A Plumber's Catchall

Beau, an educated homeless man, symmetrically explores his life. His past isolation has led him to abuse a smart drug to find meaning. In the future he hits upon how neural networks can perceive time.

I.) TAUTOLOGY: The study of rigid conciseness in learning Present day It wasn't until about a year after I'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder that I'd realized that tears will leave faint trails of salt and other solutes on one's face. And that people are able to notice them, although decorum prevents communication of their existence. I sure never noticed them. Now I carry tissue. My meaty hands gripped the recently purchased smart phone and looked up a new coffee shop for me to loiter at for the day. The phone is only last year's model. I'd waited for it to go on sale at the unveiling of the newest model, then excitedly rushed down to the local telecom shingle to wait in the line of early adopters. When I finally was reaching the front of the line I had a sudden sinking flash of empathy for Charlie Bucket being made fun of by Mr Turkentine for eating two orders of magnitude less Wonka bars than his peers. I do appreciate how this may appear at least exaggeration-adjacent, after all I've never had cabbage water in my life. I just ask that you suspend judgment until, well ideally until I am dead. Actually, ideally I won't die. Before we continue I should be explicit: I tend to invest in my own tangential thoughts. Which tends to result in my conversations turning into chaotic bushes under a theme, rather than a tall tree of purposeful intent. In high school I believe I had a touch of the social anxiety disorders. This freed up my faculties from teenaged politics, which I then gave over to the freedoms of analytic literature, which is to blame. One could argue that a given author had any intention at all, as long as you could erect a facade of evidence. Then at university I studied genetics and pharmacy: very slowly evolving biological disciplines, despite their obvious successes. They're on a seperate continent, separated by a curved ocean, from data science and engineering, so you'll forgive me if I'm less than direct. If you have any preconceptions of a destination in mind you're bound to bang at the steering wheel when my construction road sign flicks on to convey its yellowed message, "EXPECT DIGRESSIONS." But it's clearly futile: the steering wheel didn't write this, and my address is unpublished. You're welcome to try to find me though, my name's Beau Drushipux. I fear you've just joined the majority that mispronounces it, but forgiveness is swift my dear boy. Or: dear lady, mustn't be sexist! My last name has the unfortunate correct pronunciation of "droo-shee-poo," from the original Greek for "he who should not to be taken seriously." But you seem like a nice person, surely you'll take me seriously? Only joshing with you, I'm not an omniscient narrator. Right. So I'm walking to the coffee shop from my shelter... When I say shelter I don't mean it in the general euphemistic description of a dwelling: I'm technically homeless. Have been since Halloween of last year. It's surprisingly not that bad if you can get past the shame. But then, I've always had an underdeveloped shame gland. Cold brisk air fills my lungs, I look up at the friendly overcast sky that I trust implicitly to not rain at me, and coming up on my left: a locally-owned coffee shop. A young lady is outside to greet me with red Lisa Simpson hair, shredded pants with safety pins, a nose ring, and a full representation of the perceivable wavelengths affixed to her smiling face. "Hey," she welcomed. "Hello," I countered. "Today is our grand opening..." I'd not noticed this, I'd never been in this area before, "...and you get a free tumbler with any purchase today. Well, actually just until I run out of these," her voice was flirtatious, I think. "Oh," I feigned consideration. "Well I'll definitely be coming back this way later." I feel gaslighting is less immoral when it's levied at insincere salespeople. Wait, but does that mean that it should be morally permissible for CEOs to manipulate people like me? Probably shouldn't have taken such a hardline stance at her. But I did. I continued on 3 more blocks and walk in to the 'unapproved' coffee shop. It has a particularly noticeable absence of oversized framed art, that normally is kept more to communicate an appreciation for art, than for the art appreciation itself. I grab a coffee, take my magnesium, and sit down with my electronics. The disingenuous flirty voice has reminded me that I should check my online dating profile. Twelve visitors and no messages, why such a low ratio? I scanned randomly through my profile entries: "I've thought about regularly changing this paragraph by just one letter in order to drive more traffic to