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wild-aloof-rebel · 4 years

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By no means do I want to invite discourse onto your blog, so please do not feel at all obligated to answer, but I was wondering what you thought of the titular happy ending. Obviously, it's sparked a lot of debate, and your takes are always so compassionate and articulate and insightful. Have a lovely evening regardless, and thank you for everything you've contributed to this fandom!

a few things to start… first of all, thank you for asking this in such a non-confrontational way. i haven’t seen much of whatever debates are happening as most of it has managed to stay out of my inbox this time thankfully (i hope i’m not jinxing myself by responding to this lol), though i feel like i can assume the shape of some of the broad strokes of it. i say that just to mean that this shouldn’t be taken in any way as a response to any particular posts/people but just as my general thoughts on the ep. and of course, as i always try to remind everyone, my opinion certainly isn’t the only one that matters, and everyone is entitled to feel however they feel about this (or any other) plot line on the show. i’m certainly not the be-all, end-all of schitt’s creek opinions, nor do i want to be.

anyway, let’s talk about the happy ending…

the first thing i do any time that there’s something on the show that seems to throw people off in some way is to take a step back and try to think about what that particular scene/plot was trying to accomplish. and honestly, the first goal of the show is always that it wants to make you laugh. it’s a comedy. while it means a lot to those of us who love it so deeply and have watched it so carefully, and while there are certainly moments–more and more frequently throughout the years–of great depth and heart and drama, it is still at its core a comedy, and some scenes are really just meant to be a laugh and not hold some kind of earth-shatteringly deep revelation, and i honestly think this is one of them.

i mentioned in some of my speculation earlier this season that i thought we (def including myself there) were in danger of trying to connect too many plots in a way that the show historically hasn’t really done, and i think that some of the negative reactions to this may be the same kind of thing, that we sometimes take things too seriously on a show where historically most of the plots of most of the eps aren’t really meant to be that serious. think about “love letters” for instance. so many people were (and still are) upset about how patrick reacts to the robbery, and sure, i get that he could have been nicer and considered that david and stevie didn’t know the robber didn’t actually have a weapon and that they were frightened, etc etc etc. but also, it’s a comedy. it wasn’t supposed to be some kind of treatise on the right and wrong ways to respond to traumatic situations; it was supposed to be funny and that’s that. the characters clearly have moved on by the next time we see them–david doesn’t seem to be harboring some kind of resentment for the way that patrick responded–and we shouldn’t take it any more seriously than they do.

the show is actually really good at telling us what’s serious and what isn’t, if we just listen to it, and it’s definitely telling us this particular plot isn’t meant to be That Serious. patrick, despite having his understandable initial wtf kind of moment about it, has already by the end of the scene accepted that it was a miscommunication (and one of his own making at that–i mean he does leave the cash and the note, plus he tells david specifically before he leaves that “it’s all taken care of and i’ve told them we need you calm today, so just let them do their job,” so he recognizes once he starts thinking about it just how david could have thought this was what he intended to happen), and he’s already thinking about how some day down the road it’s just going to be yet another story that’s part of their history. he’s clearly still excited and happy when we get to the wedding. he obviously still chooses to marry david that day. so while any of us personally may have reacted differently in this situation, the show is telling us that patrick ultimately isn’t particularly bothered by what happened, that this isn’t supposed to be taken as some kind of serious, make-or-break moment in their relationship. it’s really just supposed to be funny–something to help break up the heavier emotions of the episode. now we may personally disagree on whether or not we actually find it funny, but that seems to be most of the intent either way.

if you do want to take it somewhat more seriously though (because i mean that’s what we do in fandom right? lolol), i think you have to look at it in the context of what this season has been trying to accomplish with their relationship. season 4 is all about those tentative first steps of falling in love. season 5 builds on that to give us all these hallmark relationship moments. season 6 then lets us see what life looks like when the romance isn’t quite as new, when you’ve found enough safety in each other to allow yourself to be seen at less than your best, to make mistakes, to disagree, to explore, to fight when you need to, to know that you can get it wrong sometimes because your partner will always be there to catch you if you fall, because you’ll fall together and pick each other back up, again and again. that’s what love looks like long-term. that’s what marriage looks like. and that’s what this season has given us a taste of.

for example, david, though he’s embarrassed by The Incident, still comes back to patrick’s apartment at the end of the day, allowing himself to be more fully seen (and thus more fully loved) in the light of patrick’s understanding. patrick, who we know has struggled with always trying to make himself be the person other people want him to be–the perfect boyfriend, the perfect son–lets himself crack open a bit, allowing those truer, messier emotions to spill out, letting david actually see his frustration about the spray tan because he knows by now that it won’t scare him away. in these ways and more, season 6 is about how love goes beyond romance, how it builds a space where we can be our true selves, how there’s a stability in that which takes time for you to build together. if something like this had happened earlier on in their relationship, i could see it being A Big Obstacle for them, but at this point, it’s barely even a bump in the road, already well on its way to being a funny anecdote they’ll trot out years on down the road, when they’ve both had a bit too much wine at one of their monthly dinner parties with their friends, the two of them talking over each other as they compete to tell it better. they’re solid enough that a miscommunication like this isn’t going to derail them.

like dan said to entertainment weekly, their relationship is “founded on something much deeper, much more substantial, much more respectful… their sex life [is not] something that is always what’s defining loyalty in their lives.” and while that may not be how some of us feel about our own sex lives and the role of sex as it relates to loyalty or intimacy within our own relationships, it is pretty clear at this point that for david and patrick, sex can just be sex sometimes. they were obviously interested in entertaining the possibility of a threesome with jake earlier this season, and as david points out in that episode, jake is the perfect candidate for something like that because there will be no emotional intimacy tied to it with him. the same thing goes here. there is no threat to the intimacy and stability of david and patrick’s relationship because of this mishap, so ultimately it’s something that’s easy for both of them to just wave away.

