Everything I’m writing at the moment is like a draft. I’m creating a body of work I can rework into multiple books. Mostly non-fiction, but with some great ideas for fiction, including a fairy tale and fable about a princess and a mage.
There’s also a story about an alchemist who makes a momentus discovery, but flees an overzealous, draconian government into the depths of an ancient city, which becomes a metaphor for a spiritual transformation. He makes the horrible realization that, by discovering and relevating a true spiritual transformation that rivals competing faiths, he has broken an ancient seal restraining the materialization of demonic transplanar entities.
Yes! I’m Looking For an Editor
When I write those books, particularly the non-fiction. I’m hoping to involve an editor the entire time. So yes, I’m looking for someone who’d like to edit my work. Most of the valid negative feedback I’ve received deals with style, form, and a lack of illustrations or diagrams.
On Criticism
★ You Are Your Own Most Valuable Asset
★ Why Is Novelty So Often Rejected?
★ Criticisms on Lack of Sources
★ Distributed Intellectual Property Attack
On Criticism
I love getting feedback on my writing, especially negative feedback, since it implies an opportunity for quick improvement. I value negative criticism much more than positive criticism, but I will disregard criticism when it’s invalid. If the source of criticism doesn’t clearly articulate their reasoning, this can occasionally be a test to see if I would be capable of filling in the blank. However, more often than not, if the criticism is a majority ad hominem, with little to no references to my ideas or arguments, it’s baseless and invalid at best.
You Are Your Own Most Valuable Asset
I love hearing what everyone has to say, but I constantly encounter people who want to throw me off with their criticisms. If you ever really get somewhere in life, you will find that you have to understand what defines you, what defines your work and how your work is an expression of yourself. You are your most valuable asset. Your definition of yourself and your creative expression: that is what you have as an artist.
Your confidence conveys that. You will get shit tests all the time and people will specifically test you on exactly that: your confidence and your resolve towards the expression of your artistic integrity. If you don’t understand that or if you let any bozo tell you who you are, what your work means, or why you should change it, then you just don’t got it. Take every piece of advice with a healthy dose of skepticism because people likely don’t know you or your work, but they know confidence.
Why Is Novelty So Often Rejected?
In fact, if you truly have something new, they won’t understand it, but they’ll understand how you react to it and how strongly you defend your artistic direction. Further, a true artist doesn’t define his work for you. If s/he does, their art probably lacks depth. Almost any work acquires depth through mystery and most attempts by artists to clarify or define their work will flatten it. So, truly, if your work pushes boundaries or it’s captivating, people won’t understand it! In fact, for aestheticians and art critics, the degree to which your work defies comprehension by various audiences is a measure of your work’s value! Especially when it inspires fascination.
The truly mysterious is what we lust after. There are so many people in my life who publicly criticize my writing by deriding it as lacking sense, coherence, structure, sources or adherence to typical academic language. I’m so glad these people are idiots: they are proving that my work has value and these people would never do me any real favors. Please! They are clueless and let’s keep it that way!
Criticisms on Lack of Sources
The one criticism I hear most is a lack of sources! That’s not so bad, compared to what people could criticize, and they are all points which I fully understand. And honestly … an autodidact with no sources?! … Again, you’re doing me favors. It’s original content.
For some articles, that’s unacceptable. But again, I’m not an academic. Criticizing me for lack of sources? It’s basically some tool too sharp for his/her own good asking me to do something they very well know burdens me with more time investment than the average academic. I’m writing posts about dozens of different fields without university education. That academic experience I don’t have? The pragmatic value is the understanding required to navigate the groundbreaking studies in your major or subject of expertise. Not only do I have nearly zero familiarity with the de facto, highly-cited papers in any single field, I’m often combining one to four fields.
Ain’t nobody got time for that! That’s where most of the work happens when you write a 10,000-40,000 word master’s thesis. I’m not writing a thesis. I’m writing blogs. No one is grading me. I have about 100,000 words on deck and 300,000 words worth of content in vague outlines, with just as much on post-it notes.
Distributed Intellectual Property Attack
Speaking of post-it notes, I’m also in the middle of a distributed intellectual property attack, which has been going on for several years. Essentially, I realized: ain’t nobody gonna let David Conner win not nothin’! I mean c’mon! LOL … And so, instead of sitting on a mound of ideas lusting over my first entrepreneurship win, I’m just going to write about all of this and forget about profiting. I’ve never wanted money itself. I only wanted currency for influence. Including this disclaimer sounds lofty, but I only want to only release IP that is positive and beneficial.