my page via the Most Current Profiles section. But don't worry, I'd never do thak." I continued scrolling until my eyes fell on the Most Personal Thing I'll Share section. "Most people put something arbitrary here like 'I have a severe allergy to lions,' but I think a reluctant embracing of radical transparency would minimize reliance on pathos and ethos, and thus lead to a better relationship. Therefore, here are my very few sources of projected shame: -2 DUIs (sober for 19 months now) -an isolated felony for resisting an officer & resultant loss of pharmacist license -I moved to the city for an unpaid internship in a completely new field for me, as a result I live in a shelter (curfew is 6:30pm, can take 2 nights out per month) and likely will for at least another year -was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (take lithium and propranolol for it) -I've had cold sores since childhood (take acyclovir for it) -I weigh 292.9 lbs, currently averaging 2.4 lbs lost per week. Big shoulders helps frame it better. I smile quixotically. Perhaps I'll never understand other people. I suddenly realize that I've left something out of my shame section: I was addicted to what I believed to be a nootropic for the past few years. Has it actually make me smarter? I still struggle with that question every day. During the module on dementia in pharmacy school I'd learned the the various medications that increased cognitive functions in the elderly patients, and their mechanisms of action. The actual physiology that connected the affects on neurotransmitters to the caused improvement in symptoms was unknown. Once the drug is demonstrated to be more efficacious with less side effects than the current standard of therapy, there's no longer any economic incentive to clarify the pharmacodynamics. Wow has it really been seven years already...? II.) THE SOMETHING OF MEMORY: An analepsis in time 7 years ago I wake up in my giant California King bed in an admittedly large room in the second floor of the house in which I rent. Behind me on the largest wall, a very large, ornately-framed painting questions its place in the universe. I blink, forcing my eyelids to accomadate the wealth of pocket lint that seems to have aggregated in the night to prevent my eyes from ever opening again. Luckily they never learned engineering either. I notice the scent of vomit hanging in the air as I roll over a few times till I reach what would be an alarm clock were I to ever set it. Perfect. I've woken up with just enough time to make it. As I rush out the door I wonder if police officers turn on their sirens when they're running late to work... I arrive at school. There's less people than usual today, a large group must've went out to lunch today. "Hey Eric and Julie. How was lecture?" Beau invites. The couple are Beau's good friends, Eric is tall, athletic, and attractive, with Julie clocking in with at least 2 of the 3. "Ah, it was a bunch of BS. Dr Marguerita just copied her 'lecture' verbatim from the same pharmacy website again." Eric bemoans, "I dunno how she continually gets away with that at this level." "Isn't that a lesson in itself, chappy?" Julie quips. I legitimately join them in a chuckle. "Yeah, I guess the reason she gets away with it is because none of us wants to turn her in. Her exam questions are the easiest of any professor," Eric offers. "Yeah we're complicit in this guys: accessories after the class." I laugh at this too, but not at the joke. Humor is odd. The best description of laughter that I've found is a communal celebration of having solved a very specific class of riddle. My riddle is more a determinination how well I understand a person. If their laugh is genuine, then I conclude I know them as well as I expected, which is what I'm celebrating. One-way empathy is better than none, and minimizes my self doubt. They laughs just happen to coincide. I thinks back to my nearby house. Did I not throw up in the toilet last night? If I had, why would it have still smell... Julie interrupts, "How far are you into the HIV meds, Beau?" "I still have half a bottle left but I think I'm out of refil... Oh you meant studying them?!" Beau overacted at them. "No, I'm of course just going to cram the night before per youzh." Lou has popped his head in from the parking lot side, "Well, like Bobby Brown I don't see nothing wrong. But unlike Bobby Brown it's your prerogative." "Yeah I thought that was so weird when Bobby Brown changed his name to R. Kelly, Lou," Julie advances. "Wait. Ah, forget you guys," Lou laughed, straightening his dress shirt. "Ah, Mr Drushipux," their professor Dr Cooper, sing-song'ing Beau's last name a là cootchie-coo, had entered with his class materials and approached the lectern. "Nice of you to join us," he repeated his favorite light sarcasm. "I was just heading to Dr