Too Stressed For Fun

The "Sun God" walked around Dartmouth in a beautiful carnival mask for two months promoting a LOVE MARCH which went down today. It's intended purpose was to provide students with a forum in which to celebrate the passion that drives their myriad humanitarian initiatives.

And few people showed up. Maybe a dozen. We were all too busy.

Love for the sake of it? Will my 50 minutes return some form of measurable reward? Can I put it on paper? No? Alright... I'll just give you the $5 and keep goin, thanks.

I didn't go to the march. I was doing work. Love doesn't get things done, it's just the reason for why we should.


I hear they have robot rehabilitation centers in the real world.

I can't wait.

Violence Is A Game Mechanic(?)

[written a month ago]

As I stand in a room with my two aging grandmothers, I find that I haven't cared to listen to their discussion of family events for the last 30 seconds. I verbalize the source of my attentive apathy with tactless honestly:

Cos: Yeah... I've been killing people for eight hours.
Grandma1: ...
Grandma2: what?
Cos: I spent all night on my computer trying to kill other people.
Grandma2: [My name], don't do that, it'll get into your blood.
Cos: It already has.

*A woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's seems to look at me for the first time in awhile*

Cos: I was playing computer games. [I explain Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2]
Grandma2: It'll make you want to kill people!
Cos: I don't want to really kill people, I just want to... I dunno. I guess it's in my blood.
Grandma1: I hope you can keep those games separate from reality...
Cos: I think I can... at least see it happening. Most guys playing don't.

A buddy's "squad" (team of 5 or 6) showed me around Call of Duty last night. They are very good, very angry and play a lot. Hours.

Sounds silly if you haven't been there, but our society needs an outlet for aggression, for conflict. We find it fun, compelling, intoxicating.

I want to play!

Nighthawk: Hey, what are you doing?
Cos: trying to blog about why I want to play this goddamn game.
Nighthawk: That should be easy.











Myst and Math Blaster don't get in my blood like killing does. Yeah, I said it. The first person perspective, the near-realistic atmosphere of violence...

Here's a guess: It's impossible to design a nonviolent game that is compellingly "fun" in the same way this is. Yes, it's is a huge problem that I'm wired to enjoy the mechanics of combat.

Is nonviolence possible, or is a simulation the safest place we can keep killing?


Let's see if I can get a post a day before I let myself blow up.

-Cos

[forgot to post it]

Ignorance of Their Law

Today I got a ticket for parking on the street past 12am.

On weekdays you can park there till 2am, when the library closes.

It takes a certain kind of stupid to raze my nerves, and I'm straight up infuriated by the concept that "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Of course its an excuse, you just have to enforce your law regardless or enforcement would fail completely.

If you want me to play along with your system of arbitrarily selected rules, update me. Inform me. Who in their right mind would willingly choose to be ignorant?

Maybe a lot of people.

In court, ignorance of fact IS usually treated as an excuse. They only really cite the IOTL rule in regard to criminal offenses (I swear I didn't know I couldn't burn you!). The difference between criminal and non-criminal is one of degree... whatever.

I just want the day to come when the parking space I use can alert me to it's limits just like any other well designed machine or application. A parking spot is a piece of social technology; I shouldn't have to pay a fine just to be handed its instruction manual.

(the parking schedule was printed on the ticket. thanks guys.)

I would like to be informed of the law before I act, and AR might help dynamically prevent "ignorance of the law" in future situations. This guy has the right idea. (Concerning bad ideas)

Two things, tho:

1) Giving law enforcement info-tracking tech in the real world could lead to some serious privacy issues and eliminate those instances when we can harmlessly break rules.

2)All of this really boils down to the fact that the Officer waited till 12:05 to give me the ticket. I'm outside a college library, you know what I'm doing. C'mon.

Is his ignorance of the library's hours an excuse?

Everybody's got their rule-book. If we every human was aware of everyone else's rules we wouldn't need to have language.

Perhaps creativity is just a crutch for ignorance.

-Cos

3D Adrenaline Makes It Hard To Remember.

