Great Expectations

I asked this question in the very first blogpost. At that time I said it was mostly for personal reasons. And that's still true. However, at the beginning it was meant more to try to externalize my thought process while I felt the noose of self-elimination tightening around my neck (long story).

Now, with Anomie completed and shopped around to a few publishers for some feeler feedback, like my South Africa blog I hope that it will be something that I can refer to ten years down the line to remind myself of my thought process at this time. Specifically, I would like it to be an externalized internal dialogue about just how I develop the ideas that go into The Ascent of Icarus. In addition, I hope that anyone who is interested in where this project could go will note the updates that I make to it. An attempt to fight my own mind to bring me clarity for the trip ahead.

On a side note, from a suggestion of a friend, I have downloaded the Waking Up app from Sam Harris. As much as I am not particularly into the New Atheists and their dogged Islamophobia for a variety of reasons, I tried it and immediately paid the $120 annual fee for unlimited access. I hope it will allow me to train my mind to order my ideas better so that progress can be made more easily on its externalizations (like this book).

There is a book called Into the Gray Zone, where he showed that mental images of "walking around your house" versus "playing tennis" lit up different parts of the brain. So a "yes" was encoded as "playing tennis" and a no by "walking around your house". It meant that even if a patient could not externally communicate, the ability to follow that encoding and answer questions internally meant that an individual was still far more alive than an external vegetative state might look.

Interesting, I had an idea today about how much "cleaning up my room" is a recurring theme in my euphoric seizures. It is as if my mind is trying to emulate the philosopher that builds a fence around himself and declares his space to be "outside" as the punchline for a joke about fencing in cattle. Perhaps more interestingly, based on the excellent YouTube videos by Artem Kirsanov, it is possible that this reflects an internal attempt to project my toroidal thought domain into a lower-dimensional space without losing information. A new idea about what's going on during an epileptic seizure? I may include something about it in Chapter 2 (Brains in a Vat)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01xyrHCfGhI