Marguerita's office, she wanted to talk to me about something." I glanced over at my classmates and shot them a font-size six, lower-case exclamation point with my eyes. They stifled chortles and we walked into the halls while Dr Cooper shook his head. Smiling, Beau implored, "Let's do something social-like. We can go out to the Korova Milk Bar, eat at Hertzfeldt's, or just come over to my place and watch movies. You know I have some good ones!" "We gotta study," they all chimed. Everyone always says that. Even our university's social club has the motto: Simultatem separatim a discendo (roughly: Togetherness from studying seperately). How would one differentiate between being friends with people who are always busy, and being a nuisance to polite people...? Would I necessarily even be able to tell if I was mentally handicapped in a specific way? It's probably better any way. Still need to clean up the filfth. I walk the few very-strangely shaped streetblocks separating my house from the university. As I pull myself alongside the construction, I say aloud to no one, "Rise of the Planet of the Shapes." I don't know what I'm doing. Something needs to change. I'm on the precipice of acheiving all my goals in life and I feel worse than I ever have. I door the door and stair the stairs up to my bed. On the way, my housemate Kirk looks at me concerned, never judgmentally. I somersault a few times to the corner where my laptop lives and fire up the social network. A friend whom I don't remember adding, named Cornflake Recipes has posted: "The unexamined life is not worth living, neither is the examined one, but hey at least you'll be smart." The last few words get stuck in my head as I remember an unanswered question I had about the last set of block exams: why would Alzeimer's medications only work in the elderly? I open PubMed and after a few search strings happen upon a smallish study that demonstrated significant improvements in ADAS-Cog scores for patients with reduced cognitive function due to chronic corticosteroid therapy. And the mean age was only 42! My mouth hung open as the glowing screen bathed me in hope. III.) ALL MY MEDIASES RES: When suddenly! 3 years ago There's a crayon on the floor. Beau doesn't understand but he picks it up. What color is it? He inspects: BLUE AZUL BLEU It's a matrix. Or an anagram? My name is definitely in there. He takes the crayon to his table and begins to work out what possible anagrams are contained. I mustn't ignore the structure of the matrix at the same time, he says to himself. I mean myself. I never did like sticking to a single perspective of narrator. I guess you could've surmised that I readily sacrifice consistency for maximal empathy. Maybe not. All I know about you is the average of all the individuals I've interacted with in my life thus far. Their 'eigenvalues,' the parts that even if they don't matter, are at least the most common and therefore meaningful. So am I the Beau in the past now or the narrator in the present? Beau looks down at his scratchings: BEAU LULZ BLEU Well I do in fact think that word is pronounced funnily, as is my name. He chuckles to himself, trying to repress the internal struggle telling him to point out every mistake, and yell out in, in whatever the more severe version of angst is. He thinks best and leaves the coffee shop. Out in the cold evening, he slowly pulls on his oversized fake-fur hood. He surreptitiously looks in all directions, eyes darting around. He feels like a Jedi now. And the thing about being a Jedi is that you need to suppress your powers or you will be noticed by enemies. Those who know what you will accomplish in the fullness of your life and wish to either stop you to prolong their financial interests or to take credit for it themselves. You remember what happened when you were doing neuroscience research and your principal investigator somhow sent in what appeared to be the Yoshi character to steal your ideas. Now we're smart. We know better. My new humanistic life goals: - indefinite human lifespans (may be expedited by AI, so...) - Strong Artificial Intelligence (poses an existential risk, so...) - a formalized scientific theory of morality Beau punches the key into his new expensive bachelor pad, and decides the experiments will take place in the living room this time. He takes the bottle of NMDA antagonist medication and pours the agreed upon daily amount into the measuring cap and downs it. He thinks of digging for the tiny notebook in which he'd written out the detailed explanation for this experiment, but only remembers having written QED a lot and casts it out of his mind. He looks resentfully at the remaining amount in the bottle, grabbed it and finished the remainder. Then did the same with a new bottle. Anxiety rising, he went into his room to get the notebooks out of his backpack. There