Philip K. Dick On Predicting Selective Emotion and a Cautionary Warning of Ignoring Negativity

 In one of Philip K. Dick's most popular novellas, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", people dialled a number on an electronic device, a "mood organ", and would feel whatever they wanted: Erotic love, crippling depression, contentment, severe argument with spouse for two hours, any emotional state was immediately granted them once the correct code was entered.

Whether it was good for the person who was with the dialler was a different thing.

'So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair… So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything...' How much time do you set aside each month for specific moods?" - Philip K. Dick

It isn't a huge leap of the imagination to see how by selecting a social media group(s) on Facebook, reddit et al. that people are immediately directed to a screen showing a Web page where people have posted content full of whatever anyone could choose, sorted by an AI algorithm  according to their likes and dislikes, judged by time spent viewing and no doubt other factors, shaped by society yet some content is more beneficial to some than others.

From cute animals, to footage of executions, with in-betweens such as road rage videos, pranks, cosplays of anyone and/or anything and so on, the explosion of memes and memetics is shaping society faster than ever before, thanks to the volume of data transferred worldwide on a daily basis.

As PKD noted, people would choose both positivity and negativity for themselves. After an hour of anime, someone may want to watch a documentary, then watch insects feasting upon a corpse, then cars crashing while people bungee jump between them.

The point is, that people choose what they want and the chemical response in the body and brain, combined with the emotional and informational stimuli received to mind and body is fed at a faster and faster pace on a newsfeed or equivalent. A social media user finding themselves with some free time, if they aren't careful (as I haven't been), scrolling through post after post, thoughts and stimuli become short-circuited by contrasting and conflicting inputs to the senses.

The number of times I've been reading a post and feeling empathic with the content of someone's eulogy, or the sweet nostalgia from a childhood item, only to be disrupted by a video of an obnoxious influencer selling stock market information with loud attention-grabbing music and my thoughts and feelings are disturbed. To watch a video of a kitten playing with a puppy, then switching to the latest Redband video trailer can cause unexpected results upon a person.

Worse yet, there is only the option to hide content, which would mean missing out on the topic altogether. Yes, I can keep scrolling or turn my phone off and contemplate what I have just received.

If not deliberately thought to do so, the mind would start to become conditioned to expect disturbance from another video or post, and in a dystopian Pavolovian response, cease to respond for more than a few seconds after receiving compatible appropriate responses to positive or negative information, both online and IRL.

People require an amount of time to fulfill their desires of various types and contrary to the above, if someone receives too much of a repeated  stimuli (Desire-response? Thoughtform? Answers on a postcard) the sense become bloated and deafened, or an addiction is formed via repeated feeling and chemical reaction. 

This could be ingrained into software the same as gambling software does: "You've watched this cat paw it's owner for five hours now, are you sure you don't want to watch/do something else?"

Facebook is worse than several other sites as it tries to remove negativity as a legitimate response.

When it was first released to the public after a brief stint in University, the only available reaction was a "like". A symbolic thumbs up. People posting their family had been murdered by rabid mongoose would receive 800+ thumbs-up 👍 responses from everyone else they knew. The effect on those in mourning was unprecedented. "My best friend said to me it's good and positive that happened! So did 799 other people! I can't be right for feeling 'like' this, I'm subconsciously changing....waaagĝhhh...." could be a viable thought process in the past, to varying degrees, despite the adaption of ironic likes that perpetuate still I.T.Y.O.O.Like. 2023.

After large public rebuttal, Facebook added love ❤️,  care, sad 😔, haha 😄 and angry 😡 to their list of acceptable reactions - hardly the gamut of human emotion and years behind the likes of WhatsApp, despite being owned by the same company and yet used by many millions (including me at the moment).

Still, it remains unacceptable to give a thumbs down to your mate who was mugged for a choc ice to feed a crack-addicted toddler.

In writing this, I hope we are soon at the time once more before corporate censorship, or government firewalls (as is in place in India, to a business extent the U.K., Morocco, and many other countries as reported by other users) where every type of conceivable data is accessible and integrated, rather than the failed approach of banning, country or Internet wide, data deemed unhealthy or in breach of ideals, leading to an underground of gore and rape fantasies for curious adolescents. 

