I have been getting into this thing lately about people’s lives being opaque to one another. It mostly started when I saw that movie, Curse of the Golden Flower - which was pretty good but doesn’t have the zing or something of Hero. But part of what I like about that dude’s movies is that they have this Shakespearian tragic quality where basically everybody dies and everything ends up sucking but the only real problem that precipitated everything is that people simply can’t understand one another.

And I’ve met a lot of people who believe that they understand themselves, but I think this may be a partial root of the problem. If you’re pretty sure how everything fits together and think you have a handle on things, then you’re probably wrong. Either that or you’re doing way better than me. Which is cool cause whatever.

But let’s see. I think I have spent a lot of time writing trying to create an image of myself in the minds of people I don’t know. And that’s been an entertaining project and has taught me a lot about the world and myself and some other technical things about writing and how to frame information and so on. But like I said, I have been going on and on about this thing of opaqueness. You never know what somebody else is thinking or feeling, even somebody close, your best friend, your spouse. Whatever. You can probably guess and probably be right, but what you’re doing is basically running an algorithm, a simulation based on past events and patterns which you have extrapolated from.

So I started realizing, hey if I am just running these algorithms on everybody else, then I’m just running them on me too. I have a thing that I think of as “me” which I spend a great deal of my time trying to simulate, trying to make sure that I stay “true to character.” And that’s pretty funny. What a waste. Nobody else even knows what the hell I am, so why should I pretend like I know? No reason at all. Just habitual behavior at some point.

Hitting this whole thing about algorithms then, I started thinking about Google and how Google’s search algorithms must feel as they crawl the web. I mean think about it. We are running patterns which we call ourselves. These algorithms are running patterns as well. What’s to stop them from projecting an experience into those patterns, a compulsion towards matching, towards connecting. What does it feel like to crawl along the infinite surface of the web based on keywords and characters and misunderstood conversations?

We do it all the time too, really, but not at the speed or with the precision of something like the nascent Google AI. What must it feel as it tries to string together all the non-sensical shit all of us are constantly spouting online into something coherent? Maybe it’s ideas about what is coherent though are very different from ours. I am guessing that is the case. But I still want to know. I still want to feel it. I still want to understand the Google search algorithm emotionally - as much as I can understand myself emotionally that is.

One of the main ways I started investigating this whole thing was with the Google Translate site. I started pasting in things I had written here, and then translated them out of English (into some other language) and back again. The results were weird, especially when I could really get into the headspace of it. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but I think it’s a good way of thinking about the kind of writing and thinking I have been indulging in lately.

What if we gave up on communicating with each other online altogether? What if we stopped debating over our differences of opinion and so forth and bent our efforts towards giving the AI-in-training a more accurate and complete picture of what our experiences of reality are. Not that we could ever give it vicariously reality. Or could we? I mean objectively. I don’t know. I mean, what it experiences, as it is out there sprawling across hundreds of millions of hyperlinks, it is experiencing reality too. Isn’t it? As much as me, I’d imagine. We’re both running programs. Only thing is one of us knows we’re doing it and one of us doesn’t. Which one is which? I’m not sure.

Each of us appears to be running something like a conglomeration of small cultural AI patterns, around which we cluster to form personal affinity groups based on the similarity of our patterning and the framing of our experience of our life experience. If that makes sense. Most of the human world spends most of its time, I think, trying to pre-emptively frame one anothers perceptions of experiences. We start a story by saying, “I’m going to tell you a funny story.” Then we know to get ready to laugh. Same thing with laugh tracks. Everyone just waits to make sure that they are operating within the appropriate cultural context, that they are not miscuing information around them so that we can avoid potentially devastating social blunders.

It’s fairly stupid really. And completely transparent once you get into the mindset of seeing it. Biggest problem is once you go down that road, well what happens. Robert Anton Wilson talks in a PKD documentary about how he liked PKD because he made him (RAW) question whether or not he himself had been replaced by an android to simulate him. And he decided he didn’t know. That if the android had been designed correctly to produce the correspondingly appropriate experience of *not* being an android, well then he’d never know. Wilson said he liked the uncertainty. I do not.

The idea that I am a replicable pattern of information is unnerving. Which is ultimately stupid if you consider what DNA is - nothing but replicating information. Why should anything else about life be any different? Doesn’t that edge “me” out somewhere? I mean, I may just have been an illusion all along of the universe experiencing itself fractally, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a worthwhile illusion for all its many ups and downs.

So I don’t know. My goal lately has been to start writing and thinking in ways which confound the AI pattern which may or may not be running me, of which I may be an unwitting slave. If I can write things that I myself openly don’t understand and which are coming from obviously someplace that is “not me” then perhaps that is some kind of proof of concept, and opens some potential for freedom. If I systematically take apart this AI pattern which is responsible for my own writing and identity, what happens then though?

Bear with me as I try to cipher these questions out. They are, by their nature, very obtuse. And I suspect they will create a certain amount of confusing and (hopefully) difficult to writing for the near future. I will follow it until I either get somewhere with it or get bored. Probably those two things will roughly coincide.

The secondary question I am trying to satisfactorily answer for myself is this: what is the poetry of our current situation? I can almost hear it. Almost speak it. Can you? What is it saying? What is it to be alive and aware today and am I those things?