was one from last month. It read: Noticing odd perceptions while waiting outside the chain bookstore to read: * a tingling wave moving bilaterally from the central sulcus of the parietal lobe to the sulcus of the occipital lobe - was very pronounced, unlike anything I've felt before or since * have taken to taking a deep breath flexing everything, which results in a temporary semi-hallucinogenic state -the shapes I see in this state appear like tilings of the center-surround and Gabor filters It frustrates him that he hadn't thought of the simpler label "Oflexes" earlier. Plus it's not even clear that the focus is to force atmospheric oxygen into his brain. Now all his notebooks are wrong. He remembers the rest. Ah, oflexing delivers a bolused increased partial oxygen pressure dose to the brain. This simulates what hyperbaric oxygen chambers do over hours, and we found that study in which chronic hyperbaric oxygen significantly increases CD34+ cells, which in turn promote stem cell release. One of these ideas should eventually work then I'll be able to reach my new mature goals! The phone rang, it was Beau's little brother Jim. He picked up the phone, "Hello, Jimothy McJanglestein. Go for The Count of Monte Carlo!" "What the hell is going on with you, Beau? You left me a bunch of crazy messages, and now your pharmacy manager contacts me on the social network and says you apparently called her multiple times in the middle of the night? "I only intended to call once, but then she said to just call her later, so I had to go for the joke and call immediately back." "Well she was pissed. She wanted to know if you were seeing a psychiatrist." "Only people diagnosed with mental illnesses see psychiatrists, so I figure as long as I never see one I never will," Beau was pleased with his satire. "Well maybe you should. You're throwing your life away," Jim spat. A deep subconscious part of Beau took notice of this indictment and formed a protest, but before it could be conveyed it was cast adrift in the turbulent ocean currents of neurotransmitters. Jim continued, "I can't be taking care of you if you're going to be abusing that drug. Mim said that when you called her you sounded high as a kite. If this is what you're choosing then I'm not going to be a part of your life any more," and hung up. Right. Beau sets up his camera on the bar of the kitchen and walks into frame. He breathes in and out a few times, then one last big one and flexes everywhere. He holds it for 5-10 seconds. He comes to, with a start. "Wait a minute! How did I get over here?!" He clutches for his watch but he doesn't remember what time he'd started the trial and he doesn't think he said it on the recording. He quickly dismisses the notion that he merely fell over to the new place. On the floor near the couch... * I'm in the operant chamber room of my neuroscience research job. White wooden boxes about two feet cubed lined the metal shelving, that then lined the small room. The computer controlling and reading the chambers sat on a rack in the back. "Rack in the back, my nose hair grows there," Beau rapped as he moved the rats from their modular housing units to the behavioral test chambers. Five half-lives equaling about 7 days, combined with an average daily intake of probably 1.25 bottles meant the drug had been accumulating in me all Summer. I was presently perceiving a grainy visual hallucination in shades of black and neon blue. This time my favorite musician was having a concert in the future and they had figured out how to mentally telecast it to me in the past. The performer stepped into the neon blue light and explained that it was extremely expensive to circumvent time laws but it was worth it for him because it seems that I'd developed the technology for his best friend to come back to life. My excitement rose exponentially, and I danced along to the music doing a comical peekaboo dance with each of the running operant chambers, which contained the virtual cameras telecasting me to the concert. In celebration I picked up one of the rats. I assured it, "You don't understand this now but everything's about to get a lot better!" * I'm in a psychiatric hospital again. A '5150' is when you're considered a threat to yourself or others. You can always spot a rookie at these places. The new Johnnys will crouch underneath the windows of the large double-doors, hoping to be out of view of potential incoming medical staff members who may be opening the doors. Not too bright. That's a sure way to get a 5250. Although I must admit that this perfectly legal removal of my autonomy without having committed any crime does seem to be hampering my progress. Luckily as long as I show them I'm sane enough to 'belong' for 3 days I'll be released. Or was it 5 days? How long have I been here? I don't see how it's my fault that I