Why close your curtains? You’ve got nothing to hide.

You’ve done nothing wrong, so you have nothing to hide.

Hi, my name is Connor. You don’t know me, but I know you.

I work for the Government, monitoring the activities of people, like you, living their day-to-day lives. I know that doesn’t sound like a very nice thing to do, but it’s for your own protection and safety, and don’t worry, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide. I’m just making sure you’re not a terrorist.

I don’t know that much about you, really. You did go for a 4.65km run yesterday morning though. It took you 25 minutes and 46 seconds – 33 seconds slower than average according to the fitness app on your phone, and you took a different route than you normally do.

I don’t know what you had for breakfast yesterday, but I know you had it at that small café, Bellucci’s, on High St. Your friend Tiffany was there too – you checked in together at 9:07am. Oh, Tiffany is your girlfriend? That’s nice, congratulations on your two year anniversary. Your relationship status is shown on Facebook. I’m glad your privacy settings aren’t too strict, it’s suspicious if you have everything locked up and hidden.

Actually, I think I DO know what you had for breakfast. Your card transaction records tell me you spent $36.50. According to the online menu, you most likely had the Big Breakfast and a large coffee, and Tiffany had a small coffee and the Mixed Muesli.
At 10:16am both your phones connected to the McDonalds Wi-Fi on Ray St, and then again 6 minutes later to the McDonald’s Wi-Fi on East Ave. You averaged 47km/h between those two locations so I guess you drove. Your car’s number-plate was scanned by the camera on Belleview St. You arrived at Tiffany’s house at 10:28am where she checked in with a photo of the two of you. “Such a great anniversary breakfast, I love you!”
You must have left around 11:10am because your phone connected to the McDonald’s Wi-Fi on East Ave. again. This time it only took you 4 minutes to go past the McDonald’s on Ray St., I guess you were rushing so you weren’t late to class. During the next 4 hours you bought two coffees on card at ‘In For Lunch’ at the University (it’s the only thing that costs $4.20).

Your essay on Marxist socialism that you complained about doing on Twitter was due in 4 hours. Based on your previous Facebook and Twitter comments, and the YouTube videos you’ve watched, it seems you have quite a fascination with socialism and communism going back years. The Government doesn’t particularly like that, it’s un-patriotic.
You don’t mind me watching though do you? Because you’ve done nothing wrong. You have nothing to hide and nothing to fear. It’s for your own protection, I’m just making sure you’re not a terrorist.

If you have nothing to hide, why do you close your curtains at night?
All of this information is available to those who look for it, and what they do with it, is out of your control.

Like taking candy from a baby, or a baby from it’s mother.

Today I’m going out to lunch with my best friend. We always go out to lunch together, to the same place, for the same meal. Day after day, week after week. It’s what we’ve been doing for as long as we can remember. It’s the only time we can be together, the only time we get away from the noise and the stress caused by the machines. At least they act as a temporary distraction. They took my son away last week. He was only six weeks old. I cried for hours at a time, only stopping to sleep. I’m not the only one to have lost a son, many of the others have also had their children stolen away at a very young age. None of us know where or why they were taken.

This is just part of a sad, sad story. A story that no one wants to hear, or to know about.
Of course, you may think this is a story about a parent losing her child. And you’d be right, in a way. This is the story of cows, and their lives in the beef and dairy industry.

We often think of cows as big, lumbering, dumb animals, only good for meat and milk. It’s how we’ve grown to think of them, to the point where we put them in a class so much lower than ourselves that we tell ourselves it okay to use them for meat and milk. But the fact is, cows are not just big, lumbering, dumb animals.

Cows have best-friends, and worst enemies, just like us. They form social-hierarchies just as we do. Cows can be depressed just as we can, and can cry, just as we can. Cows form strong connections with their offspring, and are distraught if they are separated, just as we are, and yet within seconds of a cow giving birth, her child is snatched away from her, her head held in place so that she cannot turn around and lick it or touch it in any way, so that she may not form this bond.

Currently, the Australian national cattle herd stands at 29.3 million head, of which 13.4 million are used for beef. If millions of parents across Australia were having their children snatched away from them the moment they were born, it’d be the largest, most disgusting, event in human history, but because they’re just ‘big, dumb cows’, we, in our ignorance, somehow manage to convince ourselves that it’s okay.

Boyde, Melissa. Cultural myths and open secrets: The cattle industries in Australia [online]. Southerly, Vol. 73, No. 2, 2013 http://search.informit.com.au.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/fullText;dn=191538128168903;res=IELLCC

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-emotional-lives-of-dairy-cows/

http://www.grit.com/animals/farm-animal-intelligence.aspx

http://www.mla.com.au/Cattle-sheep-and-goat-industries/Industry-overview/Cattle

Your mind is a web, your brain is its spider.