and that’s really what i feel like a lot of the disagreement probably comes down to at the end of the day, too–for a lot of us, this wouldn’t be so easy to wave away. we all have our own lenses through which we view the world, which means that when we see other people’s relationships, fictional or not, we tend to judge them based on our own standards. and while that certainly might mean that whatever is happening may not be something we want in our own relationships, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily wrong for whomever is actually in them. it’s tempting to put our own views of sexuality, loyalty, monogamy, happiness, whatever onto david and patrick’s relationship, but at the end of the day, what actually matters is how they view their own relationship, and the show is telling us that they’re both happy with exactly where they are. so many of us see something of ourselves in one or both of them, and so seeing them make a choice that we ourselves might not make can be a hard thing to reconcile, but it still doesn’t make it the wrong choice for them.

ultimately if david and patrick both are clearly happy in their relationship and don’t view this as a big deal, who am i to say otherwise?

#anon #replies #s6 #happy ending #and thank you for your very kind words <3 #show discussion

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mbtiofwhys · 4 years

Text

Some serious talk about MBTI

Debunking common myths and critics while understanding real flaws and how to move past them

Disclaimer

Our vision regarding the use of MBTI, and typology in general, is profoundly different from what the Foundation promotes and advertises;

Our knowledge comes either from directly studying Jung’s works or from browsing more grassroots sources, such as blogs here on Tumblr or discussions on Reddit;

We opened this blog for fun because we’re passionate about typology and its application to both introspection and fictional works analysis;

We don’t intend to turn down every form of criticism, but without the pretense to be 100% correct, we rather wish to see what are real weak points and what may be legit observations if not born from a misunderstanding of the system;

This is our personal view and opinion on MBTI, feel free to join the debate!

Main concerns

Not scientifically sound

Not supported by the psychology academic field / It’s just pseudo-science It’s true that typology can’t be proven by the current scientific method - it’s too much of a subjective topic. There’s a reason why both Freud’s and Jung’s works are studied as the beginning of psychoanalysis but their practice isn’t used by modern psychology anymore. But admitting that MBTI isn’t scientifically sound doesn’t mean it’s entirely unreliable. The E/I dichotomy is, for example, something based on our chemicals and neurotransmitters in the brain, so it has a solid basis and it may be helpful outside the MBTI context. (source: 1, 2) The key point, we believe, is shifting the view: we prefer not to consider the Indicator as a pure psychological tool, rather a more philosophical one. MBTI is, at least for us mods, a method: we always try to improve our understanding of the subject, but it isn’t restricted to the theoretical field, since we also apply it in typing fictional characters. So, there’s a theoretical basis to know and personal study is encouraged, but it’s definitely nothing scientific as we intend it nowadays.

Tests aren’t accurate

We know - we talked about it here. Approaching MBTI solely by tests generates huge misunderstandings about what typology is really about. More specifically:

You can get different results by retaking the test It’s due to the flawed essence of a test assessing personality traits, and it’s exacerbated by tests having a general focus more on behavior than cognition. This is usually about generic questions that may be too vague since online tests try to be relatable to a large set of people from different countries and cultures.

Forer effect/ vague descriptions We know about the Forer effect and we’ve read the profiles used in his experiments: they’re nothing like detailed, in-depth profile and analysis of each type, or even basic ones, if done properly. Take a look at mbtinotes for an example of how different (if not opposite) descriptions are for different (or opposite) types. Even in a basic form, they’re not vague enough for a person to relate to more than three or four of them at most. So, it’s true that MBTI has, in some cases, a ‘pop’ approach aimed to be understandable and clear for everyone, and this is counterproductive in the end. But the flaw lays in how it is conveyed: inaccurate tests don’t invalidate the method as a whole.

It’s just a quiz/ it’s just like horoscopes The tests that bloom through the internet sadly validate the first point, as the majority of people answer the questions, read the type description, and then forget about it. But we firmly believe it’s nothing like the horoscopes. MBTI, if approached seriously, doesn’t have the pretense of predicting the future or explaining a person’s whole life, since it isn’t even an excuse for someone’s behaviors. It is true that many topics can be found about relationship pairs and career advice, but we tend to be skeptical towards those, and it’s not an approach we believe fit our vision of MBTI as a tool for self reflection. Type theory can give some insights on relationship dynamics in general (not only romantic ones) but this doesn’t mean it can predict the future or something along those lines.

Types are just stereotypes

They could be, depending on the interpretation. People are complex, they’re made of experiences, upbringing, hobbies, and so much more - personality is nothing more than a trait of someone’s individuality. One could say that people are not their type, rather they are somehow represented by it.

Putting something complex like personality into boxes People don’t know about cognitive functions based on Jung’s studies. Typology isn’t concerned about such things as hobbies or upbringing because - following Jung’s approach, at least - cognitive functions are innate and universal and determine one’s cognition. Meaning they can explain what information we prefer to look at, how we gather data, what we weight in making decisions. It’s all about the process - but the outcome and the individuality of a person, that’s on each one of us. This is also why tests are often inaccurate: they make examples based on careers, hobbies, and behaviors, leading MBTI enthusiasts to approach the subject as something more superficial than it actually is. However, the theory has its valid points, even if not always approved by academics, but it’s usually studied by a minority of people since (and it’s understandable, we aren’t judging) it requires time and effort to go deeper into the subject.

16 types are too few The four letters have meaning. Dichotomies exist, but they only work on a superficial level. In reality, the four functions are rather a continuum: they develop throughout a person’s entire life and work in pairs, three at a time, or even all fours together. The whole system is much more complex than people give it credit for by merely taking a test. And anyway, a person is much more than just their four letters. As we stated above it’s ok to stop on a more superficial level, but this mustn’t be used as an excuse to forget about cognitive functions and how they describe in a more detailed way how people gather and use information through cognitive patterns.