I’ve found that my true power all along is by connecting the right people with the right people and ideas. I found that, while I may never amount to anything myself, I am perfectly content acheiving nothing and knowing that I’ve planted the the right seeds in the right places.
Writing On Writing and Other Writings
★ American Eros: Or How to Fell a Souley
★ If I Had the Chops to Write My Daedalian Magnum Corpus
★ Oneironautics: Questing for Lucidity
Facets of Greatness
★ Intro
★ Monumental Accidents
★ Maximizing Mutual Benefit
★ Synoptic Epigrams
★ If Actions Speak Louder
★ Meta and Epi
★ Congressional Power Structures
★ Understanding the Political System
Consciousness
★ Neural Networks and Spider Brains
★ Consiousness as a Continuum: Life, the Cosmos and You
God and Religion
★ The Nature of God
★ I’m Not Religious, I’m Spiritual: God Is Not Dead
★ I’m Not Religious, I’m Spiritual: Of God and Atheisms
★ I’m Not Religious, I’m Spiritual: A Lighthouse in a Storm
★ Hello Watson, Might You Spare a Moment to Hear the Good News
Epistemology
★ From the Parapets of Alexandria
★ Epistemology, Cognition and Category Theory: An Overview
★ Epistemology, Cognition and Category Theory: A Model For The Mind
★ Epistemology, Cognition and Category Theory: Directive Cognitive Expansion
Postmodernism and Metamodernism
★ Metamodernism & Retromodernism: Wellspings of Art & Culture
★ Paradox of Creativity
★ Death of Creativity
Refuting Marxism
★ Cosmic Disruption of Conflict Theory
ᛝ Oneirontology ᛝ
When people no longer need to work and when computers are more capable of creation than people, the Singularity will threaten to destroy the incentivization structure that motivates people towards action. This kind of techno-nihilism could end up being corrosive.
To help counter this, I’ve been thinking about putting together a kind of quasi-religion. It’s called Oneirontology from the wordstem Oneiro, which implies dreaming. Perhaps I specify that Oneirism is something more along the lines of philosophy in practice than a religion. Another idea would be for augmenting self-improvement through cognition, as I’ve outlined in my Directive Cognitive Expansion article. The idea there is to empower people by training them to use their minds through art, science and meditation.
I’m a bit afraid what I write might be taken too seriously, but I think humanity needs to return to myth to connect with our roots and that through myth and through codified practices, we can inspire people to strive for self-improvement in the face of nihilism.
One idea for a practice is geared towards the need to protect individuality and find a way to stand up against nihilism. The episaga is aimed at addressing both. Everyone would have their version of a particular story which would be a meditation on something like Love or Justice or Heroism. American Eros is the first such story.
By maintaining a personal version through their life or collaborating with others on their version of a particular story, they are developing their ability to recognize/utilize/strengthen those traits in themselves and others. Furthermore, it represents individuality for the sake of individuality as we approach the end of individuality. Individuality can provide us with drive and purpose. This can help us stand up against nihilism.
I don’t see anyone else talking about an idea like the episaga. There are similar concepts, but this is specifically targeted towards addressing philosophical problems in the near-future. I know there are authors out there with whom this would really catch on.
Oh Tyche, might thee shine on me…
ᛝ Writing On Writing. And a Short Story ᛝ
If I Had the Chops to Write My Daedalian Magnum Corpus
If you had asked me at age nineteen to pick a career path I’d never explore, I would have immediately and emphatically answered with “Writer.” Recent exigent events seemed to have altered the course of my destiny. Such unquestionable axioms of reality suddenly reek of fallibility, e.g. “DC would never, under any circumstance, ever become a writer. You can count on that like the sun coming up.” Apparently this is no longer true.
In exploring the possibility of being a writer, I decided to explore and articulate my own writing process. I wrote an article about it. As a writer, it seems it’d be useful in finding an editor. The first thing I’d want to communicate to an editor is how I think about writing. I’ve enumerated the other elements of the writing process as Theme, Form, Plot, Characters and Style. As themes are the most important aspect of writing, IMO, I created a list of hundreds of themes, which I’ll include in part two of Daedalian Magnum Corpus. Themes are the ideas behind your work that you want your readers to explore. Themes are why your work would be interesting or why they’d inspire discussion. There are tons of good stories and intriguing characters, but themes are where your work connects with the human condition.
And I wanted to empower people who’d want to write … I guess? My heads getting a bit big here LOL. I wanted to describe my own writing process, for my own purposes as a writer. So I ended up writing this. And I think it’s useful reading for anyone who wants to tell a story. If you’re making a video game or writing a screen play or just writing a journal, this article is useful.