Image from http://monkeybuddha.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/reality-brain-interconnected-fractal.html

Your mind is a web.

A spherical web with threads in infinite directions. And each thread is a path that we may navigate. A thread for mathematics, a thread for music – a thread for each and everything we know. We spin new threads when we learn a new topic, but most times we follow an existing one, learning more and more as we travel along its path.

You have the ability to jump threads, if you wish. This is best represented by our ability to talk or think on one topic, and then completely leap to another, and another, and so on. You can jump between threads, and, sometimes, you walk along with a leg on two or more (an easy feat for someone with eight legs). We could walk on, say… a thread of philosophy, and a thread of neuroscience – neuroethics. A thread of music, and a thread of theatre – musical theatre. I’m sure you can come up with examples of your own.

Along these threads, you have nodes. The further you travel along a thread, the more nodes you acquire. These nodes are ‘save points’, or hubs for the information you have collected along the way.
Have you ever noticed when you begin learning something new, that progress is often quite fast in the beginning, but then it gradually slows done as you improve? In the early stages of learning something new you’ll have many nodes quite close together, and once you have progressed and improved, they will become few and far between.
Dependant on which threads you extend, and the amount of nodes you accrue along the way, is the amount of your entire knowledge and experience of that topic.

Creativity is your ability to quickly jump between the nodes of different threads, making connections and linking different threads of knowledge and experience to create meaning, observe similarities, or spot differences. Points of intersection which give rise to new ideas, new ways of approaching things – new-thought. Creativity is a skill that needs to be worked on and practiced, and when we get stuck in the same environments, the same situations, and the same routines, we are travelling down the same paths repeatedly leaving our creativity unexercised.

Our 9-5, consumerist system does not just stop us from thinking creatively, freely, because we’re so busy, eagerly working to consume and repeat the cycle, but because our spider is stuck, working the same threads day in and day out, rigid in its own non-physical routines.
The effects of this on our creativity over long periods of time are almost permanent – our creative muscle is becoming weaker and weaker and we don’t even realise. Perhaps we won’t even realise when it disappears entirely. Open your mind by navigating your web creatively.

Your brain is its spider.

Existence and Explanation

Image by ‘pro-non’ @ http://pro-non.deviantart.com/art/Cosmos-342962111

The relationship between knowledge and explanation regarding our existence and the way we navigate the universe is always a topic up for debate, as answers to such questions are not to be found – yet. Perhaps the answers are embedded in the various systems we have developed, to progress, advance and understand – with each differing system providing its own, unique insights into the workings of our world. Let me elaborate.

Seemingly arbitrary birth dates, numbers and mathematics exampled by Dan Millman’s Pythagorean homage “The life you were born to live”, Mayan astrology, and other various forms of numerology all, somehow, provide scarily accurate insight into our being, our soul and the nature of our person. Such techniques of self-understanding and self-discovery are often scrutinized for not being scientific or logical and are therefore deemed fictitious – only believed as true and accurate due a person’s desire for explanation and meaning, simply a victim of the Forer Effect.

Furthermore, these systems are all from different centuries and cultures – each with their own interpretation but on the whole, very similar. How is it that geographic, chronologic and communicative separation can result in such similar systems of explanation if not for the existence of some form of viable but under-researched method of understanding our why?

Calling these arguably rudimentary systems totally useless or incorrect is simply ignorance: such methods of explanation are not logical or scientific, no – but judging such phenomena on its illogicalities and lack of scientific basis is illogical in itself. These systems are not MEANT to be rational, they are completely different systems of explanation and using one system (e.g. logic) to refute the other is more pointless than judging the intelligence of a pig on its ability to speak French.

These different systems of explanation are just that: systems which we have developed to try explain our universe. Science, technology, mathematics, logic, philosophy, religion, spirituality etc. are all methods of explanation in their own rights, each a different angle of discovery, of Ultimate Realisation. None of these systems are wrong; it is simply a case of apples and oranges, physics and philosophy.

Perhaps there are more undiscovered systems of explanation out there – new fields of science to be uncovered, combinations of existing systems, new ways of connecting the nodes of our network of understanding. These systems are tendrils that we send out into the cosmos, reaching around, feeling what’s out there to give us more insight, forever striving towards Ultimate Realisation. Our five senses are no longer enough to explain our universe, so we used them to create more advanced systems of explanation, and every advancement in every field is that tendril reaching further – until perhaps it hits a wall, and a fresh tendril begins to grow, seeking knowledge in a new direction.

