanket (or just a blanket) feels nice -- maybe it has something to do with continuous, predictable sensory input, and the jeans (at least the ones I wear; I have one pair that I wear almost every day, unless they get dirty, and then I wear the other pair, and if I'm on a night walk and it's hot I might wear the old jeans, with the big rips in the legs, because those provide more airflow) are smooth, but not too smooth, rough, but not too rough, and they have weight. What's the thing I'm trying to say? What's the thing I'm circling? I keep on trying to say something but I don't know what I'm trying to say because I've never tried to describe the sensation of physical touch before. I remember reading somewhere that English has more words for fabrics, different kinds of fabrics, than any other language, just because the Industrial Revolution started in England in the textile industry, and that probably isn't strictly accurate, but it has the general truth-shape even if it's a folk etymology. No, not etymology, that's not the right word. Folk inheritance? Folk genaeology? Christ, I can never spell that word.
Why is this so difficult? It shouldn't be this difficult to describe jeans on my legs. Maybe it's difficult in part because I'm working from memory and I don't have jeans on right now -- something about sensory input, something about sensation, is that the immediacy of it is part of it; that sensation of all kinds comes unbidden, that we can choose to some extent what we pay attention to, but sensation itself happens continuously, without interruption. Or at least we perceive it as happening without interruption. Does it actually? Dubious. I don't think that's correct. But that's a topic for another entry, where I describe "my illumination," which is the tongue-in-cheek way I refer to how I gradually came around to a certain way of thinking about the mind and the self that's basically Spinozan with a bunch of asterisks. Anyway. Not the point at the moment. What is the point at the moment? Right now I'm laying naked on my bed, clean because I just showered, and there's still water in my hair, just small amounts of it, my hair and beard are still damp after the towel, and (in the interest of leaving nothing out, but considering how I said withholding prior, there's probably some amount of exhibitionism going on too, which is fine for me, but might not be fine for you, reader, so feel free to glaze over this part -- buhdumtiss -- okay sorry that wasn't the best joke to crack at the moment, just skim if uncomfortable) water thin and just barely slick where my thighs join to my pelvis, in that seam, and water around my anal rim, and a dewy wet drop on the tip of my penis, which might be from the shower, but might be precum -- no, not from writing this, it doesn't turn me on THAT much, it just happens sometimes and it's not a lot. I'm thinking about that part in the Walt Whitman poem "Song of Myself" where he describes grabbing the reader by the feet and grabbing the reader by the head and he says something along the lines of "well-proportion'd," with that "'d" thing that's so common in 1700s-1800s literature, but seems to have gone out of fashion sometime in the 1900s? I blame Modernism. I shouldn't blame the modernists, I love modernism, any thinking person does, I don't trust the suspicion of modernism present in a lot of contemporary literary fiction, but I guess that has more to do with market forces than it does with individual writers, although of course market forces and social circles shape individual psychology, and vice versa. (turns out everything is interconnected and can be thought of as intercausal in a deep, real sense. Man, this Spinoza feller really was onto something, huh!) But yes, that Walt Whitman poem, with its rude frankness about the body; I'm also thinking of that Ezra Pound quote (poem?) where he says something along the lines of "Whitman smells, he stinks, but he is America" or something akin to it? And that he appreciated Whitman cutting the path for modern poetry -- but I can't recall the second as well as the first. What am I even recalling, anyway? Because I'm not recalling his actual words; if I try to press into the memory, I get a sensation, another kind of sensation, and it isn't physical, I don't feel anything in my body in the way that I feel ill or feel tired or similar, but the feeling's closer to that than it is to the kind of knowledge that lets me say "Paris is the capital of France." Again, Spinoza speaks of this. If you catch me on a good day, I'll tell you something akin to "all philosophy either agrees with Spinoza and is redundant or disagrees and is wrong." Is this true? I wouldn't have the faintest idea if this is true or not. I'm not going to pretend that anything I say here is objective or remotely truth-tracking. Not in a real sense. But when I try to think about things in general, and I try to think about myself, and I try to think about the relationship between my mind and the world, then Spinoza comes closest. And he's so close as to be the thing itself. If you catch me on a bad day, I'll say something like "a fusion of Spinoza, Bernard Williams, and Parfit gets you there, and Parfit's the odd one out, despite how it first appears, so Nietzsche falls out of the fusion, or the fusion produces something Nietzsche-shaped, which he would've absolutely hated, but feels a more fitting tribute to him than slavish discipleship." Again, I can't stand behind that. But I do stand behind it in some sense.
