Imma baddie baby. That's how my mommy made me.

https://lostfrog.bandcamp.com/album/ghc-good-hyperflip-collection-vol-2

I saw a YouTube video where they tried to figure what constitutes "self." Surely, if you replace your limbs, or even your entire lower half of the body, "you" are still "you." Maybe you can replace some parts of the brain, too? What can't you replace? 

They introduced an interesting thought experiment. Suppose you have an enemy. You hate them and want bad things to happen to them, but you love yourself and don't want bad things to happen to you. A mad scientist captures the two of you to swap your parts of the brain responsible for memories. Before they do so, they reveal to you they're going to torture one of the bodies: either the one with your memories, or the one with your enemy's. And you get to choose which. Imagine: a person wakes up after the operation and remembers that a moment before they were in a different body. Which one would you choose?

In the video, they chose to torture the body with the memories of their enemy, thus, presumably, concluding that the minimum or the central part of self is memory. They were confident "they" were in their enemy's body.

There were many undefined variables that would influence my choice. Who is my enemy? What is the condition of their body? Does my wish for bad things happening to them override all my other wishes? When people experience severe amnesia and cannot even remember their name, they usually retain their skills, such as language fluency or bicycle riding, since those are embedded deeper, so I assume those won't be swapped? What if they were born a prodigy easily capable of curing cancer and whatnot? Will the tortured body be traumatized so much it won't ever become a contributing member of society?

All in all, with those variables undefined, I would choose otherwise. I don't associate myself with my memories. I cannot, at this point, reduce self to some single part in the body, or to its bare minimum, but I know that other parts cumulatively are more important.

If my memories are transferred to the body of some retard, they may, for a period, think they believe in what they remember they believed in. But very soon their beliefs will match what they can comprehend. They won't be able to rationalize why rich people or artificial intelligence are good when everyone around them says they are very, very bad. They won't be able to see why stealing from the local store is bad when it's literally free stuff, and when there are so many movies about those badass criminals portrayed in a positive light. Similarly, if my memories are transferred to the body of someone who's way smarter than I, they will quickly see holes in the reasoning they remember they considered bulletproof and change their beliefs, values, and goals accordingly.

Like I said above, skills would likely remain unaffected, which is important. Even if you have some extraordinary piece of memory that can lead to the creation of a legendary song, or painting, or novel, what is it worth if the body can't play the instrument, can't hold the brush, doesn't have the vocabulary, and is incapable of seeing the beauty? It would be difficult to spot the difference. The body would walk like it usually walked, it would talk like it usually talked, with the same strides and words.

And there are so many other things. How well the body is maintained. What hormones it releases under stress. How it responds to a certain drug, or more importantly, to the lack of it. How it responds to hearing certain music or seeing another body in pain—you don't recollect your memories for the automatic response to happen. How well it can focus. How well it can learn. Things like PTSD, OCD, and ADHD will remain, and even many aspects of personality are deeper than memories.

It's important to stress that I'd choose to spare my body not because it's perfect and my enemy's might not be, but because it's what I'd associate myself with more.

There is a side bonus to this choice. The body with my memories would've seen it coming. It would understand the reasons and accept its faith, at least for a period of time, while the body with the foreign memories will jubilate, and maybe consider its "previous owner" a useful idiot, at least for a period of time, before that body allows them to see why it happened and appreciate the choice.

People tend to value their memories more than anything else. I don't. And it's not because I didn't climb one hundred mountains or fuck one hundred people or study one hundred cultures, or whatever else they consider the pinnacle of their existence. If you are a worthless piece of shit, you are a worthless piece of shit, regardless of your experiences. Your experience gathering may bring more harm than good: you litter natural sights, you spread disease, you waste people's time. Some people assume all experience is good since it teaches you something. That's also misleading. What if a particular combination of experience and cognitive capacity teaches you heroin is good and must be sold to kids? Is that good to you, or to the world? I hope the answer is obvious.

Memories are incorporeal. With enough dedication you can make yourself believe you had some vivid experience, or forever forget you had some.

We can approach this question from a bunch of other angles. If you replace the memory of your laptop, it is still your laptop. Twin studies show intelligence is something like 70% heritable, meaning the entire lifetime of experience influences how your brain works relatively little. And what is self but the way your brain works? If you put your memories on a hard drive, you think it will become you? What if you put them inside a primitive LLM? I don't think it will. And yet twins had a lifetime of different experiences all of which shaped their brains in a different way, unlike in our thought experiment, where your brain is still your brain perfectly preserved and unshaped by any other experiences or memories. Thus, the old you and the new you (with the new memories) will be far more similar than even twins are similar.

