This Is A Race: March 2008

Near Tulum in Quintana Roo province, Mexico (the region that Joan Didion named her daughter after, RIP), past the barbed-wire fence, I sat on blackened rock beside a tide-pool containing hermit crabs, anemone, and a blue plastic Pepsi bottle-cap. It was late afternoon on my second day at an ALL INCLUSIVE RESORT. Looking left I saw, in the distance, the sunburnt families splayed on chaise lounges dotting the groomed beach. To the right were wild shores and jungle palms. In front of me crashing azulejo waves and the ocean horizon. Surrounded by a stock-pile of resort beer I wrote:

I am Morvern Callar. I swim past the pool bar, alligator eyes poking up. They are something to be afraid of (both the people and my eyes). That's not to say I don't enjoy this place; it's gorgeous. But, I don't think I enjoy it the way I'm meant to.

Last night I swung in a hammock listening to Joni, Joanna, and Natasha (not Beddingfield) after walking on the deserted part of the beach. White sands glowing in the moonlight, fierce winds, crashing ocean (violent, infinite, and black), beer in hand and more where that came from, and a tiny bit of fear. Everything as it should have been. Why wasn't everyone out there?

I crave cigarettes, _______________, and ________________. I'm not lacking in enjoyment, though. Like I said, I'm loving this, but not the way they want me to. While frat-boys date-rape the willing I lurk the dark beach, occasionally stopping in at the perpetual wedding reception's open bar for a glass of champagne.

Suckers.

Yeah, so basically I drank a lot. I also took a bunch of photos, went to Chichen Itza, hung out with my dad, met and went out with people who dance for the resort (nobody puts Graydie in a corner!), got a tan (I look like such a typical gay now with my short hair and too-dark-for-March skin), read, wrote, walked, swam, drank, ate, drank, slept, listened to music, saw poor scraggle-doggies with big boobies scrounging for food, drank, oggled, and ate.

As for the photos, I planned to continue with my "Are We Having Fun Yet?" series...but it didn't work. Like I just wrote to Claire, I expected to find lots of sad fat gluttons trying to get happy - but I found that, unlike "Are We Having Fun Yet?" the people knew exactly why they were in Mexico - they weren't looking for distraction or happiness, they just wanted to do nothing, so it wasn't that compelling. In AWHFY? I saw myself in the people I photographed. There was some relationship to the subject and empathy in those photos. But had I just taken photographs of the people at the all-inclusive, I think it would have been purely judgmental, which I totally am, but that kind of photograph is a bit played out in my opinion. I also wasn't nearly as anonymous as I was at the fair because there were no flashing lights or spinning rides or candy-corn booths. I would pull out my camera and 18 people would look up from their books to stare at me.

I'll put up the photos I did take as soon as I can afford to process and scan them.

I was also wrong in my last post - I didn't go to Cancun, but about an hour and a half South to a place called Akumal, near Tulum.

Labels: BAD DOG

I'll admit that I'm drunk right now. That said, I've come to the conclusion over the past while that I don't believe in free will...but I do believe in the illusion of free will.

I first believed in the absence of free will when I thought of our minds and consciousnesses as only an impossible-to-imagine amount of neurons and firing synapses. These synapses and electrical impulses are all very complex, but still only governed by the laws of physics...and these physical interactions manifest themselves in a way that feels like conscious free will - which is an illusion. Our conscious actions are all simply manifestations of physical action and reaction in our brains. Our brains are super-computers. Our brains are artificial intelligence; so complex that we can't yet understand them, and thus attribute a mystical concept called "consciousness" to it.

It's much like faith in God. We attribute the inexplicable to deism. Atheists attribute our sense of free will to consciousness, as did I until recently.

Then I had that thought about those millions and billions and trillions of pathways that electricity takes in our neural pathways, and how every decision I make comes about because of these trabillions of tiny explosions, not because I wanted them to.

I wondered about a good analogy for that, and somehow I landed on Plinko from The Price is Right. Plinko is the most beloved game on The Price is Right. When this connection between free will and Plinko just happened, I completely understood why it was so popular. The little disk that gets dropped into the myriad of pins seems to have a life of its own. There is no telling where a disk dropped on the far left of the board will end up. It appears completely random, as if it has free will. It acts within the boundaries of the board - in effect it will never jump out of the board and hit a contestant in the face. And it is governed by the laws of physics - it bounces against the pegs and always ends up at the bottom because of gravity. But it always appears to be going along its own route, unpredictable and playful. This is a microcosm of the human mind. It appears to be making decisions at will. That's why Plinko's so popular; people relate to its random but willful appearance. The disk looks like it wants to go a certain direction, when in reality it is governed only by physics and gravity.

If someone gets a disk in the right hole at the bottom, they try to drop a disc from the same spot the next turn. But it never plays out the same way. This is because you can never get the disc in the exact same spot twice in a row. Italics! The Plinko chip will always be off by an atom or two at least, and thus can never take the same path.

