Author Topic: Just Give Up?  (Read 2136 times)

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Nation of One

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #15 on: September 18, 2015, 11:55:14 pm »
I think that's why, even though it's been 15 years since I really thought about it, I want to consider how Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra are related. 

I have been thinking about vectors ...

Do you think that when we engage in thinking about such things that it is possible to think about them on an unconscious level while sound asleep ... like while "dreaming" ?
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Nation of One

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #16 on: October 18, 2015, 10:43:40 am »
I do wonder why I even bother studying.  Surely my motivation must be raw interest since employment involves so much ... phoniness.  I can't adapt to the world of phony liars.

OK, so I accept my outsider status.  It's been official for quite some time.  I do not participate in society's phony bull-sh-it ways.  I can't stomach weddings or even being around a group of people watching a sporting event on TV.  It all makes be sick.  I can see how I have drifted into this solitary dimension.

Why do I bother studying what I do?

Listen, I study out of curiosity and to get a feel for something.  I have periods of initial enthusiasm, and I don't ever feel I am wasting my time doing it.  It does not mean I am looking to find a job.  One of the turn-offs about reading tutorials or watching tutorials is that the presenter thinks everyone is coming from the same place, that everyone is trying to become more employable or trying to keep a "position" with a company.

This too makes me ill.

I feel hatred.  That's what I mean by ILL.  That's what I mean by SICK.

Pure Hatred.

And yet I continue to study ... out of curiosity.  That's all.  I dabble and explore.

Wow ... frustration ... I guess I am an Orwellian Thought Criminal ... a subversive loner with a disdain for mainstream society.

I was contemplating on the fact that many go into debt to afford a car so as to keep a job that will pay for the car.  I see the hamster wheel.  I see it.  And many cave in to the pressure to conform out of fear ... fear of the herd.   I see ...

Anger within me ... The best revenge is to continue to study and learn for no reason whatsoever.  It is all devoid of purpose and necessity.

How many others must face the same void?   And there we have it.  I have stared into the abyss, and where others may have done themselves in, I stick around ... just to fart around and study obscure and difficult concepts.  Eh, I am living an existential novel.

I don't have to write like Kafka.  I live Kafka's fiction while he reported to work afraid to metamorposize into the creature I am.

One has to be an intelligent monster, intelligent enough to make it clear to even the stupidest that you are not out to harm anyone.  For if the herd gets it in their collective heads that you pose some kind of threat, well, then you will be apprehended and put in an institution for observation.

No.  I just like to sit around and think ... and sometimes actually lay down and think of how pleasant it must be to not exist ... We are concerned about writing something that might be misconstrued by knuckle-dragging bullies of the mafioso state pizza mall brigade?

HA!  I see how literature is suppressed.

OK ... Transformations and their Orbits ... that's the title of chapter 2 of Stepanov's Elements of Programming.  You see, theoretical studies hold my interest ... and, in the meantime ...


« Last Edit: October 18, 2015, 07:03:30 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #17 on: October 18, 2015, 02:22:36 pm »
You LIVE your philosophy.
Kafka was timid.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #18 on: October 28, 2015, 07:14:27 pm »
I can only concentrate on something for just so long, and then my interest seems to wane.

The one consoling thought is that I never claimed to be a mathematician.  I do not aspire to be a "mathematician".   I write some code and can read some code, but I don't really consider myself a programmer either.  I had always considered myself a philosopher, but maybe I will even stop thinking of myself as such.

I am Mr. Nobody, a run-of-the-mill "former student" who never really found a place in the workforce, who had lost patience for the mind-numbing redundant positions available in the industrial service sectors of mass society. 

I don't have to do anything with my life except endure time.  I try to stay out of harms way.  There are many horrors in our world.   

Maybe I enjoyed Ligotti's philosophical manifesto so much because I am such a complainer such a whiner.   There is an endless groaning in the fibers of my being.

Note:  I wonder if the spell-checking software in the editor for this message board is from the UK.  I mean, notice the word humor is marked as a misspell whereas humour is AOK.   Oh well, thanks for the free message board from across the pond.

