making others laugh and the need for love and acceptance

I am a ridiculous person. 

Though I can be deadly serious about things that I am passionate about, more often than not you'll find me saying or doing something just a little bit ridiculous - putting on a weird voice or acting out a character of my own devising, using terrible groan-worthy puns, or making up random songs about my current situation. I say and do ridiculous things when I'm with my friends, family, and peers, but I'll also say and do ridiculous things in public, among superiors, and even sometimes in professional situations. This is just a part of who I am. I value silliness and do not deem it to be mutually exclusive to professionalism and hard work. In fact, I find silliness to be essential to hard work. I need to inject a little silliness into my day to day life to keep me sane and to keep me energized when I've been slogging away at a project for hours at a time. 

me playing with bubbles on my 25th birthday+

I love being silly just because it is intrinsically gratifying. Being silly is fun and I think that fun is one of the most important things in life. Being ridiculous and yes, childish at times, helps remind me not to take things too seriously, to lighten up about my apparent problems, and to remember that things are never as grave as they seem in comparison to the plights of others.

I also love being silly because sometimes it makes other people laugh. I love making other people laugh. I crave it like a drug. There are fewer things more gratifying in this world than reducing a room to laughter. I will, without fail, try and strike out with jokes nine times out of ten, but it's that one time when I can get a room laughing that makes me keep trying. 

Humour also happens to be something that I find very attractive in other people. I say humour but more specifically I mean wit, the characteristic of being both clever and funny at the same time. Now, don't get me wrong, I love silliness for the sake of silliness - no cleverness required. But there's something about wittiness that I just adore. It's something that I try desperately to cultivate in myself, because I know how much I love a witty person, and I want to be that loveable too, dammit. 

I have begun to realize that my joy in making others laugh stems largely from a need for love and acceptance from others. When others laugh at one of my jokes, it's like they're saying, "We hear you, we like you, we care about you." This is so important to me. I was bullied as a child (as so many of us were) and humour became my way of attracting friends. I was overweight, awkward, and felt like an outsider as a preteen. I had some serious issues with my sense of self worth and it manifested in destructive ways. In my gradeschool class of peers who (in my eyes) were all incredibly intelligent or beautiful or athletic or artistic or what have you, I sought to create a unique identity for myself through humour.

After Robin Williams killed himself last year a slew of articles emerged about how those who are the funniest are often the saddest*. While research on the topic is still in its fledgling state, anecdotal evidence seems to lend truth to this notion. Just look at all of the comedians and funny people out there who have dealt with mental health issues and addiction. Perhaps these people use humour to secure the love and affection of others, just like I do. 

I realize that I may rub a lot of people the wrong way. I've gotten feedback in the past that I'm a bit 'intense'. But this is who I am. I am ridiculous. I am silly. I try to be witty when I can. I try to make others laugh. Whether it's borne out of a need for love and affection or stems from the intrinsic value of making others feel light, if only for a moment, this is as much a part of me as any negative feelings ever were or ever are. 

Thank you all for putting up with me. I hope I can make you laugh someday.

+ Photo Courtesy of Mel Althouse

* http://time.com/3103256/robin-williams-dead-jim-norton/

* http://time.com/3104938/depression-comedy-connection/

the realization that perpetually gouges me open

the chance encounter of their meeting as commonplace as any other,

significant in the way that nothing actually is.


they have histories of secret suffering kept from one another.

faces turned inward, away from the world.

away from each other.

childhood torment. families, slashed apart and thrown together. sacrifice. anguish. pain.

death.

a thousand untold stories swirling in every cell.


the complication of each is a mirror of the other.


they are both broken.


their jagged edges fit nearly seamlessly, save for the hairline cracks

where the light of their joining shines through.

disaster, cruelty, tragedy, and finding meaning amidst the absurdity of human existence: reflections from stoic philosophy

I can't help but feel helpless in the face of disaster, cruelty, and tragedy. 