I was somewhat hesitant right after I watched that YouTube video, but now that I wrote everything on paper, it seems ridiculous to consider that a foreign body with your memories is you.

I've been learning Japanese using just Duolingo, an exercise a day, for almost two years now, but screw this snail pace. I challenge myself to learn all 2,136 jōyō kanji by Jan 19, 26. I know up to two dozen of them right now, no more than that. To motivate myself better, I'm going to publicly announce my test results, with the exact number of mistakes, on Jan 18, 26. I'll make a list of English words to which I will handwrite a corresponding kanji, plus one on'yomi. If I fail miserably, I will write about it honestly. If it goes so badly that I refuse to take a test, all this humiliation will be here on public display. I can't allow that.

Jan 18, 26

Alright, time's up. I managed to learn... 447 kanji. Yes, pathetic. I feel a little embarrassed, a little ashamed, but not much. I was so bored I couldn't invest much time. The challenge humbled me. Even if I could spend 12 hours a day studying, it's unlikely I'd succeed. Handwriting takes too much time. All in all, I don't recommend this approach to anyone. Learn kanji as they appear in lessons or your favorite song lyrics. Not only is it more fun, but also more applicable.

I get it now. I love Peter Watts' "Blindsight". Still, its issues I described earlier stand. Today, out of respect for the work, I want to elaborate on the novel's problematic postulates I only briefly mentioned before. I will provide the exact words that, in their respective contexts, made it feel like those were the postulates the author believed in.

- Everyone commits war crimes. There's nothing unusual about them.

Direct quote: "No matter that the four who'd died had been guilty of multiple counts of rape, torture, and homicide; that's just what people *did* in wartime. It's what they'd always done. There was nothing *polite* about war, no honorable code beyond the chain of command and the circling of wagons. [...] There may be murderers and rapists in our midst, but by God they're *our* murderers and rapists."

You don't have to dig deep for this one. There are definitely societies that take war crimes seriously, systematically punish their own side for misconduct, and keep the number of those misconducts as low as humanly possible. There are definitely societies that celebrate war crimes, reward their war criminals with the highest government-issued orders of merit, and have phrases such as "it's not a war crime if you had fun" embedded in their culture. I won't dignify this senseless piece of cynicism with any more of my attention.

- Every bleeding-edge human ought to be an atheist.
- Every atheist facing something horrific or traumatic ought to question their beliefs.

Direct quote: "But Isaac Szpindel had been an atheist. All of us were. We'd all started out that way, at least."

It was said as if it were obvious or natural that all of the crew members were atheists. And why would it be obvious, natural, or even casually possible for all of them to be atheists, except for the author's own bias? Look at the bleeding-edge humans today: scientists, billionaires. Even when they don't mention God directly, they often say something like, "Yeah, it's entirely possible we live a simulation created by someone." Why won't those people be open-minded? Why must they firmly believe no agency was involved in the creation of the universe, and no overarching agency has been present there ever since?

As for the atheists turning believers, statistical data confirms trauma increases religiosity. However, there are also many instances when people's beliefs remained unaffected. I just didn't like that part. It felt cheesy. If atheism is an obvious choice for you, then it shouldn't be easily undermined.

- Everyone who tortures people and then goes and plays with their kids as if nothing happened does so because they dehumanize their victims.

Direct quote: "She'd just fallen back on the oldest trick in the Torturer's Handbook, the one that lets you go home to your family after work, and play with your children, and sleep at night: *never* humanize your victims."

Many of the people in the West masturbate to this word, "dehumanization". They think it's the sin of all sins, the root of all the world's problems. But when you dig a little bit deeper, you realize it is, in fact, irrelevant.

Have you seen a torturer in your life? Ever researched any information on any sociopath, sadist, serial killer, war criminal? How many of them were trying to convince themselves their victims weren't really human? They don't give a fuck about your dehumanization crap. They are just different. Different values, different mindset, different mental issues.

There's also another definition for this word: you dehumanize someone when you are being a meanie: you call them pieces of shit, you think them worthless, etc. But such a context would make it even more asinine. Those who draw an alarming connection between this so-called dehumanization and heinous crimes cannot tell correlation and causation apart. Humans are being mean to each other all the time. It's a healthy response to wrongdoing. How often does it lead to actual tortures?