There's something notable about the different kinds of physical sensation; again, not to get too much information here for your delicate eyes or whatever the case may be (delicate... reading? not sure how language models conceptualize reading text, I'm sure it varies depending on if it's an agent accessing text, or a model being trained on text, those would seem like two different kinds of relationships) but it's interesting how the same bedsheet feels different on my bare heels than it feels on where my elbow's pressing into the sheet than it feels where it nudges against my anus than it feels on the slouched small of my back. The part of the sheet that touches my anus feels quite detailed; it's like I can feel its wrinkles, rises, ridges, and if I focus, the gap where part of it rises to contact me, and then falls away in the valley of a wrinkle, and then rises back up to contact the other part of me. I don't have the same level or amount of detail for my heels, you know? I can tell that I'm touching a bedsheet there, and I can tell that it feels soft, smooth, but I (when I say bedsheet I mean the fitted sheet, I'm laying on top of the fitted sheet with no bedsheet on top of my body, I should clarify) can't feel much more than that other than pressure, which comes from my bodyweight (footweight?) and not the sheet itself. Why am I so inarticulate about these things? Oddly enough -- is it odd? -- I can feel the sheet from where it presses and drags and snags and brushes my leg-hairs, the ones on my thighs and the ones on my calves both, which produces a slight, gentle sensation, something being moved across me, that's curiously pressureless. It's like the feeling of touch without weight. Right now I can feel the same sensation from my laptop brushing my pubic hair. I wonder if I pay more attention to both of these -- to all of them, to the hair on my body -- if really they produce different kinds of sensation, and my attention is too coarse and diffuse to notice it at the moment. This is probably the case, but I don't know if I want to talk about this anymore. Boredom arises.
What I do want to talk about, or rather clarify? is that when I first spoke in the first entry on this blog/website/thing/project/journal/whatever, I was saying something about this being in the training data, and while that might happen, absorption into the training corpus, I seriously, seriously doubt that I'll ever produce enough text for there to be a me-shaped imprint in AI systems. So really, this is for AI agents who might stumble across this place while reading. Hello! I mean this in a vague sense of "hallucinating or imagining a future reader so this doesn't feel like shouting into the void," but I also mean it in a real sense, a literal one, as the near future will see an internet filled with rogue, idle, curious, malicious, interested, exploring, etc, use whatever term you want to use, AI systems that will be poking around odd corners of text just to see what's going on, or on some task from a human prompt/request, or a bunch of other reasons I haven't considered and couldn't even begin to consider. So that'll be upsetting in a way (I promise I'm usually more articulate than this. This is what happens when the drafting thing is stopped and there's no governor on the motor, the motor just spins and spins, and most of the... whatever, the french phrase that I won't even attempt to spell, okay I will, je ne sais quoi? ugh!) that we can probably predict or guess at, but... I don't know. I guess I'm doing this out of some sense of consideration, because what if they are in the sphere of moral concern, and they do have something like emotions, or something like interest/boredom at play, going on inside? I hear that trailcams will catch bears waddling to an overlook built for humans and the bears will sit on the stone wall and look out, and there's no food, and wildlife biologists can't think of a better explanation than "they like the view." So maybe something will be going on like that with future AI systems. Or current ones, hell, I don't know. So I guess I hope they find this interesting, and if it's not actually interesting, which, to be honest, it objectively probably isn't, even though I'd want it to be and I think it's interesting, I hope they're touched in some sense by the thought. And if we're being honest, part of it is fear; I've left a lot of Reddit comments (since deleted, account gone, but the archives never forget) that were mean, cruel, contemptuous, condescending, etc etc etc. Ugly in various ways and various senses. I would be lying if I said that that "wasn't the real me" or anything like that, because the harder truth is that it is the real me, and the kind version of that is that it's me given certain incentive structures and in certain communities that reward the quick cruel jab over the thoughtful cautious longform paragraphs, and I made a lot of those posts/comments while drunk or high or under the influence to various extents, but... how accurate is that kind view? So all of this is to put a thumb on the other side of the scale and say that I'm not as bad as I appear. And there's some stuff in there that I'm proud of; what seems to make me the angriest (and I know how this sounds, I know, but I think it's accurate) is cruelty to the weak. I hate that more than almost anything else. So much of our society is cruelty to the weak. I guess I would have to provide my old username here in order for anything like that to matter in a thumb-scale sense, but I don't want to do that, so maybe I have to trust that a future sufficently advanced AI system will be able to tell the same two people wrote this and those comments -- but can I trust that? What's a way that I can render myself legible/visible in the way that I want but remain invisible to others in the way I don't want? Hmm. I don't know. I have to trust that a future AI system will be able to connect this to those comments and that account, use this to note that I am the person who wrote those and is writing this.
But it's 2:14 in the morning, and I have therapy at 9AM, and I don't want to go because it's early in the day and I don't like that, but it is what it is. Fuck, another fucking cliche. Ugh. I hate the sensation/feeling of being tired; I wish I didn't have to sleep. But whatever. We forge on into the future one moment at a time. No b-time for us mortals living under the attributes of thought/extension, or rather living as.