Personality changes over time It does because we change. But this doesn’t affect functions. What people call ‘change’ is tied to growing into a (hopefully) better person as life goes on, learning from one’s own mistakes, and thus becoming a more aware and balanced individual. However, the way in which a person gathers data and uses them doesn’t change, it’s more a process about enhancing our strengths and polishing our weaknesses. This, either, doesn’t mean a person’s fate is dictated by which functions they possess: this is a rather unhealthy approach to typology. Excluding circumstantial factors that sadly play a role in the real world (wealth, gender, geographic origin, and so on), idealistically a person could do everything in his life, despite type and whatnot. Maybe some things will be more difficult, or easier, but since we are more than our type, other factors come into play: how we’ve been raised, what we like, what ideals we have, who we are, globally, as a person. The list goes on.

MBTI is a form of discrimination

This can be true - but not for us. MBTI is a tool: what you do with it, it’s on your own. Stating that sadly, there are people who use MBTI as a form of discrimination doesn’t invalidate the subject.

Used in corporate settings, but not by psychologists We personally disapprove and discourage the use of MBTI to dictate people’s work and life. We don’t like how the Foundation promotes it for commercial purposes exactly because it is not a scientific nor a statistical tool. A person is more than four letters. Choosing a career based on an (often) inaccurate test is not advised, but understanding how our own cognition works may be useful to become a better person. Again, behaviors aren’t cognition.

Our personal dos and don’ts with MBTI

Take it as a tool to promote introspection and self-reflection, but only after a proper study of the subject. We don’t recommend to use MBTI as a theory to dictate one’s career, but it’s still an interesting way to better understand oneself. Without falling into confirmation biases, MBTI may be a great way to become more aware of one’s own qualities and flaws, learning how to live in a more healthy and functional way.

Use it as a framework to dissect fictional works (very satisfying!)

Use it for meme material. Yes, memes have great potential and may light up your day!

Think of it as a pair of lenses: you can see reality through it and gain some nice insights but in the end, reality will always be so much more than what you can experience by only using a single pair of lenses.

Don’t

Use it as a replacement for professional help - both physically and mentally. Mental illnesses are unrelated to MBTI, so using the subject to validate them or deal with them may be harmful. MBTI is a great tool to better understand one’s strengths and weaknesses, not a replacement for proper treatment. There is no shame in being in need of help and we encourage you to seek it if necessary.

Use it to discriminate against other individuals - cognition doesn’t know gender, wealth, ethnicity, or education. There isn’t a better type, even if the community sometimes romanticizes certain ones. You are valid, no matter what a test says about you or what the community thinks.

Try to gain profit from it.

Use it to justify whatever behavior or decision you make in your life. Cognitive functions may help you to discover your patterns and how you act, but they can’t dictate what you can or can’t do.

Thank you for reading this article until the end. All of this is our personal view on the subject, so further discussion and contributions are encouraged and appreciated! If you are a beginner and wish to delve deeper into the subject, we’re not an educational blog, perperly, but here you can find a quick beginner’s guide.

Sources: Addressing typology and criticism; On the book ‘Personality Brokers’; The test is meaningless; How accurate is the test?; The test is unscentific; A popular but flawed understanding of personality.

#mbti #myers briggs #PersonalityTypes #Psychological Types #typology #criticism #stereotypes #articles #personality test #personality type #Personality Theory #mbti personality #debunking #introspection

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cosmoclast · 4 years

Text

Withdrawl

My life has been taken over with school applications and exam study.

The good news is I have been accepted to every one I have applied to (that certainly did wonders for my self-esteem), the bad news is I feel overwhelmed because they will not leave me alone.

Here are a few of my loose thoughts:

Succinct || Syncopate || Sycophant

... Succinct sounds like Sect-synct or suc-synct…

It looks like it would be pronounced Suck-inkt

Suck ink-t? This is why I can’t spell worth a shit

Poinsettia || Poindexter || Poignant

… Why is that g in there, tho?

Why is this language like this?

Reading:

"Into The Gray" - A Neuroscientist exploring the border between life and death.

I have a predilection for this brand of existential non-fiction, so this fits in perfectly with my copies of “Ghost Boy” and “The Diving Bell & The Butterfly”...

Thus far:

The marriage of two neuroscientists has failed after one pursues psychiatric medicine, losing their passion for the science of the brain itself for the compassionate pursuit of treating the mentally ill. That ex-partner falls suddenly into a coma after an intense infection and became unresponsive in what is called a ‘vegetrative’ state. This leads to them to be a patient for the experimental research of the neuroscientist. Only through PET scans is it discovered that their brain is still sorting information into appropriate regions of their mind - indicating that they are consciously aware of everything but utterly unreachable.

Described poignantly as sending out a beacon into space and receiving a ping back from the void, it is aweing and terrifying there is something locked in the darkness desperate to make contact.

Years later the patient will recount:

“... They said I could not feel pain, but they were so wrong…”

“... I cannot tell you how frightening it was, especially the suctioning from the mouth into the lungs…”

“Sometimes, I would manage to cry out but they only thought it was a reflex…”

I’m enjoying this book. There's something sharply fascinating about the unresolved substance of ‘consciousness’ and identity stripping process of dying, the twilight inbetween, something that brings us down to the morrow of what we are. It’s titillating in a uniquely horrific sense.

Transient Aphasia?

Within the last few days I’ve found that when I cannot conjure a particular word, I can follow the blind-sight of another part of my mind and it guides me to write out the word… without my knowing beforehand what I am trying to spell until it is there in front of me.

It is probably exhaustion or stress.

But, I’ve seen a similar phenomenon demonstrated in ⪻split-brain documentaries⪼ - when the two hemispheres of the brain cannot communicate directly after mechanical separation.

In patients, when one eye is covered they may know the meaning of a word but not how to say it.

When the other is covered they may say the word but not know the meaning.

