Blogging

One of the things that I've been working through on long lonely nights is the idea of the worth of a man (this is not an invitation to rail on me about my gender insensitivity - the worth of a human sounds ridiculous and you know what I mean). The worth of a man is a summation of his experience. Experience exists in either your mind, the minds of those who shared it with you, or in some physical testament to the happenance. To exist in ones mind boils down to memory, leading hopefully to a changed and improved pattern of thinking, leading to improved and increasingly robust experiences. Memory is a lossy compression (i.e. information is irrecoverably lost during the process). Compression is intolerant of uniqueness (i.e. compression efficiency goes low as uniqueness goes high) although not in all compressions, but I believe this is true in memory's case.

Through publicizing my diary, I am: creating an experience that can be shared; creating a physical testament, a literal mile marker of the event through pictures and description; and improving the chances that I will remember (uniquely) the 100 or so thin slices of time that will, in future, characterise this excursion ("thin sliced" not in the "Learn How to Prejudge Those Around You in 90 minutes" bible sense, but in the "small slivers of the whole cake" sense). I am imprinting what would otherwise be fleeting and highly compressible memories into my indelible stack of experience through translation and sharing.

Blogging is good for me (rather the act of expression is good and it happens to be convenient). It improves my worth.

There are some caveats that clearly need to be rationalized which I may get to. One might say that there is no worth to 1 million unique experiences of a scoundrel. I would have to disagree. A larger topic to be sure, but I believe that we are on this planet to learn. I do not believe in a higher power, but in a higher order ("something going on", spirituality and energies can fit into an order that we do not currently understand). I do not believe in an omniscient being that created the heavens and the earth, nor a greater organization requiring daily mental or physical servitude. If the summation of my entire life compresses to almost zero (say that I lived a million minor variations of one experience) then my worth is less than a scoundrel who has learned, adapted and internalized through every step of his reprehensible life. Now, someone can have unique experiences every day on their way to work, watching a hockey game or digging a ditch. Don't get me wrong - I am not saying they aren't worthy experiences or enjoyed by people of no worth (and in fact am saying there is the potential for quite the opposite), but (however it happens), we had all better survive memory's compressive vice or we run the risk of running into trouble at the end of the day. I am also a strong believer in being a good person, which adds an additional dimensional quality to the preceding statements which might not rightly fit. Further, if I truly believed this working definition, then the whole idea of worth boils down to a retention model and I would never lose an hour of sleep, certainly wouldn't taste a drop of alcohol and shun the metallic food container and aluminum infused deodorant conventions that I frequent so often. (again, it needs some thought).

Speaking of modelling:

Thinking of how to describe ones experience as vectors and the volume they could subscribe as someones "worth". The idea being that adding orthogonal experiences to an existing plane of experience gives you the most bang for the buck (an orthogonal experience to another experience gives a plane). Any point within the resulting volume can be interpolated based on your experience - it becomes "familiar". The more experiences that you add, with long vectors jutting out at weird angles, the better. 1,2, and 3D personalities as well as being "well rounded" or "focussed" takes on a visual representation.

Can't you then give that volume a notional mass and model "attraction" through Newton's universal law of gravitation? (it is universal after all :) I.e. any two bodies of mass exhibit a mutual, attractive force which is governed by their masses and their distance between them. In this case, two bodies (personalities / worth / experience) will attract each other based only on the distances between their respective centre of "gravity" (the location of their core) and their mass (the amount of space that their representation of experience in a 3-d vector space takes up multiplied by the mass of one unit of worth). It would take a lot of doing in terms of definition of the axis et al and boy would I ever need to pull out the old textbooks. Also, it would become difficult to apply when the shape isn't a sphere and it would run into some serious problems when the two shapes melded. So, not sure if this idea would fall to pieces quickly and it probably is only valid in some very narrow "opposites attract" situations. Besides, isn't making a bigger resultant shape through relationships what it's all about? Although, how the shapes intersected, how the familiar was replicated in each shape and how the "cores" moved towards each other regardless of the model of attractive force would be interesting to think about. For this stuff though, it would likely make sense to add more dimensions which will preclude the use of Newton's law (I believe).

[Editors note: Right brains on. Nothing beats a good kiss and this is prob a load of crap. If its not then I am sure to not be the first to think in such terms, such is life - take it for what it is.]