The massacre of hundreds civilians in Kenya. The earthquake that killed thousands in Nepal. Police racism and brutality, in the States and elsewhere. Human beings are constantly faced with disaster, cruelty, and tragic circumstances that are outside of their control. I feel the pit of my stomach drop when I consider the senselessness and magnitude of the pain and violence that people have to face every day. My sheltered mind cannot begin to comprehend the hardships of others. 

I am reminded time and time again of the utter absurdity of human existence, of the fact that we are beautiful and brutal accidents. We have not been put here for any reason, let alone put here at all. We just are. We are the products of muddy circumstances and the imperfect heuristics used to navigate them.

Human life is not imbued with any higher meaning or purpose. We are all essentially fractional slivers of experience in an eternity of non-experience. The course of time, family genealogy and our own genetics have combined in such a way as to grant us the briefest glimpse of life. Thousands of us could be snuffed out at any moment, and for no good reason, other than the ideology of others or the movement of tectonic plates. Other than few influential people, most of us, when we die, affect our small circle, perhaps with a few fading ripples, but leave no other trace of having been alive at all. All lives end, and most marks fade, if marks were even left in the first place. 

We are islands of time with a void of nothingness spreading out infinitely behind us and in front of us. And we hurtle towards the void in front of us and try to do as much as we can with the circumstances we have, in order to feel that this little slice of time has meant something.

I draw on three meditations from Stoic philosophy* to keep my island from collapsing in on itself or being sucked into the void. 

Meditation One: The View from Above 
This meditation captures the reflections from the paragraphs above. It captures the absurdity of human existence, the fact that human life is not inherently imbued with meaning, that we are all drops in a vast ocean. Picture yourself from above the earth looking down, and meditate on the smallness and relative insignificance of your existence. Remember that your experiences, joys and sorrows alike, do not matter to most other people, to the planet itself, to the universe, to anything really. This keeps one from falling into the trap of egotism and narcissism but left unchecked can cause feelings of nihilism and apathy.

Meditation Two: The Inner Citadel
Just by virtue of being alive, having volition and consciousness, feelings and thoughts, we are infinitely powerful beings. Despite the fact that we are not externally imbued with meaning or significance, we have the ability to create meaning for ourselves. We can do everything we can with what we have to create lives and selves that mean something, we can do everything we can to make a difference in the world, we can experience things fully, we can learn, we can love, we can hurt and feel and experience at all. Time flows through us unrelentingly, within us and without us, but we have the power to alter the shape of our lives and this in itself is the closest thing to the divine that we can achieve. This keeps one from falling into the trap of apathy and nihilism, but left unchecked can lead to egotism and narcissism.

Meditation Three: Premeditatio
This meditation is used to practice gratitude for current circumstances. It is a common notion that we don't know what we have to be grateful for until we lose it. This meditation draws on this aspect of human psychology and instructs us to practice losing everything you love. Imagine that all that you hold dear were swept away tomorrow. It could easily happen, if the reports in the news are telling us anything. Imagine everyone you love, gone; all your possessions, destroyed; all your freedoms, revoked; all your dreams, crushed; your light and your life; snuffed out. Practice this and let it flood you with gratitude for the things that you have.

I find myself pulled between the extremes of egotism and nihilism, stretched thin between believing in my absolute worthlessness and my absolute importance. Tragedy, cruelty, and disaster are sobering reminders that we are all just blips of light in the darkness. But we are sources of light nonetheless, points of light where there could have been nothing at all.


* I draw particularly from the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, and my understanding of it is greatly shaped by the pedagogy of Professor John Vervaeke.

femininity, gender expression, feminism, and cognitive dissonance

I have come to realize that most of the things that are considered to be physical hallmarks of femininity have to do with not being in the world and having experiences. 

Meaning, these hallmarks of femininity are indicators of someone who is sheltered, kept indoors, away from the elements, and away from the world. 

Women wear makeup, because we don't have to sweat or go outside in the rain. We wear high heels because we don't have to run or walk anywhere. We wear dresses because we don't have to run or climb. We have long, perfectly styled hair because we don't have to worry about it getting caught in things. We wear painted nails because we don't have to use our hands. White women are deemed prettiest, because they don't go out in the sun. We shave our body hair because we don't need protection from the elements. We don't have scars because we don't come into contact with danger. We can't have wrinkles because we shouldn't age. We have to be thin, because we don't have to be strong and resilient in the face of life's challenges.