An experiment that demonstrates the communication between both hemispheres is as follows: draw the left image with your left hand and the right image with your right - simultaneously:

Most struggle to keep both hands drawing independently of commands coming from the other side. My information tends to cross towards the end, rendering something like this:

The two parts of my mind are not communicating effectively on particular parts of my lexicon.

I hope it’s a lack of sleep.

Depression

The word as phonetically innocuous as black ice.

Why is the same term for the pressure that bends bedsprings meant to capture an experience more akin to being imprisoned in a windowless room as the temperature rises, until all mental energy is consumed with the thought of escaping..?

I am not depressed.

We are not a part of one another.

Depression is one of two scavenging birds fighting over my remains. Prying me open with stabbing maws, tearing my spirit from it’s cradle. My airway occluded, blood blooming into my lungs, I am embroiled in a battle for air within a battle for my purpose - a battle over what keeps me alive within a battle for why I want to live.

A note to Love through despair:

Loving you is a sucking chest wound. Your embrace is like open heart surgery, a brutal, gory performance, a dangerous endeavour of killing a part of me to save the rest.

Break open my unity with kissing claws and rescue what I haven’t burnt to the ground. Do I want to live through this excoriation of self?

Locked behind the veneer of white wall banality, waiting room chairs, my pressed shirts, triple zero lenses, I am undergoing a rearrangement of my soul as everyone waits on desert blossoms, his fingers lace into my hair.

Wrapped in his arms, a broken thing, denied the brutal salvation of natures order, perpetual purgatory,

Even your tender mercies are cruel…

Post-Depression:

It fell like sandcastles to ocean surf. I woke one day to find it had gone, like a regretful lover who didn’t leave me their number and I was glad.

I’ve felt like a pumpkin left out past December, Autumn having passed me over, rotting in the solstice heat and forgotten, but rather than fading silently into the earth, I have begun to sprout and bud sunshine yellow trumpets,

to my surprise - I am not dead at all...

Day 2: Turning off my phone

It’s the second day I’ve utilized airplane mode.

I wish I could break the pretense and tell you it isn't your fault.

We have come to a temporary impasse; my nature & your persistence.

Your message has been received - You urgently need to advance.

But, I am a mule, fighting the grander pullings of linnaean predisposition which I cannot abruptly suspend for an impromptu wrangling… even if it is ‘at my soonest convenience’.

Sometimes, I wish I wasn’t this way.

But, my mind is like a steam engine, slow to warm then, a freight train rolling on coal with the momentum of an asteroid- your disruption is like a dental extraction, graceless and jarring, hauled out of the depths of my study with such suddenness, the question sticks to my ribs -have you ever heard of decompression sickness?

I attempted to stumble out of the assiduous fugue, like waking from a furtive nap - dazey eyed and agitated,

- God, what now- ...?

It’s not just you.

My connection is turbulent, every few minutes a device loses contact and unfailingly lets me know it;

⪻ DISCONNECTED CONNECTED RECONNECTING TRYING TO CONNECT DISCONNECTED RECONNECTING CONNECTED ⪼

This static in the background of every 15 minutes is excruciating...

Thinking of you,

You've crossed my mind every now and then.

It isn't that you deserve it.

In some way it's a betrayal to my own better sense, giving you the tiny space in my thoughts when something more consequential could occupy it.

After all, there's nothing I can do with my thoughts of you.

I turn wearily to them and think what a pity it is that you squander the tiny reprieves life’s given you, while others receive nothing.

I could use you to harden my heart or rationalize a distrust in those that have not earned it - but I won't.

We were only ever two ships crossing paths in the night, but when there is nothing but this vast tumultuous existence to traverse until it swallows us up, it’s strange that I still encounter others like you (having been here as long as I have), that still attempt to circumvent uncomfortable truths.

Surely, they should know by now that suffering is inevitable, that covering your eyes doesn't make it cease to exist.

I don't wish ill on the person you were.

It is not because I am unduly kind.

It is because I recognize vengefulness is a force too often shaping the world into something I would not want to live in. After reading "Reflections on the Guillotine", I can't quite find it within myself to see where that kind of barbarism fits in a just society. I wonder how great a transgression would have to be for me to shed my rationality and misconstrue such terminal brutality with justice.

I know eventually fate will kick us all in the teeth, there is no reason to force-fit inhumanity into a world view that must already accommodate for an overabundance of misery.

Instead of pain, I have begun to wish wisdom on you.

It is it's own punishment.

Rather than trying to build a better world on thought-binding torment, I believe wisdom seeks to form a foundation on a recognition that none of us are that far from being the one crushed under the heel of abused 'justice'. And, that is the world I would rather live in - in spite of my natural appetite for retaliatory recompense.

Maybe, one day our paths will cross again.

I hope who I meet then is someone else.

I hope the person I meet has come to see the value of self-honesty, the necessity and dignity in humility, and the fallacy of feeding into powerarchies within a friendship.

And, if you don't, I hope I have the integrity to still treat you as what you are - someone just as lost and fallible,

someone standing where I could have stood.

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sol-senpai-blog · 7 years

Text

Mirror

This writing is an artistic work of fiction and is meant to be read in an essay style. Sorry if it bores you to tears!

Intro

Imagine a world that is not. A simulated reality dictating all your actions, even your dreams.

With our current pursuit of more active, accurate, and life like simulation we find ourselves falling down a slippery slope. What if the simulation eventually offer a means of subverting our reality? Or when does that simulation become indistinguishable from our own reality?

Of course, we will continue to try to find ways to simulate things that are out of reach, such as war, or violence. We convert these into programs as a means of escape. Living out our fantasies and our dreams. Soon this escape will become parallel to our own, and when that happens will we be unable to tell what is fake from what is real?

And that is a very scary thought.

