Thanks, Sir Philip Sidney.

How geeky is this : I know that line because the superhero The Vision said it when establishing a rapport with Hank Pym.

Basically, they were nerding out together. Gotta love it.

Tonight’s blogging will be an uphill struggle because I have been havinjg troiuble sleeping lately and it’s definitely taking its toll. I can feel my medium term memory filling up and displacing my working memory, which in turn makes it hard to stay focused and hard to stya in the here and now and hard, sometimes. to remember who I am and what the fuck it is that I am doing.

But only for a few seconds. So far.

Oddly enough, this does not impact my video game performance as much as you would think. I think that’s because video games offer such a rich and reliable stream of stimulation that it can compensate for my lack of working memory by keeping what brain space I have left in a hyper excited,. high performence state.

The reason I am overdrawn at the sleep bank is that I had such a hard time getting to sleep last night. I don’t know why. But my mind just would not slow down so I could rest. It just kept whirling around like an out of control merry go round.

It took hours of laying very still and letting the windmills of my mind wear themselves down before I got to the point where I could drop off.

And then I woke up less than two hours later. and couldn’t get back to sleep again. So I had to get up and do stuff.

Since then,  I managed to get an hour and a half of near-sleep and that is it. Right now, all I really want to do is take a nap.

And that’s a good sign in that I am at least getting sleepy instead of feeling like my eyes are being held open like in A Clockwork Orange. And a voice in my head says, through a bullhorn : I hope you’re enjoyiung the ride, because you CAN’T GET OFF!”

My mind is kind of haunted.

But I have pizza on the way and blogging to do, and so I cannot just curl up in bed and catch up on my sleeptime.

There are thing that need to be done. And eaten. Things that need to be done and/or eaten, whichever is appropriate.

I am struggling with my meaningless existance lately. And I don’t mean that in some throwaway, hyper dramatic emo way, either.

I mean it literally. My life is devoid of meaning because it lacks the most critical form of meaning : meaningful effort.

A lot of the time. I feel like I am just biding my time and waiting to die. What else do I have to show for my time? It has been a long time since I did anything that really meant something, as judged by the only judge that matters…

Wapner. Just kidding. It’s me!

And maybe that’s part of the problem. I am mentally ill, as you all know, so my judgment as to what is meaningful effort is, at best. somewhat suspect. It could be that part of the problem is that no matter what I do, if it conflict with my self-loathing and therefore would require a massive restructuring of my mind, I will reject it.

That’s how a lot of badness persists in the human mind. Our brains automatically rejects things which would require too big a change or that are inconsistent with what is already known and taken as true.

It’s a necessary function that protects mental integrity, but it operates just as efficiently and effectively whether what is known is rock solid truth or felonious bullshit.

That’s why people are so adept at rejecting evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs. It might be the most credible and verifiable evidence possible, but if it conflicts with what is already there, the mind just says “Nope!” and rejects the information before it can destabilize the psyche.

It is a rare person indeed that can truly be naked before the truth.  It requires extraordinary mental discipline (and maybe being somewhat mentally fucked up) in order to really commit to the spirit of the scientific method, which I formulate thusly :

I will believe nothing that that the evidence does not support, and everything that it does support, no matter what.

Italics on that second part, because it’s the part most people have the hardest time with. It’s relatively easy to reject things for which there is no evidence.

I’m not saying most people do it, I am just saying it’s easier.

But accepting the truth of that which conflicts with a great deal of what the person already knows is extremely difficult and not for amateurs.

Hence “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. In fine detail, that is not logically justifiable. The nature of the claim has no logical connection to its burden of proof. There is either sufficient evidence to support the claim or there isn’t.

Calling a claim “extraordinary” is, strictly speaking, an emotional valuation. not a logical one. It just means that the claiim feels implausible.

But plausibility is also an emotional valuation. not a logical one. The truth is the truth no matter how we feel about it.

But that’s nitpicking. For the most part, this maintaining of integrity in the human mind correponds sufficiently to reality for it to be useful.

And honestly. I am not sure we have a choice. I mean, I’m a mental mutant from the shadowy fringes of society and I doubt I could accept strongly conflicting evidence more than twenty percent of the time.

Because the truth is that, under all the mental machinery of the logical mind, there are still things we simply do not want to be true. And we willl avoid believing those things for as long as we can because we don’t want to be upset.

It’s a very human weakness.

And as such. I treasure and value it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.