What is a blog? Is it the journal of our age? Where we put our thoughts – yet instead of it being a personal and private experience, it is instead very public and extrinsic. Although in this particular case – it is probably quite private, given the lack of publicity this website currently has. Which I am thankful for, for the time being. Less pressure to have a sufficient level of grammar to survive the online slander that may inherently occur in line with more views on the writing. Less exposure to the judgement of others, and therefore less of a requirement to adhere to my occasional perfectionist tendencies.
I suppose right now I am testing it out as a brain dump – trying to see where everything will be posted on my website and how I might need to clean everything up to have it more organised and easier to navigate. I sit here wondering – will this be the only post I do? Or, will I decide to write about my interests?
Perhaps an internal discussion about my thoughts on the brain and neurochemistry could be one topic. For example, one thought is – with sufficiently accurate brain scanning technology, could you effectively read someones mind? Could you use electrodes to stimulate someones mind? Such that they were experiencing what you wanted them to – which is an exciting and terrifying thought. Exciting in the sense that you could have new age movies that were instead experienced. Perhaps, empathy could be reached from a literal sense if you could actually experience walking in someone else shoes. Terrifying, by the same measures. Firstly, a malicious person could make you experience a torturous event (my mind goes to an Altered Carbon scene). Secondly, would we have a problem of not knowing what is real (here I think of inception)?
Now, I’ve already diverted my thoughts along this railway, and it begs the very philosophical questions. If that technology were possible, how do I know I’m not already experiencing it? If I was experiencing it, would it even really matter – it feels real to me? How could I test if it were real? What kind of laws would need to be put into place with this technology? Would it be something humanity achieves and then realises its not something to be used? Much like the atomic bomb. Or, would the subtle nature of its encroachment into society ensure we don’t realise what we’re doing, like the frog in boiling water fable (even if this fable isn’t inherently based on truth – the message itself might).
Okay, now I switched thought trains because of the frog fable and as to whether there are any stories that might replace this, and whether it is based on psychological reasons. Maybe I can check for papers on the topic. But does can it derive from over investment in a situation, shares or project because of not wanting to waste an initial investment, so a doubling down ensues.
Time to wrap this up. Despite my tendency to feel like I’ve always got to write at least X amount – perhaps I can practice holding back here, and only write (X-1) amounts. So, I’ll stop my procrastination now and write the little bit of python code that I need to in order to do a batch analysis of radial distribution functions. I’d prefer to automate the process than do over 1000 myself.
Good day, enjoy the multifarious thoughts, and keep anion the future.
