Larger Minutiae Bites

• Good thing the Taste of Chicago runs for another week, because while I got to walk around yesterday, I got completely knocked out from a sickness today. My eye was killing me with a nasty, stabbity headache early, but the aspirin seemed to get rid of that OK. Though my throat is still killing me, even after a bunch of Halls lozenges, and now my ears have been messing with me. I’m hoping I get better by tomorrow, if not just for the Taste, but since I still have Animation homework to work on that I couldn’t finish on Friday.
• Speaking of the Taste, I always love it to death because of all the food you can try there. The big Chicago staples are always there too, but you can always count on running across tons of little treasures. Some of what I had for the whole day:
  • big potato pierogies
  • cajun sausage meatballs (very spicy, very good)
  • cookie dough waffle cone
  • saganaki (fried cheese)
  • BBQ boneless rib sandwich
  • honey fried catfish

  Yum!

• I am lusting for an iPhone, too. The Apple store that day practically blocked off the whole sidewalk with customers and photographers, and Michigan Ave. is congested already as it is. I just don’t know about the price and mandatory AT&T plan, though. I suppose with all that the iPhone offers it makes up for the price (especially over the phone I have now, I figure), but I don’t know if I can rationalize getting out of my family’s Verizon plan just for the iPhone…
• I mean really, the amount of praise the iPhone is getting (one rundown I like) is insane, and this is just the first generation before Apple surely will tweak and further fix things. And a lot of the sticking points seem to be things that can easily be patched – like e-mail format, missing copy-n-paste feature, to-do list, spam filters, Notes. I don’t know how feasible it would be, but a notes program and touch screen is calling out for a way to doodle or draw on the screen…

Wise Advice

The stock response probably would be that the guy’s a Luddite and such, but my Internet Lesson has been the Internet is largely pointless and ineffectual.

While I was offline, those who really wanted to get in touch with me did so through other means. In fact, when I got back online, the most surprising thing was how little I had missed. I had 370 e-mails but most of them didn’t say anything. The most significant inconvenience of my not using the Internet had nothing to do with people getting in touch with me; it had to do with my needing to reach others.
….
I suggest this as a routine for people who must spend their days in front of a computer and want to accomplish more: Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slows down productivity. As long as you read your e-mail and respond once every twenty-four hours, nobody is likely to notice. Dedicate at least half of your day to handling non-Internet tasks exclusively.

But I’m weak and stupid, of course.

I Like To Do Drawerings

As melodramatic as it sounds, it is a kind of eternal battle: the critic vs. artist. And there’s always, always a certain ideology built in depending which point of view you take. The truly gifted, unique artist vs. a stogy, close-minded, mean critic; The wise, weathered, steadfast critic vs. the deluded, self-absorbed hubris of an unoriginal/untalented/rough artist who needs their bubble burst. Sometimes people root for the artist, sometimes people root for the critic, but the ideal is somewhere in the civil middle. Although no matter how open you try to be in whatever role you take, some of that ideology is going to seep in. As an artist you’re told to always be creating and keeping at it and embrace your own vision, so it’s hard having someone step in that personal space and try to pick at it. As a critic, you have standards and reality to uphold, but in addition to trying to keep an open mind, it’s not often fun to deal with other people’s personal stuff and emotions.

And Christopher Butcher relating a case of delivering the harsh, critical truth is as sympathetic as anyone could be, but it still has those elements – the artists’ hubris, the terror of subpar-to-terrible art (with the animation portfolio links), criticism of a stylistic influence. Butcher, though, sounds like the best kind of critic you can run into though, given how much he still constructively helped the girl. And I know it’s hard to give honest criticism if it hurts, I had trouble commenting on the work of my peers in all the workshops and classes, trying to be as nice and supportive as I could.

And I think it’s also hitting close to home because I’ve also been attempting to become a professional as well, and I’ve certainly been in the positions of the girl and the portfolio kids. The portfolio horror stories make me question and fear my portfolios, and I’ve already been accepted to the schools I applied to for animation. Can’t be more glad I took those life drawing classes when I could at Iowa. From all the horror stories lately, I’m feeling ashamed to being influenced by anime. I’ve read enough of the kind of critic posts – ranging from brutal shadenfreude to genuinely but exasperatedly sympathetic – to try to take comments about my scrawlings with grains of salt handy (I mean, I know I am likely part of that uncritical “all-supporting fan community” he mentions). And I know I’ve got to keep things in mind (always improve; keep drawing from life; develop your own style and push yourself) and press myself to improve where I’m failing (still have issues with hands and anatomy; need more diversity and originality; better poses; backgrounds for once in my life, and how to at least make them look decent in Photoshop or wherever). It’s not easy, you gotta have thick skin to take the essential lumps, and work as hard as possible and then more. Gotta do original stuff, not the fan junk. Where does self-confidence end and entitlement/hubris begin?