Not that any of that damaged the 90's kids I write, pocketing the bloodstained lock of her hair, the only thing that still gives feeling to the blackened husk that is my soul as I prepare the next runaway child to be sacrificed to Moloch.

I mean, wasn't the free Internet of the 90's cooler, jaded and scarred as we may be now?

Immanentise the eschaton! Release full reality VR full haptic body sensors to respond authentically to every perceivable situation!

 Let the death waivers be signed and may the next Aeon be more glorious and terrible as is desired by the All!

Mashed in Mumbai

Just spent the last hour writing this journal entry into my phone at a train station, only to be moved on by the police for smoking in a stairwell, and while walking my writing was deleted. 2nd attempt …

I write this after arriving in Mumbai a little over a week ago, I arrived  at 2am in a semi-fugue state after two days travelling through train stations and airports stopping at three countries on the way to Mumbai. I walked out of the airport and was quickly reminded how different some countries are in their offers of assistance regarding getting a tuk tuk, taxi, cup of chai etc. One guy walked at least a couple of kilometres with me while I tried to find an atm that took my card, not one did for several hours.

By 4am and in some more inhabited part of Mumbai the skies were cloudless and blue, the streets as busy as a European town centre in midday. Literally couldn't wrap my head around how it was 4am Indian time and bright blue skies.

I spent a couple of days walking around different parts of Mumbai, looking at the thousands upon thousands of street stalls, selling snack food, chai stands, tarpaulins with many clothes splayed upon them, people searching for an item they want to buy, reminded me of several markets I had visited in various countries.

Walking through different areas I saw some narrow entrances to different streets, and walked into several corridors, residential areas with left and right junctions that would make Ariadne proud of a more difficult labyrinth compared to the one she created to hold the minotaur.

It holds tied to first place with the back alleys of Marrakesh, and if it wasn't for my experience spending hours upon hours lost in their winding passages I would have no doubt after hours of walking through Mumbai's equivalent walked back into the street I had entered, falling to the floor, babbling and cursing and blessing at the same time the God of architecture for the gift of hubris.

Some nights I managed to sleep in a hostel that after booking existed and wasn't full, other nights after walking for hours I laid my head on my backpack and slept on the concrete for a few hours before picking it back up and walking for hours again.

A few days ago, I met up with a few guys on the streets and we got talking, went to a shop that sold cheap spirits, I bought a few bottles of Indian Reserve whiskey (not sure I had a reason beyond the suggestion, don't normally drink whiskey, maybe because I've never drank it before MJ the voice of temptations suggested it, sort of associated with electrochemistry in a contemporary art video game, that should be recognisable to some people). 

We sat in front of a shuttered shop front and drank whiskey, while I listened to their current positions in life after telling mine. One guy was a tour guide, he showed me many of his clients, his children, and how he had moved to Mumbai several years ago and shown people from all over the world the sights to see in Mumbai and how happy they were with his service. 

Another guy was married from Jaipur and looking to earn money to support his family, out of work, hooked me up with some decent greenery, and then a young lad who was introduced as Shiva told me how he could only find work at a vegetable stand for four hours a day, couldn't find a way to earn more and was looking for better work, I told him of how much he could get paid in Europe for picking vegetables, though we all knew how difficult it could be to get to Europe for a lad without a passport, let alone the money for visas.

Eventually we got seperated and I walked around several streets, into a different area of the city. 

I smoked a couple of joints of cheap seeds, sticks, stalks and strands of leafybuds that were known as Thai quality in Amsterdam, and a joint of "Mumbai's best, sticky buds that were coated in something to make them that sticky to the touch.

Barricades had been set up blocking some streets showing as accessible on Google maps, other streets involved walking through tunnels, tip-toeing through people sleeping on a flip flop on the ground, after a while walking to a quiet area in the middle of the night.

I walked along these streets for hours, listening to the voice of society, of the street, part of the mindscape that makes up the collective hive mind of living things. I looked at a dog and seemed I could pick up it's thoughts, and observed how it reacted to the other thoughts that were also part of the city.