God forbid we actually went out and did anything.

This realization has caused me to struggle with how typical expressions of femininity play out in my feminism and in my gender presentation. Most of these typical feminine expressions are very impractical (as in, they take a LOT of time to execute), and many of them are designed for the male gaze (for example, heels put the body into lordosis*, pushing out the backside, which is also the position that female mammals assume when presenting themselves for mating behaviour+). 

I struggle with the idea that women can participate in these feminine rituals solely for themselves. This is not to say that I believe that it's impossible - I know and respect a number of people who fully believe that women can and do engage in feminine expressions to satisfy themselves and no one else. I'm just saying that I am incredulous. Yes, wearing makeup or wearing heels can make you feel better about yourself. But is it an intrinsic feeling better? Or is it extrinsically motivated, even in the smallest way?~

As a result of this line of thinking, I have made many changes in my gender presentation over the years. As the wonderful artist, writer, and all-around amazing thinker Clementine Morrigan^ once said of her gender presentation, I want to simultaneously celebrate and subvert femininity. I am very proud of the fact that I don't shave my body hair, or typically wear makeup, or typically dress femininely, or wear heels. But I do wear makeup sometimes, and sometimes paint my nails, and sometimes I like to wear skirts (especially because it throws people off when they see skirt + leg fur). This typically happens when I go out, and yes, I'll admit, I do it because I feel better about myself, but I feel better about myself because I think these things will enhance others' appraisals of my appearance. The result of this is an experience of cognitive dissonance whenever I "femme" up my appearance. 

I'll end by making it very clear that I respect however anyone wants to present their gender identity, and that I do not believe that engaging in feminine beauty rituals makes anyone a 'bad feminist.' That helps no one. We live in a world where, unfortunately, women are still valued for their appearances moreso than the contents of their hearts and minds, and there is a lot of pressure on women to present as typically feminine. I have no issue with others' gender presentations or identity - femme, masculine, androgynous, or anything in between - you do you, and for goddess' sake, love yourself and be happy with who you are. I just struggle with these thoughts sometimes, and thought I'd put them out into the world to see what comes echoing back. 

* http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3206568/

+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordosis_behavior

~ (I am incredulous but also relish conversation and debate so if you'd like to speak to me about this then please engage me.)

^ http://clementinemorrigan.com/

products vs. processes and the myth of infinite consumption

Odds are if you've spent some time around me you've heard me rant about the process-oriented nature of human beings and how stupid consumerism is.

Now, if there's one thing that I can't get behind, it's people who stand up on soap boxes and preach at you while not acknowledging their own participation and complacency in the very systems they are criticizing. So allow me to make the following disclaimer:

DISCLAIMER: I fully acknowledge that I benefit from capitalist, consumerist society. I enjoy it, to a degree. Most mornings I buy a coffee from Cafe Plenty. I really like to go out to eat. Once or twice a year I buy shoes that are made in China or some other low-income country where individuals are being exploited. Sometimes I buy things I don't need.

*exhale*

There. Now that I've got that out of the way...

We all have an ache inside of us. Well, I say 'We all.' What I mean to say is that, I suspect that here in the developed world, many of us, especially us younger gens, have an ache, an emptiness inside of us. An itch that can't be scratched. Why else would we sanctify notions like fulfillment, unless we experienced some sort of emptiness? What is fulfillment without a certain space to be filled? I feel it; the drive to improve, the yearning for love, for happiness. The deep, desperate desire to live a good life, a passionate life.

I'd hazard a guess that you feel it, too. Even just sometimes, when you're alone with your thoughts, trying to fall asleep, thinking, "What am I doing? What's it all for? What would I do if I could just drop everything right now and attend to this emptiness inside of me?" It's something existentialists and philosophers have been mulling over for years.