American Eros: Or How to Fell a Souley
American Eros is first a short-story about love at first sight, without sight. It’s also a pitch for a revolutionary new concept that I’m calling an episaga, which is an open source myth. The idea is to tell a story describing how main characters were led to develop exactly what they needed in order to have that perfect love experience the next morning, when they least expected it.
Yes, there have been open source and collaborative books before, but this is a new age reworking of myth and I hope to inspire others to return to the true human storytelling tradition. The distinguishing idea of the episaga is that storytellers will keep several fixpoints mostly constant, and these include a handful of plot-points, characters, themes, etc. The fewer and the more general, the better! Storytellers can fork off of other versions of the myth or collaborate. The self-imposed restrictions help foster creativity.
To explain further here are several invariant plot points – fixpoints – which should mostly stay the same. And other people would contribute towards them. The fixpoints should be as generic as possible and there should only be a handful. Ideally, for plotpoints, just one or two, to conserve types of variation in form.
Oneironautics: Questing for Lucidity
I occasionally have the most vivid dreams. Oneironautics is a series where I describe some of my dreams. These are the ones where you wake up and you just have to write them down. If you’re looking for a laugh or something to freak you out a bit, then by all means, take a peek at my subconscious. The first in the series covers several dreams: one includes a Colombian drug lord and power tools and another includes a journey into the recesses of my mind, presented as a metaphor whereby I unlock some knowledge hidden away. And perhaps for my own good…
ᛝ Medical Sciences ᛝ
ᛝ Facets of Greatness ᛝ
This is a series on Leadership. Think of people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. What about local community leaders that you find motivating and inspiring? What is it that sparks leaders great and small to begin work on projects that seem monumental or impossible or hopeless? Why do they strive onwards where everyone else gives up? Why do they find success when others might work harder?
For leaders like Ghandi, IMO, he gained an opportunity because his non-violent tactics countered traditional resistance to social change. And his tactics and protests, perhaps by chance or by genius, built a movement. Ghandi was a master of social networking before Facebook or Twitter. Either he was very lucky and capitalized on his chance or he was a genius at networking through people. How could a fairly soft-spoken man like Ghandi inspire people throughout India at a time when the telecommunication system was still being developed there?
What makes these people different? What are those subtle aspects of their craft that have thus far eluded us? There must be something that makes these people different in a way. What do they know that the rest of us are missing out on? Would the world be a better place if many of these ideas were common knowledge? Yes, with the exception of some ideas, I think it would be a much better place. I wholeheartedly believe that a world full of empowered, knowledgable, wise people would certainly be a more peaceful world.
ↂ Maximizing Mutual Benefit ↂ
How to quickly identify, vet and connect to mutually beneficial connections.
ↂ Synoptic Epigrams ↂ
An inappropriately titled article on why communication is important. Overview on Communication for Leaders. Leveraging your network with a concise message. Simple is better.
ↂ If Actions Speak Louder ↂ
Overview on Signaling. The how and why to signaling. Why signaling overcomplicates otherwise simple projects. How signaling is the missing piece for the otherwise exceptionally intelligent.
ↂ Meta and Epi ↂ
Overview of Knowledge. Understanding metaphenomena and epiphenomena. Constructing and reading models. Utilizing knowledge differential for profit.
ↂ Congressional Power Structures ↂ
An intuitive overview of working with political power structures. This is about leveraging your network, your goals and your colleagues’ needs to get things done.
ↂ Understanding the Political System ↂ
An overview of common blockers in the American political system, along with the reasoning and wisdom behind them.
ↂ Monumental Accidents ↂ
There are no such things. Truly, nothing great is an accident. This article covers some disparate topics, such as diversity of body and mind, the modular mind, social engineering, independence and the art of bonsai.
ᛝ Linguistics and Semiotics ᛝ
ᛝ Consciousness ᛝ
It’s important to note how lost I’d be without Coursera’s free online education. Those courses are such stellar opportunities and I never would have had the insights I did without them. The first was Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning class and it was mind-blowing. I was challenged at first, but by the second week, I was hooked. Taking this revolutionized my understanding and conceptualization of artificial intelligence.
The Nature of Space, Time and Information Implies Universal Language
This post pitches possibility of some language which constructed to mirror the kernel or apex of the structure of knowledge. It is built from the most basic structures of information. The thesis for this one is: the need to communicate & establish protocols without having to cross vast distances implies that every sufficiently advanced civilization would eventually uncover an identical language to communicate ideas, given enough time and development.