don't like people. They started it. Oh, great it's dinner time. "I do believe I smell the famed cheeses from the isle of macaronia!" I announced as I walked into the cafeteria. A staff was standing nearby. "Is there any way I could have access to the Internet in here?" "No chance," and broke eye contact to stare back in the original direction. I later was able to at least get Micromedex printouts of psychiatric drug information which I was 'considering trying' so that way I could at least study pharmacy in a memorable setting. * Now I'm completely alone. Even more than before. I knew logically it was very unlikely that the smart drug would be tested for as it's not traditionally abused. Abuse? Perish the thought, I'm bettering myself. I hadn't taken into account a gradual accumulation of external symptoms: mannerisms, the occasional verbal slurring, and constant sweating. They would all imply an addiction, or at least amplify any shortcomings in my work. I'd lost my good research job and what paucity of friends and family I'd had, had moved on with their lives... * The hallucinations had been amazing this time. I understood it as the entire history of humanity. Plato was the narrator, special attention was taken for my life, of course. Upon being born, I'd been very ceremoniously thrown from the window of a moving 1930s car into a large slum. The family that took me in would watch pornography in the living room which made me very uncomfortable. In first grade I'd impress all the other children by breakdancing at the bus stop. As the timeline was ending there was a setpiece of two speakers in movie critic's chairs. They were a mashup of nonspecific Monty Python members with the two old men from the balcony on The Muppets. They capped a long leadup to a hilarious joke and the universe closed in on everything as a black cartoon circle constricted shut on existence. I woke up in my bathtub now full of very cold water. It hadn't worked. I saw the nine bottles of the drug perched tauntingly on the toilet. The repeated phrase of, "If everything I've learned tells me this will work and it doesn't, then I wouldn't want to live anyway," echoed through the apartment. Literally. I had begun to hear auditory hallucinations. Most of the time just whispers within the wind, like the hallucinations would be carried within a pre-existing sound. A slamming door would be an envelope for someone shouting 'hey' at me. The only complex voice to join in had convinced me that he was actually me communicating from the future and that he'd set it up so that someone on my street would sell me their car for an extremely low sum. After asking many people if they were the ones selling the car, my skepticism asked the voice if this was a prank. He only laughed at me and disappeared. IV.) CANDID YAMS: A New Hope 3 years wait "You'd agree that every claim about the past is either true or false, right? Because it's fixed already. What I'm saying is that the same thing is true about the future, and that we then have no genuine free will," Jim clutched his pipe, set it to his mustachioed lips, and blew bubbles as punctuation. Nicotine solution bubbles. Beau had always admired the cutting edge of the Hipster culture. But then again that's the primary export of college freshman. Jim had just begun studies at the state university, double-majoring in physics and philosophy. "Entanglement allows me to neither agree nor disagree with you," Beau rejoinded. "Oh great, now even the sound waves coming off the tree that fell in the woods are in superposition?" Beau laughed, celebrating this extension of shared history. He momentarily wondered if it were possible for others to understand jokes about shared futures. "Hey I gotta go, it'd actually be noticed if I was late to my internship today. Love you, sir. Say hi to Skylar for me." "Will do, she's learning numbers now. Oh and I'm pretty sure yesterday she said 'Kierkegaard' when I was sitting her," Jim winked. "Hoo beoy, that's no good. Well. I'll try to advise Chad not to react to it, and suggest clean alternatives like Foucault." They both chortled miserably and ended the image call. Today was actually a big day. After three years of sitting in on the research presentations in his theoretical neuroscience internship, and painstakingly training himself to study long-term rather than cramming, he had finally gotten the opportunity to prove himself. The hardest part was reading the largess of previous, influential work done in the field. He'd always claimed to be the world record holder for slowest reader alive, and this wasn't far from being accurate. The upside was that he at least compensated for this with increased retention. The experiments he'd done for the past year have provided the proof of principles that have led to today. He was still well behind his colleagues in the lab, but