Perhaps this is even evidenced by, and is reason for, evolution. However, I think this tangent is to be explored another day. For now, I must go and start the uni work I have been so successfully avoiding all day. Ciao.

Have a taste

Some day’s thoughts flow easily, freely. Others, it is as though thinking requires intention, forcing the process by dragging it through the mind’s labyrinth.

Today is one of those days, where I feel so close to achieving succinct thought but it doesn’t quite make it from A to B. It arrives as though fragmented, 90% of the content, but in pieces and scrambled. The basis is there, but a conclusion is just out of reach, as though I am missing… something. I liken it to trying to remember a word, place or name – you know it but at that moment it escapes you and the harder you try the further you search down the wrong road, and sometimes, when all hope of remembrance seems lost… it suddenly clicks and with a rush it comes to you, as if the gears in your head have finally meshed.

Recalling and new-thought are so very similar in this regard, the only difference on a day like today, however, is that a conclusion never comes, the gears never mesh. I have in my head so many thoughts, some so close to a spark of brilliance on multiple planes but forever only wisping around just out of my grasp, out of my reach as though teasing me, taunting “here, this idea is brilliant, have a taste!” before ripping it out of my hands and taking it back.

When I say brilliance, I do not mean some sort of stroke of genius, or world-changing discovery, but simply a sense of achievement through well-structured thought. Sometimes I do feel though, as if I have just missed out on the idea of a life-time.

Sunshine

There’s something about the sun, something more than I fully understand. More than just a source of heat, of light, of vitamin-D. It warms me on both the outside and the inside, physically and mentally, in a way that no other energy source can provide.
Only sunlight has a sensation, an emotion that with it brings a feeling of relaxation, contentment and peace.

Noise, sounds that would usually annoy, somehow become tolerable, even enjoyable as though at that very moment, everything is as it’s supposed to be.

Photo by Sam Dessaix-Porter

I know of no other situation in which the hysterical screams and cries of children’s laughter, the scrabble of birds arguing for ownership over of a piece of weathered bread, and the intrusion of loud conversation into my little bubble, become absolutely blissful.

Add a layer of good music, a quality coffee and a day filled with spaces where a schedule should be, and for that moment, my little bubble expands, enveloping the happiness of the world around me.

Thank you, Sun.

Systematic Determinism

NOTE: For that which follows, think of ‘physical state’ as the brain’s status in terms of it’s physical attributes – chemical balances, neurons firing etc., and ‘mental state’ as your consciousness, your mind. A less simplistic definition of mind-body dualism can be found here.

What happens in the gap between one thought and another? I cannot remember these gaps as time is measured through consciousness, and such gaps are merely fissures in consciousness. If you added up all the gaps you’d ever had and placed them next to each other, then, for that moment, you would not be privy to the passing of time.

Is the gap between thoughts a way of loading our next? Perhaps our brains have created a sort of biological buffering, with our brain processing its current physical state and the micro-gap in thought is the resulting delay caused by the updating of the physical state to the mental state. If this is the case, our mental state is simply a delayed reaction to the physical state, and thus our thoughts are reactionary only, predetermined, albeit by fractions of a second.

If our thoughts are predetermined, then choice is an illusion. What I mean by this, is that we are constantly updating and refreshing, always changing in short-lived, small-scale determinism. We may be able to change our physical state based on resulting thoughts of a previous predetermined (reactionary) choice which in turn affects our next choice – a method of constant test and analysis before moving onwards to the next, giving rise to the illusion of free will. We are unable to skip two or more thoughts or choices ahead as one thought gives rise to another in linear fashion.

A thought about desire for thirst may result in a thought about which type drink we desire (e.g. hot or cold), or which flavour, and so on until some steps later we think “this coffee is delicious”. We don’t simply jump from the recognition of thirst to “this coffee is delicious”, even if we don’t notice the thought process between. The first thought of thirst, following the process of test and analysis resulting in a cup of coffee was the instigating factor in a series of deterministic events.

If we skipped the thought about flavour, or perhaps instead thought about the desired viscosity we may very well have not ended up at coffee, but orange juice or beer. This process is deterministic at every point of test and analysis because the results already exist (e.g. upon thought (analysis of the physical state) we determined that we have desire for coffee), we are merely testing for them.

Systematic determinism: near-instant, constant refreshing, updating and analysis of mind and body resulting in following a predetermined path of cause and effect.

About Me

I have an ‘about me’ page here. I hated writing it, but I don’t know how to make it appear on my main page as a selection/link and I don’t want it to go to waste now that I’ve finally written it… so it’s over there in post form. It’s not very interesting but if you DO want to know a bit more about me, check it out. Or don’t, whatever, I’m not your boss.