Who is the Man with the Name that Rhymes?If the name don't rhyme it ain't mine.

 I haven't written about free will before so lets make that the topic of the hour. Free will is one of those things that people will never understand. Are we in control of our actions, thoughts, and feelings? In some ways we are. I can be made aware of a situation in my life and with the knowledge I have the world I can act upon the situation to change it. In others ways we aren't. There are certain laws of nature that I am a part of and I can't control even if I wanted to. I will never run faster than the speed of light, no matter how much I want to.

I think part of the problem has to do with perspective. From the perspective of my life, I am in control. My consciousness, thoughts, and feelings control where I go and what I do. I can have hope, dreams, and desires, and act upon those to achieve some sort of goal. However, I'm only in control of my actions, I'm not in control of those forces that impede my goals. I can learn and understand about such forces and act upon them, but I can't control them. From an omnisciencent perspective (call it perhaps a godly perspective), if it was possible to obtain such a perspective, I would be aware of all avenues of possiblity at once. I would be aware of all the forces of nature and which of them controls my thoughts, feelings, and actions. Indeed, I would have the very answer to the question about free will. If such a perspective was possible, I think it would most certainly tell us there is no free will.

I think about this in terms of a game I used to play when I was a kid. It would involve me and my mom or dad. I would ask a question or they would make a statement and I would reply with "Why?" Not only it did it answer my curious mind, but it was highly entertaining to test the limits of my parents' patience.  Inevitably, the line of questioning would turn inane and the game would end with my parents' reply of "because I said so" or "it just is". 

In a way I think this game resembles humanity's quest for knowledge. We find ourselves asking "why" questions about nature only to find that the answers lead us to asking more questions "why?" This recursive questioning of "why?" eventually lead us to some atomic laws of nature that we can't further probe like planck length. They are just a given to us as fact by the universe. Attempting to further break down this atomic law leads you to the boundary between the physical and metaphysical world. 

It is at this level that you can begin to understand the illusion that is free will. At the perspective of our life we feel that we are in control. Because it is reality to us told from our senses. We see it, feel it, and control it first hand. However, we aren't in control of the fundamental forces of natures that move our thoughts, feelings, and actions in life. We can control our rate of breathing, but we can't control it to the point where we stop breathing completely, at least not in a way that doesn't involve hurting yourself. 

Think of it this way. Are you in control everything that you're doing at one moment? You are? I offer you a choice, red or blue? Have you decided? Good. 

Whatever you chose you felt in control of that situation. You chose red, blue, perhaps purple, perhaps you said "this blog entry is stupid" and stopped reading, or some other choice I didn't imagine. Whatever the choice, were you in control of imagining the color red or blue when you read it? What about the the choice you made? Do you know why you chose it? Say your answer was "because I like red." Ask yourself, "Am I in control of liking the color red?" If I start asking all these recursive questions, my brain starts to hurt. If I keep it up I will get to the point where I don't want to think about it anymore because its painful. 

I think this leads to the answer why illusion of free will exists. The human brain, for all the advantages it gives us over the animal kingdom, doesn't have the capacity to understand everything. Or to put it succinctly, to become omniscient. Even if we've recorded all the pieces that make up the universe and the forces that control it, we can't put all the pieces together in our mind at once to understand it. Even trying to conceptualize (without knowing all the details) it pushes the limits of the human mind. Further pressing your mind for answers eventually wears out the mind and consequently the body. At some point, it will give up and tell your body as such.

Speaking of which, I'm spent. I'll leave it to the reader to point out logical fallacies, philosophical consequences, or whatever else the forces of the universe has told you to think.

 It's been a long time since I've written here. Apologies to anyone (if you're still around) who enjoys reading these posts. It's not a matter of not having much to say, rather than just being distracted by other things. 

Being a home owner has been fun, but the novelty of it has worn off; I love living there but I don't feel I have anything new do around it. That will probably change during the spring when I'll have a couple of things to do with the backyard. Generally, I don't think I'm the type to be a home owner: I live as minimally as possible, I move around a lot, I don't have a family to raise. While my primary motivation was getting $8K for a great place to live with a mortgage lower than renting, that was just some economic calculation; every thing else said my lifestyle doesn't fit. Regardless though, I've enjoyed fixing small things around the place and haven't felt weighted down by the burdens. Hopefully it will stay that way.