Anyway, I was hoping that going through a couple textbooks on Abstract Algebra, specifically ones that include the use of the Groups, Algorithms, and Programming system GAP, would help me understand Stepanov's books better, and maybe even invigorate me with genuine interest.

Sure enough, I sometimes become quite bored with it.

I will keep things in perspective and understand that I'm an enthusiast ... just a Nobody Loser hacking around.  It's my rebellion against the herd, the sheep who wave flags and cheer for "the team" ...

I will have to do another search for outsider literature.  No matter how bored I get exploring mathematics, programming, and defeatist outsider literature, it sure beats "talking sports".

It's moments like this, when I can just drop what I'm doing if I choose to, that I really ought to celebrate my outsider status and my total alienation from society's meritocracy.



    “I suppose you want to become a success or something equally vile.”

    —John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces


OK, so what is "professionalism" and does one actually need to pay deference to "professionals"?

Can my animosity toward "professionals" and "experts" be compared to Schopenhauer's vehement resentments against academic philosophers?

And what about the publishing industry?   True Outsider literature is outside the publishing industry no?  I wish I could read people's diaries.   

Alas, it is good to be out of the rain, and I am humbled by my gratitude for a dry blanket.
« Last Edit: October 28, 2015, 11:52:03 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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The Great Tiredness
« Reply #19 on: November 01, 2015, 11:17:20 am »
Quote from: William Spencer
The Great Tiredness is every bit as good as death.  There was no color here, no pain, no emotional weather at all, just an occasional oddness that was the outside world trying to puff itself up into significance when, of course, the secret of the Great Tiredness, the truth of this realm, was that everything was arbitrary and meaningless.  In the Great Tiredness, the transition from sleep to wakefulness was often blurred.

From 1995:

The Calculus sessions with instructor Jay Deshabandu were very stimulating, and I was acing the exams.  I had mastered the fundamental theorems of Calculus on my own.  Now I was fine-tuning my algebra skills as one doesn’t really “use algebra” until one applies it in Calculus.   In the meantime, I began to distance myself from Sherry.

Deshabandu suggested that, instead of pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, I should cut to the chase and start taking computer programming courses.  He had a Master’s degree in mathematics, and he was taking computer programming courses.  He told me I could easily become a programmer with my mathematical aptitude, and that to spend years studying higher mathematics seems to be an unprofitable game plan with the current demand for programmers (at that time … 1995) being so high.

I believed I had discovered an escape route from my monotonous and mundane career as a maintenance man.

~ from DEAD END: The Demented Avenger



Twenty Years Later, 1 November 2015:

 On the TV outside this little room, the New York Marathon blaring ... last night it was the New York Mets in the World Series, a team my parents would take me to see when I was a child.  I would cry after the games ... it brings back memories of meaningless misery ... and here I am, thinking of Spencer's words about the outside world trying to puff itself up into significance when, of course, the secret of the Great Tiredness, the truth of this realm, was that everything was arbitrary and meaningless.

I still write in my notebooks even as I am paying each month just to store the 125 volumes of scribblings of a clinically frustrated man which I still haven't been able to destroy by fire.  I burned about 20 of them.  They burn so slow!  It's all so utterly ridiculous, and yet I continue to scribble.

Today's excerpt:  "Surely I am some kind of antisocial negative defeatist aging Hikikomori weirdo.  Yes, I am a weirdo bookworm, and what makes me even weirder still is the kind of books I worm into: mathematics textbooks, obscure pdf files from course notes ... built-in reference manuals of mathematics software ... I wonder how many others like me exist in our dystopian societies.  When one writes, does one present oneself as likeable?  How authentic can one actually become before one finds oneself being analyzed and supervised by mental health professionals in this perfect day where outcasts are made to feel that they are failures unless they are 'fathers and productive workers' ?  "

"Rather than waste my energy ranting against whatever is blaring from the television in the other room, I will just continue my private studies ... these days: Abstract Algebra ... Rings ... The ring Z/nZ of integers modulo n.  I do so with an emotion that can only be described as shame as I reflect upon my 73 year old father who still works 7 days per week building walk-in freezers and is a long distance runner."