This is one of the articles for which I received significant backlash… from my family, who knows nothing about philosophy. I sat on the outline for months. The morning I was going to publish it (a few hours before) they sat me down and threatened to send me to the looney bin. And that’s basically my life. I’m lucky if I don’t get sent off for “treatment.” The way they approached handling me that day was reactive to my writing. Weird, right? My mom, brother and sister each refuse to read anything that I write. That’s so weird. They claim that it sounds crazy, I’m crazy and that I should just get a job.
This article establishes the basis for a universal language. “Consciousness as a Continuum” establishes the possibility of a pre-existing medium through which we can all communicate instantly. Through the entire universe! Or at least, I entertain this idea. This has VAST implications for EPISTEMOLOGY and TECHNOLOGY!! I haven’t really heard anyone discuss this! So, how can someone say this isn’t philosophy and that it belongs on a futurism subreddit?! That’s !@#$’ing crazy!
Consciousness as a Continuum: Life, the Cosmos and You
This article undermines the Singularity by posing the possibility of threshold at which all civilizations in the universe will become capable of instant communication with all others. Thus, instant transmission of data & experience & knowledge to other civilizations. Imagine a galactic economy, where your value is established by the supply of computational power you can contributed to this cosmic quantum supercomputer to the sky!
This article generated controversy on Reddit’s Philosophy channel, though moderators quickly removed it. Users in other subreddits and a few not-very-supportive readers critiqued my work as rambling, but didn’t actually demostrate knowledge of the content. This further demonstrates their lack of familiarity with my subject matter in general! THANK YOU! You just proved my content was novel!
Regardless, this piece’s “rambling” nature is proof of genius: I didn’t have an outline; no one told me about this idea; I sat down one afternoon and just wrote until I published it.
Neural Networks and Spider Brains
This is an article about consciousness that ties into Consciousness as a Continuum and The Nature of Space, Time and Information Implies Universal Language. It covers how a spider processes sensory information via insights its neural networks must make. This piece covers the lower levels of consciousness and more completely describes what I call the window of consciousness in later essays. These lower level neural networks drive insights which are provided to that window of consciousness, which the spider uses to drive its actions and behaviors.
When I thought to draft these ideas, I was procrastinating saw a spider on the wall. And so I frantically typed up an outline. This is my Newton’s Apple, if I have one. As I watched and interacted, I realized that, at some level, it must be capable of recognizing objects, types of objects, actions and types of actions in order to “inform” it’s actions. These capabilities imply that its neural networks must embody some structure which permits these capabilities. This post requires understanding of consciousness, neurology, machine learning and other esoteric fields.
But … the post could also lead to important insights for Artificial Intelligence? I guess? I don’t know. But that right there is my genius: I don’t !@#$’ing know! I’m caught between both a superiority complex and an inferiority complex! Throw me a frickin’ bone here! I’m trying to establish credibility.
It’s pretty funny to watch people dismantle my work, but never actually mention any of the content. They usually go straight for the ad hominem, which is the rhetorical equivalent of flinging your own poo at someone. It stinks and now you have poo on your hands. If you don’t understand the language or whatever, that is fine. I’m more than happy to talk to you about it and I guarentee that within five to fifteen minutes, you will understand what it is I’m talking about, regardless of your education level. I guess that makes me a good teacher, too.
Have You Thought About Using Reddit?! (LMAO)
This is a real good look for you all and for the current paradigm of discourse and censorship that that pervades Facebook and Reddit: “Corralled Censorship by Veto”
I also don’t know why I have sixty cents to my name. Philosophy is spooky and dangerous!! Don’t think too hard about how you think!
ᛝ God and Religion ᛝ
The Nature of God
For that series and, in particular, for “Nature of God”, I thought that if I bait skeptical readers into attacking me by saying that my use of language is just smattering, then I’m free to respond by saying: actually, for a scientist/atheist, you’re not as intelligent as you might seem because you don’t understand A,B,C scientific idea or mathematic process. If you claim that you don’t understand, then you either didn’t understand those metaphors/allusions or you stopped reading right after the beginning. Either way, it’s like rhetorical jujitsu because some of my readers are going to respond in that manner anyways, regardless of the merit of my work & thought.
What ‘Smatter? LuLz
Actually, Ziusudra was pretty cool
And guess what? I was attacked for just that! For using expressive language! I was told “the academic world doesn’t need people like that!” LMAO, seriously? WTF? The same user informed me that she created a Reddit account just to message me. I have no idea who it was, but I have some ideas … Ya, it’s probably just someone else catfishing me. That’s real funny! Well, it’s not traditional catfishing, but more like catfishing with carney tricks thrown in to really tug at the ‘ole puppet strings.