the combination of his bio background with the engineering here, offered a unique perspective. One that was constantly feeding back in on itself. Beau flicked his eyes back and forth like that Eggserroneous guy from Ernest Goes to Camp as he mentally played out the Nuomena experiment in his head. He was approaching Ewens Hall. In my head the principal investigators from adjoining labs had heard about this experiment and had showed up to witness this historic occasion. At least Dr Tintinnabulum had made it: he's still pretty philosophical for being a career scientist. Dr Chatman, my principal investor, was there as well. If this worked we'd get a contract to develop neuromorphic chips from the technology. After all, how can one even put a price on seeing into the future? Ok we're assuming that all physics up till now has been dependent on the evolved 3-dimensional construct of the human brain. So until we gain a significant understanding of how humans perceive the world, empirical evidence will be biased by our evolutionary heritage. To test this hypothesis we've constructed an elaborate yet efficient neural network. It first breaks down our three familiar dimensions via a cylindrical deconvolutional network, and these dimensions are axiomatized. These three dimensions are then installed as memory biases for a larger neural network running in a 4-dimensional computer simulation. There are moving high-dimensional icosahedra as the stimuli, and three of its four distinct hippocampi learn something very close to our dimensions (X, Y, Z) while the fourth competes to describe the inputs without any overlap from the other hippocampi. They are only networked for negative feedback thus far, to ensure uniqueness. Now we turn to the largest neural network of them all, and today's project. It has four networked hippocampi which require complexly convolutions of each dimension. The four simulated dimensions are to be combined among each other first into six 2-dimensional basis functions, from which are built the four 3-dimensional basis functions, which then become the merged single 4-dimensional basis function. While all this is occurring the input side of the network is viewing actual natural scenes, and perceiving them in terms of the 4-dimensional construct. Engineered perceptual evolution! I'd combined my bio with their engineering, or so I hoped. Dr Tintinnabulum walked up beside me looking at it all. I leaned over, "Now before we do this. It isn't possible for it to cause a black hole of logic or anything, right?" He looked up thoughtfully. "Well, it's going to take a couple years before we even have preliminary data on what it's doing." He looked back at me, "If you promise to check on it every day, I'll make us a sign that says, Danger: Theoretical Theoretical Unknown Unknowns." "OK OK," I reply still staring solemnly at the machine. "Don't worry so much, even if this fails it'll be influential." "I know. This isn't my first Rodeo Dr." I hit Run and we stand back. The computer hummed pleasingly. "I'm actually quite interested to see how this thing perceives black holes, now that you mention it." Dr Tintinnabulum added and gave me a high five as we went off to help on other projects. As the day came to a close, I headed back to the homeless shelter downtown and saw Keith on a bus bench. The setting sun was bright and little grids floated in front of my eyes, I rubbed them. My eyes I mean, not the floaties. "Well if it isn't my favorite pharmacist." I chuckled at this. "Hey, Keith. Herman told me you got out of the shelter? I've just came back to this one." "Yeah yeah yeah, oh. How is Herman doing? I heard he was welding again." "Hmm, I don't think I've seen him in a few days so I don't know. I should be hearing about my apartment this week. My credit's for s**t though." "They don't care as much if it's subsidized housing," he reassured. "You'll get it." "I hope so. Oh, Keith, I meant to tell you, when I dream at night everything would be oddly blurry, right? So last night I finally tried wearing my glasses to sleep, and sure enough: when I woke up this morning..." "Your glasses were broken?" he laughed aloud. "Ahhh, yeah," I pouted. "Well, that joke would make a lot more sense if you weren't wearing your glasses right now," he said removing them from my face and holding them up. I grab them back. "I can't talk long, I don't have a Late for work tonight cause I didn't have too much to do." "Oh but, also too, I met a girl at a bar the other night. We were having a fun debate about science. She was saying that measurements like accuracy and precision were more valuable than overarching theories." "I wonder if her parents know that she says such things!" I mocked. "Yeah yeah, we talked all night though, and before she left she gave me her phone number on a piece of paper. I was still smiling