In this respect, it becomes a lot like the human mind, the human experience. We appear to be bouncing along, somewhat randomly, but in reality our synapses are operating under the laws of physics, and a thought you think you've created is really just a chance combination of electric impulses. You might think "How could it be chance impulse to have the idea to create the telephone after deciding to sit down and invent a communication device?" Well, I didn't say it was simple chance, and I don't pretend to know everything about consciousness, but it's chance nonetheless, and I'll try to explain why as best I can, if you care.

Think of nothingness. Think of the possibility that our universe was born from nothing. It's almost impossible. Think of "never". Like someone dying and you never seeing them again. Think of infinity - as in the infinity of space - that it literally never ends. Then think of the question "What's outside our universe?" and the answer being "There is nothing outside our universe, it is infinitely large, and it never ends." Then think of your mind as the inverse of that infinite expanse of space. The amount of neurons and synapses and the number of combinations of synapses firing and how infinite that is. So that's like the infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters who eventually will write every piece of literature ever written (though I find that analogy problematic, it will do for now). So your infinite possibilities lie in your infinite combination of synapses firing and interacting. Anything is possible. But like Plinko, where everything is possible for that disk, hitting those pegs, governed by gravity and physics, everything you do is within the realm of possibilities allowed by the physical limits of your brain's anatomy as governed by the laws of physics. The Plinko chip is not going to fly off the board and hit an audience member, and you are not going to make someone's head explode just by thinking about it (as fun as that sounds). You still with me? Probably not...but I'm gonna keep going.

Okay, so you understand that maybe our brains are like giant and infinitely complex Plinko games, yes? The chips are electric impulses and the pegs are the synapses and neural pathways. So the electric impulses travel down these pathways and fire and make us do things. So maybe these chips are all already in motion and hitting the pegs and making us do things and we have no control over them...but we think we do cause they're so complex. They're so complex that even though we have no control over them they make us believe we do, and even allow us to be aware of that contradiction. If you think of it as a timeline, we generally believe this: First, something called "consciousness" or our "conscious mind" makes a decision, then our brain sends a message, then our body does it. For example, you want a potato chip. The conscious desire for a potato chip comes first, then your brain sends a message to your hand to reach out and grab a chip, then your hand reaches out and grabs a chip. But there are experiments that show otherwise. This is where it starts to get a bit fucked up. There have been studies that show that before you make a "conscious decision" you are already doing something. So to put it another way, these studies show that first your brain sends a message to your hand to reach out and grab a potato chip, then you feel the "conscious desire" to want a potato chip, then your hand reaches out and grabs a potato chip. There are studies that actually suggest your brain backtimes conscious decision to match up with physical action and reaction. REALLY READ THIS: It is possible that your brain sends signals BACK IN TIME to give you the sensation that you made a "CONSCIOUS DECISION" before you acted on it.

THAT'S FUCKED UP! That means that truly, scientifically proven, there may not be such a thing as free will. And not only that, but that our brains have developed in a way that convinces us that we are in control of our decisions (while also being capable of disproving that). It's a meta-mind-fuck.

If you think that can't be so, go back to what I said earlier about the infinity of the universe. So think about why infinity feels impossible. Think about why we can't imagine something like the idea that there is no boundary to the universe, or that there is nothing beyond the universe. Maybe we are just not capable of understanding the concepts of NOTHING, INFINITY, and NEVER. That's why we made up things like God and Heaven and reincarnation and so on - to fill up the infinity of the nothing-never with things we can understand. So if it's possible that we are simply not equipped to understand those concepts (how can we imaging the nothingness that lies outside of the universe? Is it black? Even black is something...) then maybe it's possible that we are simply not equipped to understand the complexity of our brains. If we can't understand a simple concept like nothingness, then why should we be able to understand the infinitely complex connections in our brains. Also keep in mind that people used to think the Sun revolved around Earth, and that they could not possibly conceive of the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun. So think of the concept of infinity or nothingness or never. It is impossible for our minds to understand it right now, even though it exists and we are aware of it abstractly (like the number 0 - that is an abstract concept, not a physical thing). And hopefully someone will be able to explain infinity-never-nothing and it will become clear, like the Earth going around the Sun, and the world not being flat, and all the other millions of things that we have come to understand over our existence.

Anyway, it's terrifying but freeing. The next step of existentialism. It's a God-free religion, the other side of the deep well of existential darkness - belief in something intangible again. I no longer believe that I am in control of my life, but that I make the decisions I make based only on how my synapses have fired so far. I know that if I lived my life all over again exactly as I've lived my life up until this exact moment I could only make the same decisions. That is to say that if I lived this exact life again, not knowing I had lived this life before, I would make the exact same choices. I am like a Plinko chip. If I was dropped in the exact same spot, and all the pegs were in the exact same place, I would bounce along in the exact same way.

Now...that brings us to quantum physics and alternate universes...and that's a whole other drunken rambling blog post. This is all more for me than it is for you assholes. I know you're not reading this.

Labels: BAD DOG, HOW TO PROCRASTINATE, I MADE THIS. ME. GRAYDON., MAYBE THE FUTURE WILL BE BETTER, NOBODY LIKES A NERD