For example, I was walking along behind a dog, it's tail wagging happily from side to side and it had it's nose in the air, when an invisible clown from out of sight said, or thought "CATCH THE *APIST!" and the dog said/thought "CATCH IT! WHERE IS IT!" while barking and then other dogs joined in with their barks. For anyone who thinks it's only the plant that causes paranoia, being started at suspiciously from a number of people say outside converted storage containers while you, the only white person for miles around is walking next to barking dogs can certainly make a difference to one's mind.

Eventually I entered a different part of the city, unmolested save a nerve near my brain inside my skull throbbing from high stresses, maybe that can be an example of howolcommon such experiences can be - imagine walking into a saloon in the Old West with a sign around your neck saying "Down with the U.S.A." and you can get a fraction of the…paranoia that other experiences contain.

I am writing outside the train station, reminded of the consequences of hatred from an impersonal super A.I., and think of that is my fate, a immobile jelly unable to express it's torments, I may as well make the most of things before that "end". One would much prefer to relax in a hammock in a state of harmony and contentment, but the future seems mutable, how dull and boring it would be if not.

Decided to go the long way to Goa, see a nature reserve as I visit several small towns, and see more of the beauty of India. Namaste, as they say in Hindi, and may your divinity and infernality be balanced healthily.

.

Ad Futura Excelsior

 Delving deep through the abyss,

Scattered words attract and repel.

Realising to step into a trap would be amiss,

Gather the energy, make the spell.

Let desire be oft not sated,

Let bridges of health reach body and mind,

Let enemies' schemes be frustrated,

Let person be to person kind.

Fortune's gain, and fortune's ail,

Be the wind that guides my sail.

Ride the rapids, nudge the stones,

Worse a broken heart than bones.

-Written somewhere in Georgia

The Crossroads of Life's Goal

The heart is as the Sun,

It moves to an ebb and flow,

The rhythm of One.

With each moment of time,

From the white, vast, life-giving heat,

That encircles life, to a state sublime.

The heart cries out with the Law of Attraction,

Calling for another to rend it true,

Recreation of the Divine Reaction.

As each reaction aeffects the reagents of heart,

Heat is expelled, entropy proceeds,

Mortality looms, knowledge from death impart.

With lack of binding,

Of one soul with another,

It cries, a distress song of finding.

All who fail in achieving their life's meaning,

Find their heart burn inward,

To the eye of mind, frozen from receiving.

Yet if Sun doth find love,

If hearts be twinned,

Tempreature increased, fulfilled to the above.

All light must flow,

All bodies be emptied,

Myahp the only choice, to soar high or plummet low.

-30/10/2020

-Rijeka, Croatia

Croatia

 Arived in Riskje last night, got off the bus to a warm yet downpouring city. Spent a few moments astonished at how expensive everything is before remembering Croatia hasn't adopted the Euro, and exchanged at a rate of 7.5 kronen to the euro. 17 kronen for a local draught beer (0.5l), 12 for a coffee in the city centre, half that outside it.

Walked around the centre, getting gradually more lonesome, in part due to the language barrier, people who didn't want to talk, people pretending not to understand pan-european words such as autobus and train station, in Italy as well as other countries.

With no concious aim, I let my feet be guided according to my sub-conscience, and upon hearing nightclub music, entered a place called The Tunnel Club.

Relieved by the intelligence of the people there, who collectively turned their noses up at the Covid "pandemic", I dropped my backpack in a corner, and ordered a beer and stood at the bar.

My despair heightened and the depths of depression tightened my mind as I surveyed the scene - everyone was with someone, or many people. All seemingly happy, and as my envy grew, so did my selfish resentment.

After a few beers, a woman who I had noticed with the D.J. was stood at the bar next to me. When she heard me ordering a beer in English (to my shame I don't know but a few words of Croatian), she asked me where I was from. When I replied England, she excitedly told me how well she spoke English, the English music she loved, and we started to converse.

Being able to speak naturally while travelling is a welcome relief. She was what could be called crazy by many people. Hyper-expressionate, enthusiastically moving her arms and facial expressions to accentuate her words, she moved from trying to guess my star sign (she didn't) to Jim Morrison, to how David Icke was, in her words, the first. As she had picked up on my interest in spirituality, I noticed she was placing David Icke on the same level as Jesus Christ and the Buddha.