From: Dr. Pepper
To: Dr. Cosmos
Subject: Avatar

Is awesome because that technology will make virtual experiences more visually and imaginatively pleasurable than real life and will keep getting better. And the movie could be all about affirming the imaginary or fictional world because the guy chooses pandora over humanity, and the pandoran world is depicted as being so much better. So, we should embrace upcoming virtual realities? But they can't last indefinitely because humans will come back?? So its better but not??? Cos??? What's it all mean??!? ahhhagdvbhd I've been $#@%%^$ all day. miss everyone, movie was good

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry



From: Dr. Cos
To: Dr. Pepper
Subject: Re: Avatar

I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner man; but you're dead on. There's quite a lot going on in Avatar. In the end the marine chooses to stay in his Pandora game-world and live a life of avatar-pleasure rather than remain faithful to his physical human past... So it seems like they're saying "HEY, VIDEO GAMES ARE BETTER THAN REALITY!, WORLD OF WARCRAFT FOREVER!"

But I think that Cameron was going for something different. In the last moment of the movie the hero opens his eyes in a new avatar body and the lights in the theater flash on. After hallucinating for 2.5 hours, anyone really watching that movie feels a shock, a jarring sensation of being thrown back into their human bodies. I personally believe that my reality is fictitious to a degree (I'm the author), and so any subjective perception of "reality" is by definition just as invented as Avatar 3D was.

Thing is, when you get thrown back into your physical body at the end of the movie, your world is a bit different because you've been subtly handed a new set of shiny goal structures within which to live (/play):



Hi, I'm James Cameron. Uhh, Spirituality, conservationism and harmony with nature, you know? Down with capitalism, $#@% Iraq and long live collectivism! Don't pirate movies.




No? There are some very seriously confusing messages about how we should return to earth following this movie. Sure every film/game/novel/dream has its messages. Problem here is: this pamphlet is making a billion dollars cash. It is itself the greatest mass-exodus of escapist citizens ever executed within our capitalist system, and they pull it off by deriding the very system that pays for it! The popcorn bags used to watch this thing worldwide probably leveled half the trees in New Guinea.

Our way of dealing with scarcity is very confused right now; it seems to be commenting on itself by selling a simulation of its opposite, ie, "Pandora." Avatar: 3D Technology allows a top media tycoon to show you a world where technology helps a public servant enter a media-free paradise and defeat technology-wielding mineral tycoons by blowing up their technology with technology.



We're confused. We can't decide whether or not to embrace virtual reality (technology-enhanced-existence) or live in a tree. I say: Embrace the alternate realities that are presented to you with every moment, sure, but there's an underlooked aspect of Avatars' hero: he was crippled. His avatar grants him the ability to move again and escape suffering.



By entering nature. Ready for some high theory? Deep breath.

Nature is change over time, dynamism. Self-aware (intelligent) systems that are forced to stagnate (not-change), experience suffering. Humanity, given the ability to remember, experiences suffering in the preservation of one personality throughout a lifetime of change. Because nature is in a constant state of change, and we are not, we revere it. It is everything our hard-drives are not. Computers and archives and facebook pages attempt to protect our fictions against the onslaughts of time and change. At the same time, we are afraid of getting stuck on a planet that has "killed its mother," forgotten all reverence to change and fully embraced mechanization as g_d.

An intelligence fully stuck is the saddest thing in the world. Don't leave your computer on.




Anyway.... those of us playing Halo, World of Warcraft and all the other immersive virtual realities we have today cripple ourselves in order to escape to our avatars. We can't move or walk or smell or make out with our fictional worlds, yet. We play because we're handed systems of challenges that we know we can accomplish and enjoy the visual and social rewards that have been meticulously created to seem more attractive than those we would receive with equal effort in the real world. Blizzard makes 80 million dollars a month through subscriptions to their desktop-pandora, and everyone plays it sitting down.

Games don't change unless you let them.

So Cameron is telling us to get out of the movie theater and rediscover mobility, nature, change, whatever(?) Whether we can get the same awesome visuals and subject-enhancing super-powers that you'd find in Pandora laid over our comparatively drab WalMart landscape is really... the question. The future is gonna be whacky.



Pepper, once we can step away from the desktop/Imax theater and get the same visual gusto in a fully mobile, 3D glasses-type mobile device, the question will indeed be : "should we embrace it?"