What is this emptiness? I believe that it stems from the knowledge that we have limited time. It's the ever-present implicit knowledge of our impending death. I know, a bit melodramatic. But in all seriousness. We are all painfully aware, at all times, in the darkest recesses of our minds, that time is running out, so we'd damn well better make the most of it. We'd better find love, fulfillment, acceptance, fun, happiness, comfort, passion, all those things that we long for and strive for, the end to all of our actions. Because time is running out.

I believe that human beings are fundamentally process-oriented. We are most fulfilled by processes. What do I mean by processes? Well, I mean anything that unfolds over time. A walk in the forest. A conversation with a friend. Enjoying a favourite meal. Listening to music. Swimming naked in a cool lake. Creating or appreciating art. Making love. Processes.

But the thing is, processes are hard. They require a certain amount of energy and dedication - some more than others. And many of them, the more social ones in particular, require being a warm and caring person around whom people would want to spend their time. It's hard.

Products, on the other hand, are easy. What's easier than going out and buying something? Assuming that you have the capital, of course (whether that comes from working two minimum wage jobs at 60 hours a week or having it handed to you because of your socioeconomic status). It's just so easy to go out to a store and buy something, even if you don't need it.

Advertisers and corporations, I think, pick up on this. They know that we're process-oriented beings, but that processes are harder to get at, and a hell of a lot harder to sell. So they disguise products as processes. You're not buying the makeup, you're buying the self confidence that the model exudes when that handsome man gives her the eye. You're not buying the car, you're buying the winding miles of driving down empty coastal highway. You're not buying the shirt, you're buying the approval, regard, and envy of your peers. Products disguised as processes.

So we try to fill this process-shaped hole inside of ourselves with products. And when that doesn't work, what do we do? Buy more products, of course.

And so the myth of infinite consumption is created. But the real myth is that we'll have enough stuff so that somehow, someday, we'll be happy. We'll have the big house, the cottage, the three cars, the massive entertainment system, the designer clothes, etc. etc. etc. etc. until we die, surrounded by all of our stuff.

And not only does this lead to extreme alienation and unfulfillment, but it harms our planet. Because hot damn, that new iPhone 7 is out and I need it in order to (insert process here) so I'll just chuck my iPhones 1 through 6 into the nearest landfill. I'll just throw these old products away. But, as we know, when it comes to our planet, there's no such thing as 'away.'

This is something that I have come to realize. This is why my phone looks like it's made out of lego. This is why I try not to buy products (unless they're absolutely hand-made, like the bracelet I got in Costa Rica, or if I absolutely need them, like winter boots). This is why I spend a the majority of my paycheques on concerts, meals with friends, and travel. I'm not saying that I am a perfect person - goodness knows I could do without most of the things I have, and sometimes I do slip up and make unnecessary purchases. But I'm trying.

Next time you feel that hole opening up inside of your soul, ask yourself if it's really product-shaped. Because I have a feeling that we're all being tricked into denying our process-oriented nature, to the detriment of our minds, spirits, and planet.

ricochet robots and the myth of static intelligence

My family is big into board games. I played a game over the holidays called Ricochet Robots. If you've ever played the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, it's basically like that chamber in the Ice Cavern where you have to push the blocks of ice into their proper spaces while using the walls and stalagmites as barriers. But with robots. 

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, basically, the way the game works is like this:  The point is to get the proper robot in its proper space in as few moves as possible. But, when you move a robot in one direction, it keeps moving in that direction until it hits a barrier, at which point it stops. If you take a look at the board it might give you a better idea of how this works:

image stolen from http://codehats.co/blog/2014/01/18/robots.html

So basically, a tile is flipped in the middle, and that tells you which space you have to get that colour robot to. In this picture, the tile in the middle is the blue moon. So, you need to get the blue robot to the blue moon space. The first move is to move the red robot up. Then you move the green robot over to the right. Then you move the blue robot (using the red and green robots as barriers) and get it to the blue moon. You have a timer that counts down, and everyone around the table just yells out how many moves they think it takes, and the first person who identifies and shouts out the fewest number of moves wins. In this case, it's eight. 