Eh, I dunno. Life is hard, we are condemned to be free, and all that…

(Amusing to me, right before reading this I came across an oldish article asking why artists can be so badly negative about their own work.)

Why We Blog

I’ve been traveling a bit with my Dad, so Internet access has been pretty rare. So for quick content while I’m away from home, I decided to follow kalinara with this meme asking why you blog. I also did it because it’d be incredibly funny if I never posted again after this.

1. Bad habits are hard to break. Way back in 2001 I started submitting stories to Plastic.com (even winning a karma contest based just on story submissions – this, of course, was back around when people thought the Internet was of value). It’d probably be in with the “proto-blog” era with Metafilter and Kottke, so it wasn’t much of a leap to go from writing up stuff for a community weblog to a personal one.

2. I’m a self-absorbed egotist. I also get warm and fuzzy when I get linked and get big traffic numbers, and nice words. It makes me feel good to see if I’ve made some sort of effect, or made people think.

3. I am under the severe delusion that what I have to say is interesting and other people will read it. I guess it’s keeping the useless English and Cinema degrees fresh and trying to figure what to so with all of it. And I enjoy writing. So it ends up being some kind of outlet. Otherwise, I know I’d just be ranting at something, or someday wearing a sandwich board.

4. I like reading comments and discussions. Even though I don’t usually reply, since I’ve always had social anxiety, I do like having discussions or at least seeing what people have to say.

5. I like passing on interesting things, or showing my interests. From simple del.icio.us links to articles, it’s probably another holdover from Plastic, that I want to show everyone this cool thing I found or was passed onto me. Sometimes it’s a pretty niche interest, and it may be just something that got me excited. My photos on flickr are kind of like that, with all the pictures of ice and stuff. But it’s something that struck a note with me, and I sometimes try to express why or try to make some converts.

So that’s why I waste my time and effort!

I’m posting from Canada!

Best Left Unsaid – Unamuno’s Paradox

This is probably a really depressing and unsettling topic. It’s probably the worst thing to start writing about when it’s late at night before going to sleep.

I was sure there used to be on Edge.org, a very dense and heavy science and philosophy site, something I read a long time ago, for an article asking various experts on human consciousness. And there was a very terse reply, that I remember saying to the effect that consciousness was all a trick of chemicals and the brain. This is also filed in my memory with an episode from the old TV show Discover Magazine that used to run on the Discovery Channel years and years ago. It was an episode investigating near-death experiences, and the thing that struck me the most, and stuck with me for a long time was the conclusion, that the experiences were nothing but hallucinations generated from a brain starved of oxygen, and the piece ended right at that moment.

I couldn’t find that specific line on Edge, but I did find something that essentially deals with that thought. They were part of a yearly series of deep questions posed by the site. For 2006’s question, it was asking for a dangerous idea. John Horgan posed his dangerous idea, with the caveat of wondering if truth really does set us free or is better than lies and illusions. His idea was that there’s no such thing as souls. Horgan quotes the famous co-discoverer of DNA, Francis Crick from his book The Scientific Search for the Soul. Crick began with this blunt, incendiary statement: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

There’s always been an anxiety with humanity over the frightening possibility of being soulless, usually told through Sci-Fi Warning tales. Frankenstein, in Shelley’s book at least, was a fully conscious being raised from a construct of corpses; Dr. Moreau cut and sliced and grafted animals and bludgeoned them to have a consciousness and act human; pretty much any story involving robots and clones and genetically altered or engineered creatures, going back to Karel Chapek’s artificial humans in Rossum’s Universal Robots. It’s usually, though, safely revealed that those that look closest to us do, indeed, have souls, letting us have a huge sigh of relief and go back being happy, shiny people (Teen Titans‘ Conner Kent, a clone of Superman and Lex Luthor, is an example I can think of off the top of my head). How often are we assured sentient robots like, say, Star Trek’s Data, can attain a “soul”? A unique, definite identity is always stressed here, as proof of a “soul,” as if the achievement or discovery of a definite, concrete identity births that immortal soul into existence. Moreau’s projects of raising the animals to a human level ultimately fail, with the constructs losing their conscious identity and back to anonymous beasts.