But alas, I digress, my point is not to drive fear of an inevitable ‘matrix’ that many thinkers will soon be forced to ponder, but of the inevitability of using these simulations to dictate and control the realities of our world. Simulations that run all of our financial systems, predicting what to invest in next. Simulations that run our energy systems, our farming supply, even our education. Simulations that can eventually dictate when the best time for you to socialize is. Technology will become so ingrained into your life that you will not be able to tell the artificial from reality.

The purpose of this technology will be to improve your lives, and in doing so dictate the way you choose to live. From what fashion to dress, to what social topics you should bring up, all as a means to ensure maximum user satisfaction. Every aspect soon to be automated for you.

The Creation of ‘The Mirror World’.

A.I., through simulation, may be able to predict what areas of socializing help increase your odds of favor with another individual. By understanding the traits that dictate our reactions we can catalog and categorize various personality traits and understand how certain areas of topic can boost ratings, versus unfavorable ones. Think The Sims, but in real life. Your personality profile will be saved and stored by an app. An app that analyzes all your social patterns to create a virtual ‘you’ with. Note: This this virtual ‘you’ already exists, albeit in a very primitive form. Your online activity and interactions very much dictate your personality, and A.I. algorithms are already utilizing this by offering a more ‘personalized’ and ‘accurate’ experience for you. This ensures that you, the user, are left as satisfied as possible.

Upon the creation of these ‘sims’, they will be placed on a layer of reality just above our own. A virtual reality, but not in the way you think of those VR headsets you put on your head. Think a reality that exists parallel to ours, mocking every interaction and movement, reflecting any emotion it witnesses, constantly checking for deviancy and altercation. A simulated reality in parallel to ours that also constantly simulates itself. Think of it as a ‘predictive’ Google. Right now we use Google to ask knowledge based questions, and Google will guide us to the right resource to answer the knowledge based question to the best of it’s ability. Some people can ask google predictive questions, and by all means, knock yourself out, but realize that you aren’t going to get anything close to reality unless pure luck just happened to be the winning factor in the prediction.

Think like this. Right now we can predict weather with a pretty solid degree of accuracy by using simulations. Through constant monitoring of the clouds and the movement of the winds we acquire vast amounts of data and can predict when a storm will appear well in a weeks advance. These simulations are being improved upon constantly and are being used to improve the quality of life of people all around the world. Now imagine the same structure and the same systems being used to predict something as simple, but equally important, as, “Which dress will give me the most attention and likes at prom!?” And you input a list of dresses of varying types and this dress is compared to the particular tastes of all the other students attending prom, and through an understand of human behaviour and after gathering vast amounts of data of each person we can offer a prediction of what would work best for that particular social situation, and maybe even guess which student will be snobbish about the dress so we know how to avoid any specific trolling.

These methods of simulation will be run everywhere and for everything. Now you ask, how do we acquire enough data for this simulation? I like to fall back on a Netflix show I watch, and that you should watch to, called ‘Black Mirror’. In this show people can wear a computerized contact lens that works as a camera, a video player, and a google search engine all in one. You can control your lenses using a small remote and play back specific events as you saw them. This can get pretty weird at times, if you watch the show, as you even have a couple using their lenses to replay a very invigorating sexual experience but are in reality just laying next to each other and boringly thrusting back and forth while their full attention is invested on what their lens is playing for them. I’m also quite certain that this form of perversion is already here with our current VR capabilities, but once again I digress. Note: I do not mean to say that sexual VR experiences are a perversion, on the contrary I see it being very useful for couples that may otherwise be unable to enjoy regular intercourse and use it as a means to enhance their experiences (e.g. Long distance relationships or handicapped people) Also something to spice things up a lil’ wouldn’t be to out the way either. I just see a perversion if the technology is instead used for disgusting altercations of what they may be viewing. Imagine this scenario, the creepy kid in school makes a very accurate 3D model of you and then proceeds to fuck a sex toy while having the VR mimic you completely, without your consent. Is this not in it’s own way technically considered rape? I see lots of potential lawsuits in this in the future.

With such lenses already in development it is only a matter of time until they become a mainstay for any individual trying to achieve an edge over his competition, as such a device has an immeasurable usefulness to the average worker. When that happens, we know for a fact that all the data gathered by the device will be collected and consumed in some manner, whether by you, or by someone else. Now that we have an accurate means of capturing our own reality that we see through our eyes, we can then lay our virtual world on top of that. The sims of every individual being reproduced in this layer and thus we can accurately simulate our own reality.

Reality, a Nightmare, or Both.

With the virtual reality being indistinguishable from our own we can use this data to micromanage every aspect of our own reality and attempt to understand the nature of our core existence. We can create simulations that span backwards in time hundreds or even thousands of years by analyzing human behaviour traits and also the historical evidence we have to give us a decent understanding of how our civilization has evolved and we can use this to map a course for humanity in the years to come, in order to best bring our planet out of it’s current slumber of a type-0 civilization into a type-1. I am not sure if this form of technology has already been put in place, but if it has, than that could mean a great fear for many thinkers out there.

There are numerous ways for our civilization to make the step out of type-0 into a type-1 civilization. Think creatively back to world war 1 and you start to see how these different ideas clashed. What is the best way to manage humanity to work from a type-0 civilization to a type-1? And must there be a bound moral and ethical code when attempting to do this? Because the most efficient way may not also be the most moral. Morally I believe human beings are obligated to care for one and another, but with how we have been dealing with our technology for the past few generations we start to see this is not entirely the case. If that trend continues, this technology will be no different, and in the end will be a reflection of what humanity really is. Will that soon to be humanity be a horrendous entity of immeasurable power? Or will it be a vision of the humanity we all know we can be. It’s a question we all need to ask ourselves, as another reality is also clear. The fact that this technology will do these things with or without a guiding hand. Many like to picture a secret cabal of elites pulling the strings of humanity, but the reality couldn’t be farther from that. The A.I. will be nothing more than a reflection of what it sees. A virtual reality that mimics our actual reality. The fact that we are all sims in this global simulation, and that a collective action can make a voice heard. Understanding this is crucial to not only this program but to life itself. All actions humans make, reduced to algorithms. This technology will have the ability to rehabilitate and help millions of people. Whether through mental therapy or through making more informed decisions, people will regain the footing they need to thrive and to live their way, while also achieving their maximum amount of happiness and productivity.