Needless to say, I was terrible at this game. (My cousin Mike could do incredible things - yell out 'twelve!' accurately without having had time to serially count the moves. His girlfriend Amy was giving him a run for his money, too. They're a good match.) Spatial thinking has never been my strong suit. But as I was playing the game, I could practically feel new neuronal connections forging themselves. It's not that I'm stupid, or that I could never be good at a game like this. It's just that I haven't honed that part of my intelligence. But as I continued to play the game, I was getting more and more answers, faster and with greater accuracy. I in no way approximated the performance of others around the table, but I felt damn good about learning.

If I had played this game a few years ago, I would have felt crushed in the face of my inability. I would have felt terrible about myself. Instead, I was able to see the game for what it was, and what it wasn't. It wasn't a measure of my worth as a human being, nor was it a measure of my intelligence. It was, however, an opportunity for me to learn and develop an aspect of my intelligence that I often neglect in favour of other aspects.

Over the years I have put a lot of stock in the label 'smart'. I grew up around kids who were fiercely intelligent and we were told that we were smart when we were younger. Marks in school were my way of measuring my self-worth. I felt completely ineffective in every other department of life - looks, sports, popularity, arts, you name it - but if I could just get good marks, I could cling to the belief that I was worth something. Big surprise, then, that when I got poorer marks, I felt like jumping out of a window. I put so much stock in good marks as a measure of intelligence, and as a measure of self worth, that any poor mark was a negative reflection of my intelligence, and therefore my worth as a person. 

So, I began to fear failure, because failure was a sign of my overall ineptitude. I would shy away from challenges, even things that I loved, like playing music, because my failure in any domain was tantamount to my failing as a human being. 

Research by Carol Dweck and colleagues* has actually lent evidence to the fact that praising children for being intelligent implants in children's minds the idea that intelligence is static. These children tend to care deeply about performance and see performance as a measure of worth. These children shy away from challenges and miss out on valuable learning opportunities. Children who are praised for effort, on the other hand, relish a challenge and see failure as a learning opportunity. 

It has taken me too long to realize that, contrary to what I believed as a child, intelligence is not static. It is fluid and can be changed with practice, and especially, challenge. I am still undoing the damage that the myth of static intelligence has wreaked on my mind. Now in graduate school, I am less concerned about individual marks than my overall learning experience. I am not afraid to make mistakes and try to grasp things that are just beyond my reach, because I have come to find that that is where real learning happens. More than ever before, I am putting myself in situations where I am forced to bend my brain in ways it usually doesn't, just to force the growth of new synapses. I don't want to be held back by my fear of failure anymore. 

So, if anyone wants to play a game of Ricochet Robots with me, or any other spatially-oriented game for that matter, I accept the challenge. I may get frustrated, and I may have to actively stave off those feelings of being a failure that still seep in at the edges of my consciousness, but damn it, I'll play. And I'll improve.

It is just a game, after all.  

* http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/75/1/33/

An Inimitable Game: the impossibility of artificial intelligence

I just saw the film The Imitation Game, about Alan Turing, fore bearer of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. First of all, let me say: SEE THIS FILM. It is one of the best I have ever seen. I was a wreck by the end of it. Turing was a genius and did so much for humanity and I just feel so scraped away and raw inside. So inspired. This film focused on his efforts in breaking the codes that the Nazis used in WWII. He was a genius, an enigma himself. 

I have to do something with my life. 

Damn.

Anyways.

I was (and remain) most familiar with Turing's work on the possibility of creating an artificial intelligence, having read Can Computers Think? and Computing Machinery and Intelligence during my undergraduate studies. In the work of his that I have read, he lays out a test for intelligence - the eponymous Imitation Game, also known as the Turing Test. He posited that, given the proper speed, amount of storage, and code, a digital computer could fool a human judge into believing that the computer itself was a human being. He was sure to reiterate that he was merely talking about the possibility of such a machine being created, and he had no reason to believe that this was not a possibility - after all, rudimentary digital computers existed in 1950, when he wrote Computing Machinery and Intelligence. For Turing, it was all a matter of memory and processing speed, something that the future would likely provide - the mechanics were already in place in his time.

I was (and remain) of the mind that we will never be able to create anything like strong AI. 