An earlier question about what unprovable ideas the subjects believe in garnered another response on the topic by Jesse Bering. Bering bases his idea off of existentialist Miguel de Unamuno and a particular problem he had. As Bering explains:

Specifically, the problem was his own death, and what, subjectively, it would be “like” for him after his own death: “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.” I’ve taken to calling this dilemma “Unamuno’s paradox” because I believe that it is a universal problem. It is, quite simply, the materialist understanding that consciousness is snuffed out by death coming into conflict with the human inability to simulate the psychological state of death.

Bering then quotes research of how even people who think the “soul” is extinguished after death, still end up saying they believe a dead person who just died in a car accident would know he was dead. Bering, himself, doesn’t believe in an afterlife, saying “Recent findings have led me to believe that it’s all a cognitive illusion churned up by a psychological system specially designed to think about unobservable minds.” I used to always wonder, since the perception of sleeping and waking was almost in an instant, if the sleeping person was “ahead” in time than a person up all night watching them. The closest way to think about death, as I’ve been compulsively thinking about time to time, is the point in between falling asleep and dreaming, that one stretch of missing time of nothing. It frightened and freaked me out, the ultimate and sudden end of conscious thought, of everything. It was even more unnerving if it was during an accident or something with a sudden or gruesome death, which played into my fear of flying. Unamuno’s paradox and Bering/Horgan/Crick’s system have some interesting meanings. All heroism is the same – all heroes put their existences on the line and sacrifice them, violating humanity’s basic desire for immortality according to Unamuno. It wouldn’t necessarily matter how “successful” they were (one life vs. however many vs. one life that goes on to save however many), since the end result, ultimately, is nothingness. All life is either sacred (not wanting to snuff out a life into nothingness) or expendable (nothing leads to nothing, it’s all nothing, if consciousness is a chemical, living fiction).

Unamuno’s Paradox, and also the development of consciousness and identity mentioned before, plays into the research of Nicholas Humphrey, who studied the consciousness problem after 40 years, argues that natural selection gave us souls. Humphrey argues that since it’s so difficult and threatening for humanity to think “there is nothing more to human experience than the churning of chemicals and electrons within the brain,” that difficulty could have been formed by natural selection. Humans “have a self that seems to inhabit a separate universe of spiritual being. As the subjects of something so mysterious and strange, we humans gain new confidence and interest in our own survival, a new interest in other people, too. This feeds right back to our biological fitness, in both obvious and subtle ways. It makes us more fascinating and more fascinated, more determined to pursue lives wherever they will take us. In short, more like the amazing piece of work that humans are.” Humphrey’s is kinda on the brighter side of things.

So why is this pressing me to write about it now? It’s something that has always been plaguing me, sending terror chills laying in bed in the dark now and then, racking my mind with the same problem Unamuno did. My grandmother and mother, the other day, openly asked me the question of my belief in God after they apparently found out that my litter sister, off at college, had become an “atheist.” I waffled on my answer, because I didn’t want to trouble them, and ultimately responded that I thought it was impossible to definitively prove either way. I don’t know, I don’t think I can ever know. But that’s what’s faith is all about, they said, after a disappointed gasp and sigh. Faith, though, can be a delicate thing, and can fall apart after repeated blows that undermine the support of it. You may just not even be predisposed for it, a mental condition or structure of the brain or amount of chemicals. Mental illnesses can be traced to an imbalance of chemicals in the brain, or something abnormal or gone wrong; since identity and personality are formed from these illnesses, forming a distorted (in extreme cases like schizophrenia, and to a certain extent in lesser ones like depression) view of reality, how can you determine what the essential nature of an individual’s soul is, if it’s being filtered by a broken mind? It’s unsettling to think crippling mental illness or trauma to last in eternity in the soul.

Going back to Horgan’s dilemma, would it be beneficial for science to end up proving “The Depressing Hypothesis”? There are always stories about how an outsider takes down a illusionary society for the betterment of its people, now living in the “real” world. But there’s something I’ve wondered, like Horgan: what if that false society was really better for the “trapped” citizens than reality, and the outsider actually doing something incredibly detrimental?