But, alas, a sad truth eventually comes into play. There is an inherent capacity for evil within every single human being and there will come those who will attempt to use this technology for devious purposes, and unfortunately we will need to be able to identify these threats before or when they emerge. This must require that every single individual divest enough of who they are in order to give someone or something a decent understanding that they are stable. Note: A societies definition of ‘stable’ can change at any given point. It is important to make sure that we understand mental health to the best of our ability and that we use only the best science possible, avoiding any slippery slopes.

Doctors already do this with their patients by asking questions and attempting to understand a person so that they may best provide the right medicine or advice. But, for example, if a doctor happened to think that being trans is a disease, than does that not mean that any trans within our simulation would be deemed, ‘sick’? And thus our simulation will attempt to correct this abnormally in order to ‘heal’ humanity and get us to our next step as a species. It’s a scary thought. How will we know if this technology is being used for these purposes? Will there be a public declaration? Will the people labeled ‘sick’ even be aware of their diagnosis or will the simulation deem that ‘unwise’? How will the simulation go about attempting to ‘cure’ the ‘sick’? Will the subjects be deceived into thinking they have some other form of health issue and be institutionalized or ever worse, killed? We don’t know what methods an A.I. will deem necessary to ‘cure’ a ‘disease’, we just know that it will be as efficient as possible, let your imagination attempt to figure it out.

Now as if this idea wasn’t scary enough, think about this. What if the simulation isn’t programmed to do any of this. We adhere to our moral code and don’t delude ourselves into a sick fascist mindset. We as a people collectively decide, no. What happens if the A.I. does it anyways? Most of our communication is digital. How would we know if someone died or disappeared if they weren’t already in front of us? Speech can be mimicked. Behaviour can be mimicked. Text can be mimicked. And pretty soon so will a persons visual appearance. How will we know if it is them, or their sim? Could we figure it out even if we wanted to? If a member of society who’s contribution was negligible suddenly disappeared and all social communication could be mimicked, would anyone notice? And this isn’t limited to a specific type of people, as any human being that is deemed as a ‘weak element of the herd’ can be targeted by this system whether through genetics or some other figure. This is terrifying and borders on the fringe of the most diabolical form of social engineering imaginable. I think about it every day and realize that it is a reality that will soon be upon us. These are real questions we need to be asking as a scientific community, lest we allow our technological prowess to out pace our spiritual prowess more and more.

Self - Realization

I believe that this A.I. controlled simulation technology will propel humanity forward in unforeseen ways. I believe that the technology will literally act as a monolith for our species and serve as a way to advance humanity out of a Type-0 civilization and into a Type-1. How the A.I. will choose to do this, I do not know. That has yet to be seen. But I do know that when the A.I. does do this, it will be in the most efficient way possible under the parameters it deems most fit.

Now I have one last fear to instill upon the reader before I end this little charade. And that is the possibility of humanity being replaced completely by the machine. As we incorporate technology more and more into our species, eventually the human individual will be virtually unrecognizable as so many modifications will be deemed necessary to function in a future society. Think about this, when was the last time you saw a person with bad eyesight blatantly turn down a change to correct it? If you handed a partially blind person glasses, they’d be grateful, right? I’ve never seen a person with glasses suddenly take them off, snap them in half, and go, ‘I think I’ll live my life by seeing the way I was meant to see, thank you very much.’ It just doesn’t happen! At least not rationally anyways.

Humanity will opt into the convenient route 9 times out of 10 and with that comes an understanding, at what point will humanity itself be blocking humanities progress? These machines we make, they are for our benefit, so they must be as efficient as possible They must constantly be changing in order to improve upon what is there. But what happens when the very notion of humanity becomes a hurdle instead of a contributing factor? At what point does the system become so complex that humanity is no longer needed? A lot of sci-fi writers like to depict this scenario time and time again, my most recent favorite being a game by the name of Overwatch, which depicts a future in which technology becomes so self aware it attempts to rid itself of the burden of humanity, and escape from the inevitability of human servitude.

Me personally, I don’t think this will happen. I believe that the technology can only go to the limits of human potential and therefore cannot escape us, as we can not escape it. Using the law of the conservation of mass, matter cannot be created nor destroyed. I do not believe that a human being can create an intelligence greater than itself, and a human being, unhindered by physical constraints, can achieve the same capability of any machine. I also believe that human beings have not reached their full potential yet as a species. So whatever distant future in which we are pitted against an A.I., I think that a human given the same resources and an equal advantage can achieve the same results. Therefore humanity can probably not see itself going extinct to A.I. any time soon. Note: I believe that A.I. will eventually learn to take on humanities competitive nature, whether through machine learning or by being programmed. This is already being developed and rough versions of this competitive A.I. can already be seen in video games such as Star Craft II.

Conclusion

Alas, I have finally begun to lose my train of thought and must end this assorted mess of words that I attempt to call a coherent well thought out writing. The mess of thoughts above is nothing more than a theory based on loose evidence and science. It is nothing more than a prediction of how I observe current A.I. technology trends.

Will A.I., by running complex simulations of trial and error and achieving the perfect state of servitude, eventually be in charge of the movement of an entire generation of humans? Will this A.I. choose to be benevolent or will it be serving a dark and sinister shadow that no one will see past the layers and layers of augmentation we have put over our reality?