However, I may have misinterpreted that piece. Maybe the Torturer's Handbook wasn't meant to illustrate how torturers think. Maybe what was meant is if you're a normie, and you must torture someone against your will, a friendly piece of advice is that you imagine they are not human and have no humanlike attributes. Even in this context, I've doubts about that technique's effectiveness.

- Every capitalist corporation only cares about brainwashing you into consumerism.

Direct quote: "They're calling it an entertainment device with massive applications for online gaming. Uh huh. And if you can implant sights and sounds into someone's head from a distance, why not implant political beliefs and the irresistable desire for a certain brand of beer while you're at it?"

The underlying cause for such an opinion must be the same old omnipresent "poor people = good, rich people = bad." The idea that businesses can genuinely want to create a good product without any hidden malicious intent can never fit peacefully in their mind. Have you ever had any business owner friends? Have you ever watched those interviews where big CEOs casually talk about their lives? I had such acquaintances. I saw those interviews. And the conclusion is clear: the vast majority of business owners do what they do because they love doing it and want to make an impact. You don't even need any of that experience to see it. All you have to do is realize you aren't that drastically different from other humans and put yourself in their shoes. Take the author himself. If he only cared about maximizing profits, he'd be busy running scams instead of writing niche novels.

Those were the postulates. It's not a complete list. The novel is saturated with similarly themed messages. Perhaps those were the most intrusive and memorable to me at the moment.

Some of the postulates may feel far-fetched based on the provided quotes; that's because they were extrapolations rather than paraphrase.

In case those opinions were not of the author but of the protagonist, the protagonist was not as perceptive as he was portrayed. Nevertheless, next time I read Blindsight, I will try to apply that "shallow and cynical Twitter user" archetype to the protagonist and see if it fits neatly and doesn't look like the annoying and unasked-for injections of the author's wisdom.

Wow. German women are amazing. So many of them showed up on a recent protest against the decision to force young German men into the army. [1] Let me tell you this: there are countries in the world where women think men *must* be forced into the trenches, while their own carefree life in safety *must* be financed. With all those rotten societies, with all those screeching feminists pushing for widening the gap even further, for even more punishments exclusive to men, for even more benefits exclusive to women, it's easy to become bitter and not see the beauty. [2]

The German women of today reminded me of the German women of a distant past. The siege of Weinsberg, AD 1140. Conrad III, "in his exasperation at the protracted resistance made by the garrison, vowed to put all the men to the sword, but promised to spare the lives of the women." He allowed them to take with them whatever they could carry on their shoulders. What did the women of Weinsberg do? On their shoulders, they carried their men.

Even if this story wasn't historically accurate, it was still a part of the local culture for a long time, which is perhaps even more important.

I would even feel uncomfortable from this patronizing. My factory settings tell me I should rather die than be seen, a big able-bodied man, carried to safety by a woman. This can't be healthy, right? Can it?

Do death-embracing but short-living people bring more value to the world than those who are equally capable but readily-humiliated and long-living? I can't tell. Sometimes you have to embrace death. But when a town changes its owner? Perhaps not.

===

[1] A sardonic doubt creeps in on me: did they even understand the punishment was intended for men only?

Not quite relevant to the point I was making in this entry, but still: judging by their signs, a lot of it was less about freedom and more about abolishing all security guarantees. But that's fine. When one side tugs toward "let's force our people into the trenches," and the other side tugs toward "let's get naked and reveal our most vulnerable spots to dictators and terrorists," a reasonable middle ground is found. Germany can easily protect itself with a voluntary army. So-called russia, their most obvious threat, has the economy of one German village, while the Chinese with the Americans won't invade them for at least another half a century. So why introduce compulsion? This is embarrassing. They need to pump those fat stacks into their military technology and infrastructure, research, allies, soft power, gray-zone operations, etc. For example, a lot of the casualties in modern warfare come from drones. The fraction of drone operators in an army is big and only grows. Is it so hard to automate it fully? Do it. (Please.)

[2] Not everything categorized as feminist today is bad. For example, I support women's right to murder their babies.

Me:
I am mighty scared of pain.

Also me, every time the anesthetic wears off:
I don't mind that. I want to be cognizant of my body status. I *want* to feel it, I want to *endure* it, I want to *learn* pain is just a signal to the brain.

(I took the meds 15 minutes thereafter.)

This is straight from from some sci-fi flavored 2010s TV series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3qS345gAWI

A lot of Mr. Robot vibes, maybe some of The Expanse.