hi kids!!! it's me! everyone's favorite armchair philosopher/cognitie scientist, back with some bullshit fresh out of my diharreic bovine ass!

so, I was just wondering, in my ever soul-crushing train of thought -- am I even trying? and if not, is it even my fault? let me explain.

let's say you have to make a decision. uhh, "would you rather kill the puppy to save the kitty, or kill the kitty to save the puppy?" sure. whatever. it's a hard decision, but its making is an implicit property of reality; whatever twisted chain of causality led to this situation in the first place is now an unchangaeble historical fact, and you don't have a say on any of it anymore. nevertheless, by some internal cognitive process you arrive at a reasonable conclusion, which in turn causes an observable effect on consensus reality.

right, that was straightforward enough. but what if the decision is strictly internal in nature? bear with me, please: "you can only coinhabit a space throught abject non-communication, but you wish you could coinhabit a space without succumbing to abject non-communication" (totally made up example, definitely nothing that hits anywhere near close to home >_<) how much of a say do you have in that? I mean, clearly the willingness to change yourself must be analogous in some way to the willingness to embed a small, supersonic lead projectile inside the brain of a kitty or a puppy, and the outcome of this willingness should also be an observable change in consensus reality. and yet, like, it doesn't even remotely feel like that at all? what does it really mean to "want" something? surely an awareness such as myself (please hold your laugh until the end) is a fully cohesive cognitive entity capable of internal self-consistency, right??? haha wrong motherfucker.

okay let's try to look at this from a purely mechanistic materialistic perspective: your willingness to change some aspect of your brain (which as all my esteemed readers surely know is no more and no less than exactly equivalent a human mind) causes you to carefully study its construction, perfect the art of every last detail of its impecable form, and unearth its best kept secrets; you no doubt become wise enough in its ways that you may shape it as you see fit, and therefore enact upon it every last of your hearts desires. err, your brain's desires. whatever. I ask, oh cogniscent reader, isn't your ability to have accomplished such a feat, not itself just an unchangeable fact of the brain? surely if not for its delicate intricacies it wouldn't have come even close to reaching the understanding required to pull off such a marvelous deed. and indeed, the smoother-brained among us may not posses a brain with such subtle structure.

and so I ask of you, oh ever-so-reasonable reader, can such a brain be considered to "want" to change itself in the first place? surely if it really "wanted" that it would have been capable of it in the first place. that may sound counterintuitive but bear with me. what does it mean to "want"? for what it's worth one can want something, try to get something, and fail miserably. but what does it even mean to "try"? in the earlier cute-animal-slaughter as an excuse for a choice example, the difference is one of ontology, of dividing the world into a subject and an object (I *want* something _inside_ vs. I *try* something _outside_) that is decidedly not so in the latter purely materialistic mechanistic example, since the entire process happens internally, within the realm of the subject (which we have so scientifically established to be physically equivalent to the human brain.)

now, those shrewd among my readers (hiyaa! <3) may have noticed some clear flaws in my purely materialistic mechanistic model of human experience, and its inapplicability to the real world. indeed, human brains hardly understand themselves to such an extent that they may meaningfully alter themselves in any way (other than perhaps taking a few shots in the dark with a bunch of random substances to see what sticks.) maybe some day. I doubt I will be alive to see that. I hope I won't be alive to see that. (if you figure it out, do email me though.)

however, to suggest that this should be a requirement for brains to change themselves would be silly. it is a well known property of the human brain that it can effect all sorts of changes in its structure throughout its existence, without requiring any sort of special tools or knowledge. and you know what? fuck brains. I can hardly figure out what anything is even supposed to feel like to normal people, let alone figure out this big mushy mass of neurons some seem so keen to consider the single ultimate answer to the mystery of human experience. like introspection wasn't hard enough already now I have to worry about gabaergic neurons and sodium ion channels? give me a break. uhh, where was I? oh yeah.

allow me to reiterate my question, at last in more familiar terms: is there a meaningful difference between wanting to change oneself, and actually changing oneself?

which brings me to my final conundrum: am I even trying? I mean, at times it feels like I'm really not. does that entirely invalidate my desires? does that make me a permanent fixture of consensus reality, an unchangaeble hopeless problem destined to its current state, unless it *really* wanted to change itself, which it clearly doesn't? yet why are those desires -- some reification thereof anyhow, which undoubtably exists within my mind, on account of the fact that I am thinking about them right now -- even there in the first place? does that automatically make me "try"? this doesn't at all feel like an external decision! but it does feel like some sort of distinction exists between the internal want and the internal try! why, is this not what them clever book folk go on about- what was it? ah, free will... -_-

just to be clear, I don't give a flying fuck about metaphysical interpretations of free will and other such nonsense. as far as I'm concerned, whether an outside observer (by some definition thereof) can model the state of the universe as a deterministic function of its past is completely irrelevant to the human experience.

well, if we've learned anything today it's that you shouldn't ever let rationality lull you into a false sense of understanding, not when dealing with subjective experience. actually did we learn that? I can't be bothered to go back and check.

hmm, quite the rant I've generated here. what an incoherent mess! does any of this even make any sense? well, it was extraordinarily cathartic to write anyhow ^^

love may be quite alright at the end of the day. abject non-communication fucking sucks.

oh and- take care folks.