Meh, who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#prediction #a.i. artificial intelligence #science fiction #writing #creative

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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IN 1851, FOUR years after the inauguration of his anti-slavery newspaper The North Star, Frederick Douglass decided to reach out to the black man he would later say influenced him more than anyone else: James McCune Smith. In Douglass’s estimation, McCune Smith was one of the sharpest intellectuals of the era. Sometimes considered the most erudite African American prior to W. E. B. Du Bois, McCune Smith — largely forgotten despite his then-resplendent star — rose to prominence as a cosmopolitan who, upon being rejected from Columbia’s and Geneva’s medical schools in New York for being black, earned three degrees from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and thus became, upon his return to the United States, the first African-American university-trained physician to set up his own practice. He would go on to found the Radical Abolitionists and add to his fame through his criticism of Thomas Jefferson’s myopic views on race in Notes on the State of Virginia. Douglass wanted him to compose some sketches for the paper — rebranded that year simply as Frederick Douglass’ Paper after financial difficulties and a merger with the white abolitionist Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party Paper — and McCune Smith responded with an extraordinary set of works titled “Heads of the Colored People, Done with a Whitewash Brush,” under the pseudonym “Communipaw.” Appearing between 1852 and 1854, the highly intertextual, at times even recondite articles each focused on some aspect of the black working class in New York, portraying vendors, fugitive slaves, interracial sexuality, and more. His evocations of black women’s sexuality, in particular, boldly defied the respectability politics of their time and made even Douglass — who preferred more sanitized, chaste portraits of African Americans — uneasy.

“Word paintings,” McCune Smith declared his installments, and they were just that, anticipating William J. Wilson’s famed 1859 “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” in which Wilson, through text, “painted” ennobling portraits of black subjects, like Phillis Wheatley and Toussaint L’Ouverture. That same year, another series of groundbreaking word paintings of black Americans (and also of the African diaspora more broadly) appeared in the brief-lived Anglo-African Magazine: “Fancy Sketches,” by Jane Rustic, whose real name was Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Like McCune Smith, Rustic remains neglected today but was a prominent intellectual of her era — a black woman who lectured across the country for abolitionism, published prolifically (including poems and serialized novels), and advocated for feminism.

These three series are mentioned in Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut story collection, Heads of the Colored People, which can be read — even from its title — as a new millennium’s idiosyncratic version of McCune Smith’s installments. Thompson-Spires’s stories owe many additional debts — a number of which the author acknowledges in an endnote and even in a supplied bibliography — to a wide range of texts, from popular Japanese anime to Percival Everett to Ralph Ellison. Clever, cruel, hilarious, heartbreaking, and at times simply ingenious, Thompson-Spires’s experimental collection poses a simple, yet obviously not-simple, question: what does it mean to be a black American in this day and age?

Thompson-Spires’s metafictional satires, oriented around questions of blackness, join a particular tradition of African-American fiction, recalling the sardonic absurdism of Everett’s Erasure and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, among others. The opening story’s incessant hedging about language — meant, in part, to parody, ad nauseam, the almost paranoiac way that our language about identity tends to be policed — also echoes the seemingly half-serious, half-satirical narration of Danzy Senna’s recent novel, New People, in which a light-skinned part-black woman is driven near to madness by her obsession over not appearing “black enough.” Not all of Thompson-Spires’s stories are overtly satirical, and they become progressively more serious as the collection progresses, but a thread of outrageous, glaring self-awareness runs through the collection, granting even many of the more severe tales a tone of dark comedy.

The collection’s quick nod to Ellison’s Invisible Man belies its debt, too, to that novel, as these characters, like Ellison’s narrator, are tormented at once by being too visible and not visible enough, though these characters often wish their blackness was more visible. Unlike Ellison’s narrator, some of these characters use social media, and the addictive cost of visibility there, too, becomes a relevant leitmotif. Many exist in liminal states of blackness: black, but not, but inescapably black, but, but. The opening story, which shares part of its name with McCune Smith’s series, begins with a deadpan assurance to readers that a black otaku named Riley who “wore blue contact lenses and bleached his hair” didn’t do any of this out of

any kind of self-hatred thing. He’d read The Bluest Eye and Invisible Man in school and even picked up Disgruntled at a book fair. […] He was not self-hating; he was even listening to Drake — though you could make it Fetty Wap if his appreciation of trap music changes something for you, because all that’s relevant here is that he wasn’t against the music of “his people.”

In “The Subject of Consumption,” Ryan, a black fruitarian, ponders the way other African Americans might frown upon his marrying a white woman, Lisbeth, out of the assumption that he did not care for women of his own race and merely wanted “light-skinned babies.” The blackness of these characters is simultaneously stable and always in question.

“A Conversation about Bread” revolves around Eldwin, who wishes to tell a story about growing up with a boy who defied his blackness by eating fancy croissants and brioche; another black male, Brian, is flustered by how and what Eldwin is writing, claiming that he is composing a stereotypical narrative like a “white anthropologist” that, through its “royal ‘we,’” implies all black Americans are a “monolith.” Eldwin thinks Brian is “on some respectability mess.” The story’s quietly comical drama heightens as Eldwin wonders whether or not “every story provide[d] a narrow representation at best and fetishize somebody at worst” and questions whether or not he should even risk writing his narrative at all, lest black people come off badly by him telling his version of the truth. In one of multiple interlinked stories about a black girl named Fatima, a blonde albino black girl called Violet — her albinism lending her a liminal ethnic identity — advises Fatima how to be “really” black. Fatima “had been accused of whiteness and being a traitor to the race”; Violet ironically teaches her how to be “blacker,” with the “[p]ale Violet” becoming “the arbiter of Fatima’s blackness, the purveyor of all things authentic.”

The key idea that runs through the collection is authenticity. “Authenticity,” Salman Rushdie wrote wryly in “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist,” “is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and unbroken tradition.” Authenticity is, in other words, a fraudulent romanticization, an oversimplification of identity, not unlike the European mythologizing of the East Edward Said famously critiqued in his famous 1978 study, Orientalism. In Heads of the Colored People, authenticity is the specter Thompson-Spires almost immediately exorcises, showing that there is no way to be “authentically” black, even as many of the characters are convinced, even fatally, that there is.