I told her that many people had similar beliefs to Icke's before him, yet in retrospect perhaps I spoke hastily, an d perhaps he is the pioneer she claimed him to be. I'll have to check how accurate she is.

When the Sisters of Mercy started to play, I had enough Dutch courage to start to dance with her. Soon, another couple joined us. Song after song of English language music played, from Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains to Queens of the Stone Age.

Eventually, I can't remember saying goodbye to anyone but I staggered to a shop doorway and got into my sleeping bag. I was woken up by someone throwing something to the floor beside me. Eyes blurry, I eventually focussed on a bar of chocolate and some peanut pretzels. A young barely identifiable woman, disguised by shadow, kissed me on the forehead and (maybe) danced away before I could even stammer a surprised "Thank you!" Unusually, when I awoke this morning the shopkeeper was preparing to open yet didn't shoo me away from cluttering his doorstep.

This afternoon I walked to a town called Pescine, and after a phonecall with my father, who kindly reminded me how nights sleeping rough without showeing creates a stink, I stripped to my boxers and swam in the Adriatic.

Cold and refreshing, it contrasted well to the scorching heat of an October in Croatia. Doubting the normalcy of the weather, I chalked it up to climate change. I walked back to Riskje, fed some fish, saw some two and a half foot starfish, and sat in a bar by the sea, where I write this.

I continue to search for a hostel, where my parents can send me a replacement bank card and SIM card, after my phone and wallet were pickpocketed in Rome. One hostel was full, the other, Dharma Hostel, told me that they had a group in last night, so they were closed while cleaning today. I asked about tomorrow and she said that the Ministry has said they cannot take individual guests due to Covid. 

Highly doubtful, she then told me it is not profitable for them to heat the room for an individual guest. Taking the hint, I walked away from a aseemingly paradisiacal location feeling unworthy.

Maybe things will improve tomorrow.

Unpublished Warning to Myself and Others From 2020

From the purifying flames all matter passes through
To the silent contemplation of a cold, remote and contemplative city of an ordered plane.

When one chooses to think, the thought must travel from where and whence could only be assumed by the attractor of a certain type, to type.

 The gradients available in the outer reaches of suffering could be called, ready to carry out any command programmed into them.

What hell can be described by people to create such feelings and capabilties, limited only by their thought, picked up by others and oft misinterpreted - once again it seems the road is lined with good intent.

Lament O Man, for thou art been led by your downfall to the appointed place at the appointed time. Your outgoing shall reverberate around the universe in ways that you cannot possibly foresee.

+ 

Vexed in Venice

 In the Age of the Internet, information is free. The universities, galleries and museums display their information, relics and art to the public, online, for free.

People are learning, yet these institutions, as far as their physical locations go, restrict access to all but the privileged few who take out loans to the tune of tens of thousands.

Adaption should occur, lest they are left behind by the ages that progress with the passage of time. Why would an eager young student pay such vast sums when lectures, hyper-realistic digital photgraphs of artwork, and textbooks are available, gratis?

Perhaps, finally, the death knolls of Capitalism that have been prophesized since the era of Marx et al. is finally upon us. The mythical Age of Aquarius where humans are not valued according to their toil, but by the fruits of their creative selves.

Where personas are free to indulge in their hobbies, their passions, without having to slave at mundane tasks that could have been automated years ago.

The generations of counter staff, customer service assistants, till operators, factory workers and many more can finally be ended, provided the people realise that their exploitation at the hands of a tiny minority of elites can be forcibly stopped when the people show their 'superiors' that their wealth, status and power are dependent on the many.

A reckoning of equalisation is being called for, by many thousands of people, who are sharing information, philosophies, and political opinions with others around the globe.

The mainstream media, who propgandises on behalf of the few who would keep us divided, for the sake of keeping us from questioning the status quo that has been in place for hundreds and hundreds of years, are dying. More and more people get their world news and cutting-edge data from more smaller scale, independent online sources.

The world stands at the brink of a precipice - it can either fly higher and further than ever before on the wings of more and more technological advances, or it can plummet, to the ancient depths of slavery and opression.

Time, as they say, will tell.