Work has been equally novelty-lacking lately. I've been accomplishing a few things but most of my workload has stalled. Since working for a larger operation, my work doesn't depend on just myself, I have to rely on many more people to get the job done. While this is process works on its own merits, I'm the type who rather do everything myself; I understand things better that way and I don't think things are slowing down. Not to say co-workers are slowing things down, it's just my perception; when I'm not thinking about a particular problem I feel that the solution is going nowhere. While specialization of labor is probably good thing to do, there's a benefit from being able to see the bigger picture at different angles. 

What has been left for free time has been filled with enough friends, events, projects, and other distractions that I rarely feel the complusion to blog anymore. Besides, blogging is old hat these days. It's all about social media, micro-blogging, and other latest buzzwords these days. All this stuff makes me think people's attention spans are getting shorter. The skeptic in me wants to say this is bullshit. This might be me playing around with semantics, but I think it's more that people are distracted by a lot more information than it being a case of shortened attention spans.

I think its a sign of the information age we live in. We have all kinds of different media to consume now, books, newspapers, images, text, tv, movies, video clips, videogames, etc. Not only that, we have a huge, ever-growing, volume of information to consume from. Because of this, our knowledge has grown not only in depth (how much we can know about a particular topic) but in width too (how many different topics we're aware of). This means while people can have their attention spans shortened by the distraction of thousands of perspectives/topics/media/etc, they can also have their attention lengthened such that the focus is on one-and-only-one subject and all the events relevant to it. 

I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing; its just different from the past. I do think that the information age we live in does a lot to prevent a pervasiveness monoculture from happening. It's kind of ironic when I think about it. We have such a ubiquity of devices that can rapidly and  unambigiously convey information to almost every person on planet in the amount of time never know before. However that same technology hasn't created such some sort of collective understanding, rather it helps create dissent as it enables people to pick and choose what they will see, hear, read, and understand (I'm looking at you 9/11 truthers). Again, I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing (that will probably determined in the future), it's just different. 

If anything else, I think it just shows people are people and human nature isn't as changeable as the technology we use. Morality put aside, I do think the information age does provides us with a illuminating perspective we've never seen before. It shows a macroscopic view of humanity as some sort of collective organism. This is what I think of when I see the growth of cities on satellite maps that looks rather like mold growing on some surface. I see different social groups (united by whatever interests/perspectives) of varying sizes (from small group to a whole nation) as different parts of a collective brain for this organism. Illuminating in someways, scary in others, these are the times we live in. I love it and can't get enough.

It seems like all I ever blog about these days is odd-ball metaphysical, meta-cognition, arm chair philosphy stuff. As much as I love talking and writing about that, I'll change it up...This time, I'll start off with some candor about my life, ramble on about some other subject, then I'll blog about some odd-ball metaphysical stuff. Sounds good? Let's beginning.

This week was pretty good for the man with the name that rhymes. I finished a long standing project at the job. I'll spare people boring techno-babble, and just say it was a momentous effort that made various things easier (from a maintenance perspective), more secure, and, if I say so myself, a damn good professional job given the time crunch and a huge mix of various complex details of hardware and software. That might be over-simplifying but I'll leave it at that. So anyway, that means a lot of props for me at work, starting from my peers and all the way up the chain of command save for the C.E.O. So that's an ego booster.

I usually just nonchalantly ignore stuff like that at work; I'm always thinking about the next big thing, a project that will essentially be all the complex parts mentioned above but also something that will entail changing the work-flow of our software development. If I had to compare it to something tangible for my non-tech savvy readers, think about it as if I was designing an assembly line process. The only difference is the process isn't for manufacturing, it's for creating, testing, and deploying code or, in our case, web site/programs. It will employ not only a lot detailed, technical solutions, but also have to fit a natural work-flow for all the members of our team. It should be a fun challenge, and I look forward to starting it soon.

Amidst the props was a comment I found rather funny, someone called me a sarcastic beer-hunter. I think that was the term, I might be one word off...I imagine people take my sarcastic, sometimes irrated, sometimes nonchalant attitude offensively. It might be bordering on the anti-social if I said half the time I don't pay attention to my coworker's attitudes/feelings and that I don't care. That isn't true, of course, but that's sometime how I feel; it's the nature of how I work and how my brain works. When I'm thinking high level like that, I'm focusing completely on all the details and that's it. Therein lies my rub with having to work in a job focusing on computers; I love the challenges, but hate how anti-social & left-brain focused it makes my mind.