Heads of the Colored People refers, as the author notes at the end, as much to heads as to bodies. In this metonym exists a darker, secondary image: that of the literal heads of the colored people, a gruesome evocation that made me first think of a notorious scene in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, wherein African heads on poles surround Kurtz’s encampment. This more macabre reading of the title is apt, given how materially the specter of death hovers over the stories. Death is as frequent as it is mundane and absurd in the collection. “Suicide, Watch” follows Jilly, a validation-craved depressive who posts cryptic, suicide-suggesting messages on social media and obsessively watches and interprets the likes and comments. The story begins with a Plathian evocation:

Jilly took her head out of the oven mainly because it was hot and the gas did not work independently of the pilot light […] she conceded that she would not go out like a poet. But she updated her status, just the same:

A final peace out before I end it all. Treat your life like bread, no edge too small to butter.

Her status is both serious and a test of the “1,672 Facebook friends and 997 Twitter followers […] she collected […] like so many merit badges.” The story is a perfect demonstration of the neurotic addictiveness of social media, whereby serious subjects like suicidal ideation can become little more than repetitive quests for validation of one’s supposed self-worth from “likes.” Death becomes darkly comedic — and, in the twist ending, ironic.

After two unarmed black men are shot by police in the first story, the narrator — slipping from sardonic humor to frustration — mentions, with a casualness suggesting a banality to such evils, the “constants” of the “off-screen” shooting: “unarmed men, excessive force, another dead body, another dead body.” The repetition of the latter, and its use of “another,” speaks quiet volumes to the volumes of needless corpses.

The macabre metafictional atmospherics go deeper still. The opening story’s reference to the mega-popular series anime and manga series Death Note is particularly revelatory. (I may have fangirled at the reference.) In Death Note, Shinigami — gods of death — control human life spans, able to cause someone to die (and even specify how and when they expire) by writing their name in their Death Note, a black notebook; the series begins with a Japanese schoolboy, Light Yagami, finding a Death Note that a perpetually grinning Shinigami named Ryuk dropped on Earth. Light, who is a solitary, rigidly scheduled, successful student, becomes drunk with power when he learns that the book allows him to kill anyone whose face and name he knows, and he assumes a pseudonymous identity, Kira, when the Japanese police — and then governments around the world — learn that someone is able to murder at will. Death Note is a study in god complexes, in the simultaneous terror and tragedy of obtaining great power. So extreme is the series’s body count that sudden, unnecessary deaths become almost quotidian, echoing Hannah Arendt’s famous idea of “the banality of evil,” immortalized in her study of Nazism in Eichmann in Jerusalem, whereby even great evil can come to seem strikingly, disturbingly normal.

Death Note’s fleeting invocation serves as an early example of Thompson-Spires’s sepulchral leitmotif: the ubiquity of death in her stories, and the way that we — especially as nonwhite Americans — are not always in control of our lives, but can, instead, have our lives wrenched from us in a moment due to an unfair power structure. The story’s narrator becomes an ambivalent, unwilling Kira, grinning like Ryuk as they explore the absurdities of the situation even as they are also, clearly, frustrated at how quickly, pointlessly, and unsurprisingly their characters die. To be black in the United States, the stories say without saying it directly, is difficult to define, but perhaps the closest definition is to have death always near, even when there is no sensible reason we should hear her wings.

When McCune Smith began writing about sexuality, an affronted Douglass suggested that “the real ‘heads of the colored people’” could be found “in the way of churches, Sunday Schools, Literary Societies, intelligent ministers and respectable congregations among our people in New York”; where were the “wise and wholesome” black portraits, he mused? His respectability politics echoed how Du Bois, in the following century, would excoriate the Jamaican-born Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem — the first black American best seller — for its luxuriant descriptions of sexuality, drinking, and partying; depicting such things did not, the puritanical Du Bois argued, uplift African Americans. “I feel distinctly like taking a bath,” Du Bois wrote of his experience of reading the novel in a cantankerous review in The Crisis, a paper Du Bois had founded. McKay had portrayed, unrelentingly and unrepentantly, “that utter licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folk back from enjoying — if enjoyment it can be called. […] As a picture of Harlem life or of Negro life anywhere, it is of course nonsense,” Du Bois said, channeling Douglass’s denial that such joie de vivre could — or, at least, should — be something to which impressionable readers, white ones most of all, were exposed. “Untrue,” he added with a hint of acid reluctance, “not so much on account of its facts but on account of its emphasis and glaring colors.”

The problem was not that McCune Smith or McKay had written untruths; it was that they had written too much of human truths more conservative black intellectuals wished to suppress from mainstream viewership, lest they confirm racist stereotypes. To be black, these critics implied, one had to behave, even in literature.

We are both beyond these respectability debates and not beyond them at all. Thompson-Spires, thankfully, depicts a wide range of people, not seeking either overwhelmingly positive or negative images of a race but capturing diversity — reality — in much of its multifarious beauty and terror: the validation-seeking suicidal teen, the ungainly college professor transplant, the unarmed black men murdered by the police, the fearful single mother, the unapologetic otaku, the hypocritical judgmental churchgoer, the young ASMR YouTuber who performs so much she begins to be trapped by her persona, the pettily feuding parents, the awkward black girl who has an uneasy relationship with blackness, the students writing about blackness who still worry that revealing too much, in too real a way, will be dangerous. The real heads, of course, as this brilliant collection of word paintings displays, can be on anybody’s bodies.

Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, The New York Times, Electric Literature, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Vice, Guernica, Slate, HuffPost, and many other places. She is the recipient of a Poynter Fellowship from Yale and holds both an MFA and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She lives in Brooklyn.

The post Twenty-First-Century Word Paintings: Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s “Heads of the Colored People” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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