By strong AI I mean anything like sentience or consciousness. My reasoning behind this runs thus: Even the most powerful computer that can seem eerily like a human consciousness under the right circumstances is not consciousness. Take Jeopardy's Watson as an example. It seemed to have a personality, and certainly had the ability to respond to difficult trivia questions with an expertise that often outstripped its human counterparts. Surely someone who performed a Turing Test on Watson would be fooled into thinking it was a human. In my view, however, there is a difference between recalling vast amounts of preprogrammed information from a massive store and delivering it with a jocular preprogrammed personality and actually having intelligence. 

"But," you cry, "Aren't you being a bit chauvinistic with respect to your definition of intelligence? Doesn't defining intelligence necessarily preclude anything other than a human from having intelligence?" 

To which I reply, nope. I think a frog is more intelligent than the iPhone 7, or whichever one's out now. Yep, a frog. Probably even a fish. Humanity has yet to program anything with the intelligence of either. 

"Wait, what?" you cry, "What about all of the cool robots that exist? I hear about them all the time in the news."

I suppose my break from Turing's line of thought begins at the outset of his definitions of Machine and Intelligence. He defines intelligence as thinking, and he defines the mark of thinking as fooling a human into thinking that you're thinking (or, the Turing Test). 

To me, intelligence is so much more than this. Intelligence is consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to navigate through the world, to filter through billions upon billions of inputs and somehow selectively attend to just what's important. John Vervaeke, a beloved professor of mine from undergrad, would call this relevance realization. Though sentient beings can indeed become overloaded, we (and by we I mean all sentient beings, humans and frogs alike) have the ability to hone in on what matters to us, whether "matters" is defined as what's needed for survival, or if it's defined as what it takes to get that person from the other side of the room to notice that you exist. 

Furthermore, we can learn from what we encounter. (Turing's explanation for the possibility of a Learning Machine stems from the possibility of creating a child-machine that can eventually learn new propositions, but as I said, we have yet to program anything with even the intelligence of a frog, so I think a child is way out). 

I also believe that consciousness is necessarily embodied. 

"What?!" you cry, "Now, that's chauvinistic. Requiring a body for consciousness? That definitely precludes a machine from ever having consciousness."

Perhaps. But I believe that the experience of consciousnes is borne out of the physical/chemical dynamical system that is body-consciousness. I believe that all the aspects of the body (including the brain) - neurotransmitters, action potentials, hormones, proprioceptive system, sensory systems - are all required for the emergence of the phenomenological aspect of human consciousness. A programmer would need to program in all of these systems in order to achieve consciousness. Consciousness would have to emerge from these systems. Somehow.

"Somehow?!" you explode, "What the hell? Now that's a cop-out if I ever saw one."

Well. Yes. But if I had the answer to that 'somehow' I would know how to create consciousness. And frankly, I really don't.

Sentient beings are faced with billions upon billions of inputs, that require billions upon billions of decisions, every day. Inputs from the world, through every integrated system that we have in our embodied consciousness. Every second, our world, our inputs, our premises, change. We have to selectively ignore a great deal of extraneous information in order to zero in on what actually matters to our situation. Our world is messy and chaotic, every problem space has a million different paths to get from point A to point B. So far, as astounding as they are, the computers that we have still deal with discrete sets of data as input and discrete functions for decision making. A programmer would need the most giant RAM in the world and the fastest processor in order to approximate anything like relevance realization. And that would still be a pale approximation. 

It's not that a computer with the right processing speed, size of store, and coding could never be programmed to perform its functions rapidly in order to recall preprogrammed information, in order to present it in a way that answers discrete questions that are posed to it. A computer could definitely do that. They do, now. And they'll only get faster and built with more memory as time goes on.

But, that is not the game that we are playing. 

The game that we are playing is much more complicated than that. It is so much more than working with discrete pieces of input to perform discrete functions in order to churn out discrete outputs. It involves sifting through a messy world with constantly changing circumstances, and somehow filtering through it all and making some kind of sense of things, oftentimes with little to no direction or programming. 

How the hell do sentient beings do this? I have no idea. I don't think we ever will. It is an inimitable game.