when I finally looked at it, it read: 'Give me a call sometime: 5.10x10^9.'" "Ahh double loss!" I exclaimed as I held my head and laughed heartily. I was coaxed to the side by a gust of wind emitted by his bus sneaking up to me like an elephant wearing slippers. He waved as he grabbed his bus pass and ran to the door, I threw a hand up and walked the few remaining blocks to the shelter. The shelter is honestly an excellent place to learn about moral philosophy. So many sources to test your patience as well as your ideals. I got interested in morality for a pretty selfish reason actually: I'm relatively misanthropic if I'm being honest. But if there's any degree of chronic cortisol exposure, the stress hormone, that accompanies doing people wrong then I wanted nothing to do with it. Corticosteroids decreasing cognitive function is what started me down this whole path. Since all of my goals involved maximizing my thinking, morality was ironically a necessary evil. Getting advice from the greatest thinkers of record seemed the obvious choice. Here's a very concise summary of what I've found so far: If one is a consequentialist and a moral cognitivist, and they don't always act maximally moral, does that not make them necessarily dumb? Whether it's legit philosophy or not, it sure is an effective motivator for me! And any uneasiness I feel for not acting out immorally, is compensated for in the long-term. This is due to the fact that by not seeking retribution against the other person I get to feel smarter, according to myself. Even when the other person in the wrong, I might eventually feel guilt for making them seem dumb. To me morality is just the set of all the right connections between emotion and rationality, the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. Like physics it's built up from the individual level, which just gives us moral relativism. Oh, is it wrong to only be moral as a way of making oneself smarter. Wouldn't Kant say I'm only using others as a means? V.) THEORY OF MORALITY: Superego, what a great podcast 7 years wait I was getting out of the hospital when Eric image called me. I opened it. "Hey Beau, Jim posted on his social network page that you're in the hospital?" "Hey, yeah. They thought I had a stroke, but when I told them about the oflexes they said it was likely many miniature reperfusion injuries." "Ah you're still doing that? Doesn't that count as addiction if it gives you hallucinations and makes you all euphoric?" Beau nearly hesitated, "I almost never get the visual effects or euphoria any more, and now it makes me feel calm. Depending on what muscle I've used very recently I'll feel it swell up. It seems like my body's able to shuttle the oxygen to where it needs to go." "Except for your brain apparently, which is maybe why you didn't mention it just now." Eric smirked. "If you're going to do it anyway maybe... try hyperventilating right after each time to prevent any more reperfusion injuries. You have to take better care of yourself. "I see the truth of it," Beau echoed the line from Dune. "Hey I'm going to have to call you back, sir. I have to check on something." As I quickly shut the screen I could hear his eyes rolling. Couldnt be bothered, plus I knew he'd understand. I've begun to be able to see into the near future. Only glimpses. I didn't believe it at first either, I still don't believe it. And I don't know what exactly is causing this but I'm skeptically suspicious enough to pursue it. 'Seeing the future' is wrong too, I'll remember something and it'll be just as it's about to happen. I ignored these, as you do, like when you're not paying attention when walking and you suddenly throw your arms up just as you step into a driveway dip, and it softens your stumble. Little things. But after last night I've been remembering other times. We were over for a barbeque at Eric and Julie's new house playing the popular party game Brainpan. They had a bunch of their friends over and we were having fun, when my team landed on turquoise and so we drew the polka-dotted Anagram card. The clues were 'An American Statesman' and 'A Famous Landmark' and before even seeing the jumbled letters on the cards I blurted out "John Adams" and "Eiffel Tower." One could easily have been a coincidence. But two? Also, I noticed that around the time leading up to these, I got really distracted and inside my own head in a way. Which is out of character for me since I'm usually so socially starved I'll joke at anyone with at least one functioning ear. The handedness of all the mass in the universe is inexplicably asymmetrical. And no one knows why. I think our bias for remembering only the past was just as arbitrary. Adding new perceptual dimensions would've happened before as well with the spatial dimensions, multiple times during our evolution. Do bacteria even