"I identify more with cripples.  No, not even that.  I prefer sitting in a rocking chair smoking a cigarette ... meanwhile a woman with no legs is going the 26.2 mile distance.  If it were not for my fluctuating yet continued interest in mathematics, I would be writing the most vile and negative poison ... I think, therefore I am a thought-criminal.  Ashamed of my authentic feelings, I am not fit for polite society."

« Last Edit: November 01, 2015, 11:26:28 am by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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In a funk
« Reply #20 on: November 01, 2015, 01:04:45 pm »
I have been in a funk for a week or so.I feel like I am living in a dark fantasy..too many thoughts(philosophical as well as carnal) rush to my mind all at once-is this what having ADD feels like? Anyway,while I was thinking about how you think slowly about math..I came across this nice little book.The Nobel Prize winner and the intellectual godfather of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, has summarized a lifetime of research in this  book Thinking, Fast & Slow.

This is the foundation of his work. He and his  collaborator Amos Tversky, (who passed away and therefore could not receive the Nobel) see human thinking in two forms that they call System 1 and System 2. More aptly they could be called “automatic” and “effortful” systems, but Fast and Slow is a good shorthand description. According to Kahneman’s description,

“System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control”

“System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations”

So system 1 is fast, intuitive and emotional, while System 2 is slower, more deliberative and logical. An example of System 1 thinking is detecting that one object is more distant than another, while an example of System 2 thinking is parking in a narrow space. Using the two system view as the foundation, Kahneman discusses human judgment and decision-making with all of its biases and heuristics. Along the way we get all kinds of interesting nuggets about how we behave and should behave.

Kahneman’s fundamental proposition is that we identify with System 2, “the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices and decides what to think about and what to do”. But the one that is really in charge is System1 as it “effortlessly originates impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2”. Most of the time System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is in a comfortable low-effort mode in the background. When the two agree, impressions get turned into beliefs. When System 1 runs into trouble, it asks for processing help from System 2. This is a very good system that works very well most of the time. But System 1 has systematic errors and much of Kahneman’s research is focused on identifying these. As he himself readily admits, identifying them is one thing but avoiding them is entirely another.

System 2 is a lazy controller and doesn’t like to expend much effort. One of its main functions is to monitor and control thoughts and actions suggested by System 1. But the fact that it often doesn’t do that.

I have been toying with the idea of anorexia.Can anorexia be philosophical? Perhaps.
Living in a dark,very dark indeed,fantasy.Oh! and discovered Clark Ashton Smith.Smith was poor for most of his life and was often forced to take menial jobs such as fruitpicking and woodcutting in order to support himself and his parents.
A friend of a friend(Lovecraft's).
« Last Edit: November 01, 2015, 01:40:36 pm by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Holden

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Run!
« Reply #21 on: November 01, 2015, 02:39:24 pm »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #22 on: November 02, 2015, 01:22:41 am »
Quote from: Holden
I have been in a funk for a week or so.

I have been in a funk since I was around 12 years old ... By age 16 I was telling people "Life sucks."

A couple years ago I was helping a very beautiful woman (from India) move out of her apartment.  She had a 17 year old son from her first marriage and a little 2 year old from the current one that was falling apart.  Her husband was a heavy drinker.  I was too at the time, and I was naively surprised that this tendency to drown oneself in alcohol was cross-cultural. 

Anyway, I found it hilarious the way this woman would say, "Life sucks!"

I mean, it is what the Buddha said, but coming from her, it just sounded so ... well, it was Life itself crying out.

So much of what Schopenhauer wrote struck me, resounded within me, to hear things put so honestly, the vanity of existence and all that ... and it's not just the horrors of war or the tragedy of losing a precious loved one or finding oneself homeless and stranded in a hostile uncaring universe, but even when one's life is "as together as possible," even when one has a powerful computer, a spark of passion for learning, even when one has carrot juice, plenty of tobacco and coffee and [name your vices], a cot and blankets ... or, as Liggoti put it in A Contrivance of Horror, even when one gets an A in Calculus, we can feel the sorrow or emptiness in our bones.