Following into the weekend was nice. It started off with celebrating a friend's birthday. The night was fun but it left me wore out for some odd reason. I didn't really party hard so it left me confused why I was so lethargic the next day. I chalked it up to all the things—the house, the car, work, etc— I have cooking at once and the stress I put on myself trying to balance it. So many details, so little time. That dragged me down for most of the Saturday until I finally made my way over for Harvest Homecoming. That picked me up for a while. A nice diversion in New Albany always helps until I have to come down and make my way back home. Sunday was a good day to rest in, take it easy, get some more things done around the house.

 As I mused about Sunday, I was thinking about something I wrote a while back, the 3 acts of life, and the start of my 2nd act. Memento Mori, the phrase and the short story I've mentioned a number times from this blog, is a sort of reoccurring theme here. Coming to terms with your own mortality is a tough subject. Some people sugar-coat it up to end, some never consider it until their blindsided by it, others ignore it until it smacks them in face. I like to take the rational approach; know that it's coming, prepare for it, kick back and enjoy the ride until it comes to a complete stop. Or as I often say...Life is an experience, not a race (and even if it was, you certainly wouldn't want to win it).

Enough dime-store philosophy though...I'm off to the next experience. Til the next episode...

I'm getting near 30 years old. It sure doesn't feel like it. My mind feels as sharp—no—actually more sharper than it's ever been. I'm more aware of who I am, what's going on, where I at, why I'm doing it, and how I'm going to do it, than I've ever been before. Maybe that's wisdom talking, or it's hubris; I leave it to the reader to decide that one.

Bodywise, I feel like I'm probably been in the best shape I've every been as well. That does come with some caveats however. My body is definitely slowing down, that's for sure. I don't feel it too often, because I've always caried myself about the same, using my body more for endurance than peak output. However, I've noticed the changes in my metabolism. I'm certainly not the drinker I used to be too. The weekend at Purdue a few weeks ago was great, but these days a night of heavy drinking will put me down for a day or so. Not that I really miss it though. I'd prefer my balance of smart/somewhat heavy drinking without getting stupid/forgetful drunk over heavy drinking; it's a better balance.

Getting back over to the world of the mind, I've noticed over the last few years I've been really able to really focus my thoughts to pinpoint percission. This has been incredibly helpful since I've taken on my various computer-related jobs (web, software developer, etc.) over the last few years. Especially since working with  modern computers, inherently multitasking machine these days, can be as distracting as it is productive. There's been a ton of news out there about how the brain isn't built for multitasking and it just makes us perform each task worse. Let's call it the mental equivalent of being a jack of all trades, master of none(thanks Wikipedia for more obscure knowledge!).

When dealing with computers, the more complex computer systems you have, the more chances occur for something to screw up. This also means while you try to fix things, you have more chances you'll be presented with false leads and dead ends. Thus, making all the more important you don't get distracted or lead off path with superfluous, or irrelevant, details. In order to achieve this hyper-focal thinking, I often have to mentally shut off my senses where I'm completely enveloped in one feeling, that of thought.

In this state, I try to jack into (I'm not one for cliche cyperpunk phrases but this is the best thing that comes to mind to describe it) the mind of the computer to understand what's going on, using a kind of theory of the mind for the computer brain. You see, computers are completely linear, left brain, thinking machines. While the complexities of computers make it seem, at face value, that they don't operate that way, but they do. Each action a computer takes is the result of some series of instructions, a script, an algorithm. If you can see the script, or source code, you can figure out what the computer is doing. This however is complicated by modern computers that have many different instructions going on in different places. You have to figure out what which scripts are interacting with which. It's not an easy task; it's near immpossible for the brain to conceptualize everything running on a modern computer at once, the best you can hope for is to minimize interactions and isolate different parts that are relevant to each so that you can gain insight on what's going on.

As useful and intersting as this sort of hyper-focal thinking is, I think it puts a toll on me. Not in the sense that it wears me out; mental exhaustion isn't something I feel too often unlike physical exhaustion. It's more about the consequences of thinking one particular way. It disorts my thinking, like I'm thinking in only in one dimension with the left side of my brain. That probably isn't completely true, but it feels like it sometimes. I don't think I'm a very fun person to be around when I'm in that perspective. I don't joke as much, I stick to whatever task I have at hand, and tend not to focus on the bigger picture. I could on about this particular topic, but I'm going to put it down for now. There's a lot of ideas & thoughts I've been sitting on for some time that is related to this. I'll revisit it sometime later.