But by that point I think we already will have done so. We want to be entertained, and whatever makes people happy, in the end, is what they will/should(?) do.

I've seen avatar a few times. Half of the planet shares a secret existence with me in that world. We've all mind melded that Na'vii princess.

And we want to go back.



-Cos

The Librareome Project

The kindle store doesn't have any books. (100 years of solitude, house of leaves, midnight's children, anything by Borges, gravity's rainbow...)

just an empty skeleton. corporate b_ll$5*t.

We had better not forget the Library.

[Being able to pull up definitions of any word is cool. So is being able to download "previews" for free. Having 40 books in my backpack isn't bad. I'm just... worried about what won't get picked up because the publishers don't predict profitability.]

Borges? Really guys?!

-Cos

The Black Whole

[I'm sitting here reading my Major Advisor's most recent article and feeling two things.

1) An overwhelming sense of Attention Deficit. I want to be browsing my favorite sites instead (eating mental sugar), playing games, overstimulating myself.

2) The sites I visit are somehow less exciting than they used to be. I go to them because they're easy, because it takes virtually NO willpower to enjoy them.

I just wanna absorb.

So I'm struggling to read through [my advisor's] writing. It's detailed, methodical, logical. I feel like a 2nd grader trying to enjoy the dictionary. It's not his fault, it's my own. His essay is trying to describe the reasons for why I feel driven to browse the web as I do, but mental habits produced by years of browsing make it difficult for me to understand what he's getting at. At this rate it's pretty easy to imagine a time when I might be unable to understand a commentary on the deficiencies in modern cognition due to the deficiencies being described.

He writes:

"We visit the same sites each day, settle into familiar and comfortable habits of browsing. But it was not always so. Twelve years ago you did not browse but surfed the Web. Surfing is active, thrilling and risky. The waves carry you where they will, and the water may even overwhelm you. The experience of surfing the Web used to be an unpredictable and exciting one; the next link led who-knows-where. "

But it isn't like that anymore. Geocities was taken down last week, sites are becoming more standardized. There isn't as much risk, as much mystery as I experienced as a child hopping from keyword to keyword.

Right now I'm writing about an article I haven't finished reading. Where's that tab....? I have 34 open. What?

Whenever I spend the time to actually sit down and read something
great, I become overwhelmed by the number of remarkable ideas buried underneath the garble of dated prose I encounter. I want to take every little snippet of clairty and type it into twitter where my less patient peers might gobble-up and reproduce the abbreviated idea. Does this mean I'm simply underexposed to good ideas, or has my hop-skip-jumping from concept to concept given me a better ability to see the far reaching implications of the singular "good idea"?

Does the same thing happen to the physical world as we master and commercialize it?
Maybe, though I don't think my generation gets out enough to have reached that point.

"A dozen years on and the risky thrill of surfing has given way to the bourgeois fantasy of browsing. Idling one's way along the aisles, one peruses goods which for their part offer no resistance, no threat, and very little surprise."]

I stopped writing this post for some reason a month ago. I must have been distracted by something. 我要學中文可十想謝。Found an email I sent in response, where his ideas are discussed further. Please take the time to power through his essay, here.

[Dear Professor X,
I have finished reading your article and thought I would share some of my thoughts. My favorite bit is found in your abstract conclusion. You hammer on a very important chord. I quote so you don't have to go searching for what I'm talking about:

"When Eve eats the first apple, man discovers his humanity: alienation from nature and from God is the human condition, but the Fall is also the condition of freedom and responsibility. Wozniak dreams the undoing of the Fall; this time the first Apples, rather than leaving you to your own devices, let you know what you want, resubmit humans to a nature and thus to a (digital) God who rules that nature. After all, the computer that tells you what you want provides not only your desire but also its satisfaction: the black whole."

"The black whole." The thing we reach for, are drawn towards with every click. I think this is a very important idea and I wish only that you would flesh it out for me. The subjective levelling-out that you point to might be more dangerous than you reveal. You hint at it:

"Exciting and powerful, interactivity is thus also dangerous, for it threatens to dissolve actors and medium."