A single r/philosophy moderator vetoed my post. The first real post
I made on Reddit and it generated 50 upvotes and 2,500 web sessions to
te.xel.io IN LESS THAN SIX HOURS. No subsequent
post since then has generated any comparable levels. My capacity to
direct web traffic to my site is so varied that it seems as though I
am on rogue NSA Reddit/Facebook/Social servers running on a forked
splinternet.
I’m Not Religious, I’m Spiritual
★ God Is Not Dead
★ Of God and Atheisms
★ A Lighthouse in a Storm
This is a three-part series arguing for the value of religion. Part one refutes Nietzsche’s hypothesis that “God is Dead.” It does so using some pretty convoluted language. This was an intentional direction in style. I wanted to use scientific imagery to appeal to atheists and scientists in particular. I also expected these same people to be the first to dismiss my work. No one really takes me seriously LOL.
The notion of immediate rejection on whatever effective basis possible is something that I am well-acquainted with. I am constantly dealing with people who never plan on taking me serious and don’t wish for my success, ever. It would make them wrong. They value saving face more than healthy progress for myself. I never get the chance to make a first impression. And so! I have learned to take this into account. Specifically, I often present people with openings to attack me on the assumption that they will (and they do) so when they attack me, they so it on my terms! It’s a learned defense mechanism in a world of constant criticism.
It’s so bad, I have an analogy for my life that involves the statistical method of linear regression, where you are optimizing a function. The general idea is that you’ve got a ball rolling down a hill and you want it to roll in such a way that optimizes some cost function. At each step, you’re picking variables that allow the ball to roll down the hill to a more efficient solution.
Well, in terms of my most common social interaction, in both the short-term and long-term, it seems that people around my are trying to micro-manage things like number of social connections, impact, credibility, appearance, and context, such that the ball rolls down the hill in a disadvantageous manner. It seems like they are well aware of psychological methods, but that they are using them to make things harder for me. In other words, their cost function is not optimized on my success, BUT ON MY FAILURE! Both in the short-term and long-term!
That sounds !@#$’ing crazy! But when, given hundreds of decision points, when I gauge the impact and intention behind their actions and, most crucially, the alternative available words/actions, it becomes clear: this person or this group does not care about me. Over the course of hundreds of interactions, it becomes clear: they always go with what is negative for me, especially in the long term.
Hello Watson, Might You Spare a Moment to Hear the Good News
ᛝ Epistemology ᛝ
The metaphysical structure representing the sum of all human knowledge greatly exceeds the computational capacity of the universe, implying that the universe can never observe in totality the knowledge contained within it.
Epistemology, Cognition and Category Theory
★ An Overview
★ A Model For The Mind
★ Directive Cognitive Expansion
This is an unfinished series on the mind and its connections to the nature of knowledge and cognition. These articles tie together of neurology, psychology, cognition, metacognition, philosophy, category theory (math) and epistemology. By combining knowledge from developmental, behavioral and cognitive psychology, we enable ourselves to learn about how we learn. With this, we accelerate our development to learn better, faster, harder …
This post uses an incorrect set of terms for describing epistemology, but that’s because I basically I’m not using the usual epistemology language. The first part is an intro. The second part discusses specific elements of our mind. It states that our brain is modular and our mind is powered by dynamically combining these modular elements. It then asserts that if we develop/improve some of these modular elements through some specific skill or hobby that those improvements should carry over to other skills that rely on any of those elements. Part three briefly enumerates some of the skills/hobbies that work best for this. It describes how and why these skills help our mind function more proficiently.
Eventually I will write part four and five, which provide a model for knowledge that’s based on category theory. Some people at Stanford have already written about this, so it’s not new, but it is powerful.
ᛝ Postmodernism and Metamodernism ᛝ
These two articles cover social and cultural problems that will take root as technology evolves more rapidly. These are most definitely philosophical questions and I would argue that understanding philosophical problems could never be more important than at the current moment. Paradox of Creativity was the first article I posted on /r/philosophy
Figuring out how to stave off nihilism and the death of individuality is our Riddle of the Sphinx. The roots of almost all 21st century social & cultural problems will be partially composed of nihilism or the death of individuality. Those two concepts will cripple and demoralize us at a time in history when we MUST remain as strong as we could possibly be.
Paradox of Creativity
I posted the “Paradox of Creativity” in early June. It was my first post on reddit. It was deleted in six hours, but had already accumulated 2,500 sessions and 50 comments! My first post on reddit!! IN SIX HOURS!!
That is validation. It doesn’t matter what you say or whether you blessings allow me an opportunity to have my writing critiqued. My writing has been validated by the simple fact that thousands of people visited my site in six hours. When I saw that number, I thought there must be something wrong! NOPE!