Everything has been set in motion for the house; A purchase agreement agreed upon, mortgage application applied for, and home inspection has been inspected. Unlike the last house I was eying, this looks like everything should be going according to plan. There is still much to do, but it should be exciting. Outside a few details that were somewhat out of my hand, I'm fully in control of my living arrangements now. It's a matter of details now.

The place I'm getting is pretty much exactly what I wanted, biking distances from work, open kitchen/living area, master bedroom, fairly neutral colors, all (new ones at that) appliances, space for hot tub. The only thing I had to compromise was a place for a pool table. The space needed for such was compromised by another parameter, a cost of at most $120K. Knowing that I might not be at the house for the very long term, it was best that I limited myself to that much of a purchase price with a 30 year fixed mortgage. To get a place with enough floor space to accommodate such a large thing as a pool table, I would have probably either had to spend more or live further away from the city. Given all that I got, I can be pretty satisfied with only having to compromise on one thing.

Closing occurs on the 25th of September, and I should be able to move in shortly afterward. There's still a lot to furnish, though it will be nice not have to worry about the appliances. Between my current possessions I think I can get a room or 2 finished, but not much more than that. Before it can host the new BWM, it definitely will need some more furnishing. A good name for the place is in order as well...nothing comes to mind right now however. I'm shooting for the end of October or mid November for everything to be finished but no guarantees on that yet.

I've been in a constant state of agitation lately. If I had to describe it, I would say its a state of constant pressing thoughts. To use a  'pedia article I read some time ago, my brain is constantly make using of its executive functions. Between my job, finding a home, following the market, and other responsibilities, I've been set into this mode where I'm constantly taking in new information and making decisions on what I should do about them. I'm sure all of this is taking some toll on me. I've been managing my stress pretty well. Agitation turn aggravation has mostly been reserved toward computers whether that be fixing them or just interacting with them.

Recently I've taken a long hiatus from videogaming, a topic I'm sure to cover in here some time soon, but even though I put that down I still find I'm using the same skills in dealing with computers. Perhaps even more so now since less of my attention is focused on performing just-frames or EWGFs in Tekken. There are many times now where I find the computer lagging me where I can input data/keystrokes/etc. For example, the other day I had to bring back my Sanyo RL-4930 phone (with the kung fu grip!) from the dead when my POS Palm Centro fried (last Palm phone I'll probably ever buy). I had to update a lot of contacts in the phone since it hadn't been touched in 2 years.

As I was entering in #'s which was painfully slow, I slowly picked up the same input keys I was using over and over again: down, down, OK, number, OK, OK, right, OK. The more I kept doing it (I think there was 20-30 numbers to update), the quicker I got. Eventually I got to a point where I could time it so fast the display would lag behind where I was entering the keys to enter data and select options. The display was peripheral; at this point my mind had its own mental picture of the computer that was more accurate that what the display was telling me. This stuff usually only has happened when I was in an intense gaming session.

When I've noticed this happening before I get a real spooky feeling. Because as that's happening I notice I can completely take my mind off the physical task at hand. That is to say I don't have to think anymore about the what my body is doing to interact with the computer, it just happens automatically while my brain can think about other things as if my mind is now part of the machine. Of course, I can't do this for too long before I start to lose control. Or as I called it in videogaming, the "oh shit..." moments where I realize that I'm losing control of something in game and failure is eminent.

Thinking about your actions as you do them will help perform them better, but at some point you will level off to where more intensity won't result in better performance. This is because you can't control everything. As much as you can become a master at some action, whether it be typing, running, speaking, or what have you, there are some factors that you can't control. Profoundly, this is the source of my agitation; trying to control every essence of my actions, my life, that, while admirable, is inevitably futile.

After yet another long hiatus, almost of 2 years in the making, I've returned once to again to survey my domain that is shawnconn.com, aka Who is the Man with the Name that Rhymes? I wish I could have said the hiatus was because of fantastic new adventures, but its been more like the opposite; boring soulcrushing days of seemingly non stop tumultous events that I try not to get too worked up about. The result is the author not even wanting to touch a computer, let alone think about updating a website. That recap has a little hyperbole in it, but somedays it feels that way.

When I'm not stressing about it, life is otherwise great. For sure there have been great adventures. It's just a sad fact that I have to deal with so much BS that it fills up too much of my life. I only wish I had more time in the day in which to do all the stuff I want to do. I guess it's just one of those thing I've got to take in stride. Being gone from the site for a couple of years, there have been many things I've been musing about over the past couple of years that I hope to cover. I'm not digging into much with this post, but there will be more to come. That much is certain to me. Keep on the lookout.