Post 37 of 92

Had a fleeting but profound sensation of the unreality of reality this week.  It's been a week, two weeks actually, of elderly cat dramas.  One having a hiccup after a routine dental and the other having profound and critical pancreatitis for which he was hospitalized for 4 days.  Matisse, the Siamese, has, I think and hope and pray, turned the corner.  Brought him home yesterday, profoundly depressed as he is not a cat who copes well with changes in routine. and being sick AND being hospitalized has taken its toll.  It's been a stressful and expensive two weeks ($2000+). 

Yet, despite or perhaps because of this, while feeling weepy and overly sensitive, worried to the point of feeling sick to my stomach, there was this other sensation, The Observer, which saw this for  what it was; ripples on the surface.  The depths are unaffected.  Save for taking note of the surface disturbances, nothing changes in the Is-ness of it all. 

Feeling that helped somewhat - even though I am caught up in the drama of apparent reality and am reluctant or unable to let it go. 

It's humbling to have your own advice dropped back on you.  At the gym one day recently one of the staff was crying in the ladies bathroom.  She was talking to the woman who oversees the creche and had obviously been crying for awhile as her face was very blotched and swollen.  As I walked past I said, whatever it is I'm sorry.  This woman, not hard and fit and smilingly conscious of her physique, on the contrary wears glasses, is slightly overweight and when she smiles her smile is genuine.  Have always liked her.  While the others seem decorative she exudes infrastructure.

I had my shower while listening to their murmured voices and the occasional hiccuping of a crying jag not yet finished.  Had no idea what was wrong.  It was none of my business but as I walked out I touched her shoulder and said, this too shall pass.

And so it does.  Joy, grief, excitement, ennui, love and loss.  All surface ripples over the serenity of the changeless depths.  Even sick cats.  They either get better or they pass away. 

But I'm glad he's on the mend. 

Read the most amazing piece.  The AI Revolution:  The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban
( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/the-ai-revolution-the-road-to-superintelligence_b_6648480.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science ) .  It is quite an essay which I won't go into here but basically the scary bit can be summed up here:  "An AI system at a certain level -- say, village idiot -- is programmed with the goal of improving its own intelligence. Once it does, it's smarter -- maybe at this point it's at Einstein's level -- so now, with an Einstein-level intellect, when it works to improve its intelligence, it has an easier time and it can make bigger leaps. These leaps make it much smarter than any human, allowing it to make even bigger leaps. As the leaps grow larger and happen more rapidly, the AGI soars upwards in intelligence and soon reaches the superintelligent level of an ASI system. This is called an intelligence explosion, and it's the ultimate example of the law of accelerating returns."  and  "If our meager brains were able to invent wi-fi, then something 100 or 1,000 or 1 billion times smarter than we are should have no problem controlling the positioning of each and every atom in the world in any way it likes, at any time. Everything we consider magic, every power we imagine a supreme God to have, will be as mundane an activity for the ASI as flipping on a light switch is for us. Creating the technology to reverse human aging, curing disease and hunger and even mortality, reprogramming the weather to protect the future of life on Earth -- all suddenly possible. Also possible is the immediate end of all life on Earth. As far as we're concerned, if an ASI comes into being, there is now an omnipotent god on Earth -- and the all-important question for us is:

Will it be a nice god?"

If this is true, and his timing is accurate I could still be alive if and when it happens.  Rather than being disturbed by this, I am exhilarated.  Not that I have a death wish, for if it comes to pass, human life will be to ASI as ant life is to us now, nevertheless to be a witness to the final act of humankind is a gift I will be happy to receive.

For we might be an experiment.  We seem to be hard-wired to create, to invent, to indulge our curiosity.  Can we do this?  Let's find out!  And so we invent the wheel, embark on agrarian life, develop the printing press, gunpowder, trips to the moon and wi-fi.   We can no more close the door on the quest to create ASI as we could any other concept we could conceive.  If we can think it, why can't we make it? 

And so, if the Singularity and all that follows is ordained, as a species we succeeded even as we became extinct. 

As to creating a god?  Whose to say this reality isn't the result of the god created from a former experiment?  God continually recreating himself.  From scratch.  A Mobius strip of potentialities.

Feather Plucking and a dose of reality

Didn't have an epiphany the other day.  How unusual.  Days, weeks, months go by without an epiphany so this isn't 'news just in'.  However, I did have an idea.   No, more of an understanding.  The idea has been around for centuries.  Like most things I can understand it logically but *knowing* is another matter entirely.  So, the understanding was just this - that life is a distraction from reality.  While living is an adventure, a wonder, an enchantment, an education and a damned hard one sometimes, it isn't real.  Or the living of it distracts us from what is real and the realness is to be divined not through living or thinking, planning or remembering but by BEING HERE NOW. 

Realized I spend most of my time in distractions whether it's here on the computer, reading a book, watching tv, even listening to music.  What is so hard about being here now?  Why do I find it so difficult?  It's as though I must continually tempt my mind away from its own reality.  Even while meditating (and I use the term in an offhand manner as my meditations are studies in trying not to try not to think), when I do touch upon that other reality (and I only say other because it's so foreign as to qualify for another dimension), I retract from it like a hand from a hot stovetop.  It's almost as though there's a vortex yawning before me, willing to suck me away if I will only yield and the desire to yield is why I meditate and my ego the gate of fear which keeps me stranded. 

Some housekeeping:  Richard is in the States. I suspect he's homesick but that's just a feeling I had while lying in bed listening to the morning melodies.   Mallory has a little green friend.  It's spring and I hear baby birds everywhere; some mickey birds in the big gums to the east of the horse yards, some lorikeets in the blooming silky oaks.  Bittersweet to see him being courted by a bird when there is no possibility of their being mates.  She even followed him to the deck late yesterday afternoon.  Have to put him into a cage and bring him in every night as his aviary isn't snakeproof.  She perched on the top and sang sweet songs while he made goo goo eyes at her - and peered around the edge of the drape to plead with me.  Wish I could be a buddy and help him out.

The biggest bird news is the sudden decision to feather pluck by Obama.  He's always been a very nervous bird.  He's the one that screams the most, that exhibits neurotic cage behaviours like weaving, that is the most frightened of me and the one that panics first when anything unusual happens.  Had noticed a few pink feathers on the bottom of the aviary but didn't think anything of it except that the birds were starting to moult.  Then went out on Tuesday afternoon and there were drifts of pink feathers everywhere and a poor denuded Obama.  He's plucked all the outer pink feathers from his breast including his legs, his shoulders and the grey scapular and median covert feathers.  Why after 5 years he's decided to pluck now is a mystery.  I've separated him and his mate Fern into the other half of the aviary.  Every other day I'm putting in fresh branches to chew and every other day they are allowed out for morning pick.  Can't have all of them out at the same time as it would be too difficult (read stressful) to try and return them to their correct aviary.

Don't think he's picked much since the changes so I am hopeful.  He really had only 2 days of determined picking so am trying to discourage the behaviour  before it becomes a habit.