I wonder how you think such this system will or could perpetuate itself. I don't think it can! Wouldn't we reach a point at which... the division becomes indiscernible? What would such a scenario look and feel like? We are clearly heading towards this black whole, drawn there. But is every form of web 2.0 a symptom or can the destructive be parsed out from that which is not? What is the opposite of "the black whole?"

You hint at the existence of such an opposite when you say:

"Self-expression and thus also self-recognition become the defining experiences of Web 2.0, such that the Web is both mediate and immediate at the same time. How far does this paradox extend?"

Perhaps only technologies within which the user does not have a subjective representation are safe. Facebook, WoW, Email... technologies which alter/ abstract / amplify/ distort the subject... are worse than those that do not? Can anything we interact with on a computer avoid affecting our subjectivity?

So you ask how far the paradox extends; perhaps we can only guess: How far could it? How close are we to the limit if there is one? Which technologies bring us closest?

My guess: It goes to the brain stem, to the basic drives behind every human action (understanding of death, sexual drive, self-awareness). I see the black whole as a point where we no longer have individual will, where we can be swayed by outside media/inputs/forces into action without question. Where we prefer to be.

When? 100 years. Worst current symptom? MMORPG's.

Because MMO's take a human subject and reduce it to a series of menus. ("Each user gets to assent to those expressions that suit her, authorship having disappeared in favor of selection, a menu-driven collective creativity.") This feels good, allows us to feel secure in a way. With menus we know we cannot make a bad choice, but in reality we cannot make a choice at all. As the computer comes to "know what we want," we can no longer see the menus. They feel too good.

Which leads to my only disagreement. You say:
"Linking, which was only a marginally revolutionary possibility even in Rosenberg's account, has now become simply a normal experience and no longer destabilizes the reader."

Yet I think that hyperlinks still destabilize the reader's subjectivity, fracturing it. The difference is that this destabilization now pases unnoticed; users are no longer as shocked into a reflexive awareness of what they are doing. It's just the hum of "browsing." Menu selecting.

The Paradox of Choice.]

We don't like having to make decisions. Actively reading heavy text involves many. Did you make it this far?

-Cos

Skype Metaphysics in 30 seconds.

Raven: can i be in more than two places at once, and be relaying different messages to different people at the same time?
Dr. Cosmos: no
Dr. Cosmos: you can only jump quickly
Dr. Cosmos: or have simulations of your thoughts act for you
Dr. Cosmos: : D
Raven: what if the other groups asked me opposite questions
Raven: and i answered "yes"
Raven: the other people with whom i was communicating
Raven: obviously i could do that
Dr. Cosmos: in this example each of your messages would themselves be a simulation of your original intent
Dr. Cosmos: like words in a book.
Dr. Cosmos: and each of them would ony "be" with you in their understanding of what you had thought at the moment you thought it.
Dr. Comos: if they even did that
Dr. Comos: Im not sure that you're really "here"
Raven: i am there
Dr. Comos: you are imagining that you are
Dr. Comos: hallucinating
Dr. Comos: assisted in your effort by the images on your screen
Raven: that's what you learn in Perception though... seeing me on a screen and being able to talk to me in real time is the same thing as me being there.
Raven: just imagine that this screen has perfect image quality
Dr. Comos: right
Raven: and it's so big that it reaches beyond your field of vision
Raven: and the audio is perfect
Dr. Comos: a perfect simulation would become the thing it tried to represent
Dr. Comos: i feel you
Raven: ok
Dr. Cosmos: though I feel that your conscious mind can only truly apply itself to one question, one place at a time.
Dr. Comos: surely you can have thoughts under the surface, or echoes in other places
Dr. Comos: but to "be" somewhere
Dr. Comos: i dont know
Dr. Comos: maybe I'm romantic

Someone who knows more than we do about the nature of everything would probably have more than a few things to point out:

1) To think that our understanding of the words "space" and "time" allow us to come close to understanding what's up is laughable.
2) Everything is a hallucination. You're "seeing" what the graphics card in your brain tells you you're seeing. So every sensation is a simulation. Even the buddha experienced a simulation, albeit one of stunning clarity.

I still believe that is only possible to "Be" (as deeply or sincerely as any human being can really "be") in one place at any given instant. I think we jump around.

If you break it apart it's something else.