I had a strange sense of disgust reading a book by one of the innovators of the Kindle eReader.  My mother is limited to reading large print books, so I am looking for one of those "old style" second generation Kindle DX's that have the 9.7 e-Ink screen ... bare bones and basic, but better (I think) than the iPads and other tablets.  You know, a dedicated ereader with a larger screen, too expensive to make and still compete with all the multimedia phone movie crap (so they stopped making them!!!) ... yes, a wonderful device for one who needs to make the text larger ... and who, as she ages, fears the traffic she faces when going to and from the library.  Anyway, I had a sense of disgust when this innovator was talking (writing) about how great it is to be able to log onto or Twitter to discuss the books one is reading with others.  I would never want a Facebook account.

The author went on and on about things with great enthusiasm.  Sure, I know these devices are great.  I admit this much.  The thing is, as that cantankerous old curmudgeon, Kurt Vonnegut, once wrote, all the greatest books have been about what a bummer it is to be born human

That's the kind of awareness that seems to be missing in Jason Merkoski's "Burning The Page: The EBook Revolution and the Future of Reading".  When he is writing, he does not seem to be aware of all the prisoners who don't even have access to a library, let alone an ereader that can access "any book ever written in 60 seconds".  There are many different worlds in this world, and it creeps me out whenever I am exposed to someone deeply connected to only the corporate world on the cutting edge of our latest gadgets, one who does not even think of all those who end up in psychiatric wards, prisons, heavy combat, or even homeless in suburbia.  It's just F&*#@ing creepy to witness  those who are already living in "the Cloud" ...  (((Am I a hypocrite since I am writing this on a wall in a cloud???)))  :-\

I won't be too critical of the guy.  I only read a few pages, after all.  I obviously appreciate the work he and other innovators like him do for us all ... I just wish ... well ... he weren't such a humanist, you know, such a cheerleader for civilization.   These devices are great, but they do not make life worth living.  They do not solve the riddle of our predicament.  OK, ok, ok, these devices and all the great literature and music may make life more endurable and even a valuable experience in a sense - the tears and laughter and heartache and confusion and madness ... but I would appreciate it if such enthusiasts, technology evangelists, mathematicians and even spiritual gurus would find some way to pump some real life disgust, angst, and misery into the words they type. 

Ah, but would that make the elegant mathematical notation less beautiful, if one were to leave a David Foster Wallace length footnote explaining how bored one has become with writing with LaTex software SHIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTT.

Whenever I write, even if I am totally psyched about the Open Source movement or the amount of great minds contributing to free mathematics software ... I understand how fragile our personal lives are, and how, when we are in a "funk" or our emotional experience of existence becomes, as you call it, a dark horror fantasy, it is difficult to be too enthusiastic about anything.

We are each very alone in this life. 

So, while it is understandable one can be awe-inspired by the magic of the technological devices we have access to, it is important for me to remember what Vonnegut said about the greatest books being about what a bummer it is to have been born.

We can't allow ourselves to lose sight of the true nature of what we are caught in.  Most of our lives will end in tragedy.  No one is spared the being haunted by 1000 doubts per day, primal fears (of the dark?) hard-wired into our blood over millions of years of the psychic nightmare of being.   

So many pretend to "have their sh!t together."   I mistrust this.

While as I type these words my life and head are more "together" than in years, I also understand that the fabric of life is fragile, and the things keeping me calm and focused lately could be thrown into a whirlwind in a New York Minute ...

Life sure is not easy, even when one is blessed with the most crucial things like water, nutritious food, shelter, health, limbs that are not lame, eye-sight, one person who cares, a place to hide, freedom from institutions, a somewhat safe environment ... Even with these most important blessings, we still get into funks.   It would seem to me that we are not wired to be happy for too long. 

« Last Edit: November 04, 2015, 10:18:58 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~