Category: General

I’m arriving at a house, expected. By appointment. I’m there to retrieve some things, or perhaps to relieve someone. I walk upstairs to a fluorescent lit kitchen. There’s a book on the counter, tattered paperback. I pick it up, leaf through its pages, see her handwriting in notes in the margins. I hope this book is part of the package I’m here to get, but I don’t know if he will allow me to take it. I walk into the living room and she sits on the floor in front of the TV, in a bathrobe, small and young and weak and strong and held in reserve. We exchange awkward hellos. She waves towards the back of the room and I turn towards him. He’s also hunched on the floor, going through a box of books. I ask about the one in my hand; may I? His face sours. His eyes flick towards her and back at me. I await his answer.

How did I do yesterday on this week’s goals?

• I haven’t (yet) found sites that accept freelance writing.
• I haven’t (yet) found content farm sites.
• I did search Mechanical Turk yesterday for writing HITs; found none.
• I didn’t work on the novel at all.
• I didn’t keep track of interesting stories.

I did write a 500+ word post yesterday morning. Also, I had a mandatory meeting, which took some time to take the bus downtown and back again, so that took a chunk out of my afternoon. And I also applied for two different part-time jobs.

I’m not giving up, though. I’m building habits. Today will be better.

This is a random walk on a specific topic. It’s not a well-researched educational article. I wanted to make that clear right away. I may add links to articles that support what I’m saying but I do not claim to be an expert. In fact, if you have more information, please feel free to correct me or send a link my way.

A topic I’ve thought about, and more lately, is thinking. Specifically, consciousness. The most recent line of thought started because lately I’ve been tracking my sleep and my dreams, keeping a dream journal. One morning last week, I woke up and my immediate thought was about how I could tell the difference between the previous moment, when I was sleeping and dreaming, and the next moment, when I was awake. There was a difference, but not one I could articulate. Everyone knows that they’re not the same mental state, but nobody really knows why or how.

Much research has been done on consciousness. We can measure activity in the brain and tell the difference between sleeping, dreaming, and wide awake by looking at an MRI or an EEG, but, again, why do we do them? Why do we need to dream? How does consciousness work? How does the brain (or whatever is generating it) make consciousness? Do other animals have this type of brain state, or are we alone? 

We don’t even really know how anesthesia works, in fact. We can apply it to someone, and they lose consciousness and become insensitive to pain, but all the autonomic body responses, like breathing or heartbeat, continue, much like in sleep (except for the insensitivity to pain bit). How is an anesthetic state different from consciousness or sleeping? What is being shut down?

Our understanding of consciousness is metaphorical at best. We can point to areas of the brain and say, “if that part stops working, we lose consciousness” but we’re not really sure why. We have tools like anesthesia that can shut it off temporarily but we don’t know why. We spend a third of our lives in an altered state that appears to be required for our continued existence, a state we appear to share with many other vertebrates on this planet, but, again, we don’t know why. 

The ambiguity is what leads many people to assume a paranormal or supernatural explanation for it: the soul or spirit is what makes us conscious, a non-physical thing that is made up of our experiences, thoughts, and personality. While I understand the impulse I do not think that is the answer; there are too many other more reasonable explanations. Sure, when I’m dreaming there’s a strong sense of being somewhere else, like I’ve travelled to a distant land or another dimension, but it’s entirely possible, and in fact quite likely, that it’s just another mental state created by my brain. In fact, if we had souls, non-physical supernatural energy fields that were permanent personalities without bodies, would it be possible to affect our basic personality traits via simple physical, chemical or electric changes, as we’ve found? No, the evidence I’ve seen suggests our personalities and consciousness are a result of physical structures and electro-chemical reactions. I understand your potential disappointment and disagreement; but I don’t share it.

The irony of me thinking about consciousness is delicious. 

Since I haven’t blogged in a few days, and it’s Monday, here’s some bootleg video, of Thom Yorke and Atoms for Peace covering “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xhON-JjCn0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

…and even though this isn’t from Coachella, it reminds me that Mr. Yorke and the AfPs played Coachella this year, along with a metric ton of talent.

Man I wish I had gone to Coachella this year. I can’t wait for more bootlegs to pop up.

“Let’s move this table out of the way,” Kevin said. He rolled over in his hospital bed and shoved the rolling table aside, while I scooted my chair closer.

I held up my iPhone so both of us could see the screen. I poked and prodded and showed Kevin a little trick; setting Spotlight search so that Application results were at the top of the list, and turning off unneeded results like Mail or Podcasts to speed up search, so that he could use Spotlight as an application launcher, as I’ve been doing ever since I accumlated more than 3 screens worth of apps.

It was a small moment in my visit. The dark hospital room, late at night. Him laying in bed, in scrubs, unshaven, tired but still alert.

I felt the sadness at his illness, which seemed vastly unfair for a man six years my junior. I could see that he did not want to be alone, but knew that I had to leave in less than 20 minutes, to ride the bus back to my side of town. I knew that he was an extrovert; he drew energy from interacting with others, nearly my opposite in that regard.

I felt the long years we had known each other, and the laughter we’d shared, and the occassional bitter words that estranged us for a long-but-short time. I fretted about the effect of all this on his wife, and his children, so young to be exposed to a truth about life’s ebb and flow.

And I remembered a nerdy chubby 12 year old, so many years ago, showing off something cool when his 6 year old friend came to visit. The 12 year old me, patient but excited, explaining the intricacies of some electronic doodad he’d been given, sharing with the 6 year old Kevin, and then the two of them making up stories about it and losing themselves in play for an afternoon, until his parents came in to tell him they were going home.

Some things never change, I suppose. Except that the past gets layered on top of current events, shading what’s happening. Those layers are what we call nostalgia.

The fear and anger at what the near future holds, though – do we have a name for that?