perceive 2 dimensions? So what exactly did I remember with the game? My hypothesis is that I was remembering the confirmation of me saying it in the future, in the present before it took place. It's as if an anthropomorphic train is chugging along on a track and it can somehow sense all the irregularities on the track via its wheels. But then someone installs a configurable visual system pointing forward so that it can predict what's coming up perceptually, as opposed to theory-dependent deduction. It would've only been a couple seconds time to perceive, so that's my current estimate for the extent of my future horizon. I decided that the best way to test it would be to use the Random function of my favorite search engine. I searched for the website, found the link, clicked on it, and closed my eyes. I imagined... what? The first thing that popped into my head was either Godzilla, Reptar, or a dinosaur. I figured all three wouldn't be cheating: after all I'm still figuring out this process. I slowly opened my eyes... to the Wikipedia page for the Random search function itself. Ok shake it out Beau, try again. I revised. I restricted the searches to images as they're more easily summarized, and I entered in a general category from which to give my guess context. Additionally, since I have no way of knowing what processes or features should be emphasized, I decided that after getting each image result to study it and select the feature that is most summarizingly relevant to me. I planned to fixate on this after the fact, with the assumption that if perception of memory was possible in both temporal directions, then by building up my experience of consciously remembering something in the future that I would build up some Hebbian plasticity to allow me to eventually perceive retrocausality. The most difficult part is distinguishing among past memories, my creative ideas, and any potential future memories. In the past seven years I've started exercising, got my own apartment, and even met someone. The day Mildred moved in I told her Keith's joke about the scientific notation phone number and she started. "Where'd you hear that story?" she looked aghast. "My old friend Keith said that happened to him a few years ago but I assumed it was made up." "Keith? Was that his name...?" She looked off into the distance for a beat then slowly caught my eyes. "Gullible." Yeah, she was great. Even if she does forget that I can tell when she's joking. She's even okay with not having biological children and shooting for AI offspring. I'm not sure how that's going to work yet. All I can do is head in that direction from here as quickly as possible. That will help the future version of my brain via traditional memory, which will then accelerate the future horizon I have to wait until my brain is ago-propagated with additional insights. Oh yeah, I've labeled 'ago' and 'wait' to be the two directions on the temporal dimension. So some day we may be able to actively travel 'wait', just as we now move up, forward, and right. Neuroscience surely is the bottleneck that hampers progress in every other field. The Nuomenal experiment was taking too long so we had to go back to the drawing board. Even Dr Tintinnabulum even began building off our work using holograms of different polarities and the polarized lens glasses used in 3d movies. I know we'll get it to work eventually, well I should say I have hope that we do. I actually went out and got another one of those little notebooks again. This was the first entry I wrote in it: -Power shown to repeatably corrupt even the most well-intentioned in studies -non-normative morality can use a dedicated social networking site -compatible with facial recognition software, people can rate others, -even strangers, record events, abstain from verdicting, upload evidence -To avoid corruption guilt with time horizon get as many responses to the following: Suppose you're somehow given the ability to see in to the future. What you see is like memory, it's sparse and based on what you notice. Whatever you notice becomes a constant, but everything else remains a variable. Because of this there's no such thing as a paradox. You don't travel to the future you just "see" it. And the kicker: you cannot do just any old thing with the information you gather. If more than "a certain threshold" of all the people on Earth would vote No on whatever action you decide to take, then you immediately lose the power before you can even do it. The problem is that without knowing the percent threshold, you're taking a gamble every time you don't act perfectly in line with absolutely everybody would want. Ok, so assuming the goal of keeping the power as long as possible, what information would you seek out in the future, and what actions would you take in the present? The rules are set let the games begin!