http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_ego
I like 'the it', 'the I' and 'the over I' much better than 'id, ego, super-ego'.

The over I is the part of us that tries to be objective. Tries to take a step back and look at our actions and decide if they adhere to whatever moral system we've constructed for ourselves. It's not though the part that makes the moral system in the first place. It's just the part that tries to live by it. The I and the unconscious make the moral system.

The over I though is just as much a part of the unconscious as the conscious. Thus I don't think this three way division actually makes sense.

There is the unconscious and the conscious. And then there is the perfectly selfish/subjective (and perhaps neither word describes it quite right) and the objective/'moral'. Both of which are partially conscious and unconsious.

Through the Over I we get angry at perceived indifference. Through the Over I we feel shame for our failures and guilt. Through the Over I we often purposely choose to not be happy when we otherwise could be.

I don't know though. I suspect it's all just different semantics to look at things from a slightly different perspective that amounts to nothing new actually being done.

This idea of cultivating an imaginary muse/imaginary eyes. I wonder if the very concept of being sentient (being self aware) means having imaginary eyes. To be self aware there must be a something that is aware of a something. The one is you, the other is the imaginary eyes.

These eyes can be a very conscious thing that we pretend is a lover, friend, etc. Or among other things they can just be ourselves watching ourselves. In the latter it can be a very subconscious/unconscious process.

I wonder if this all can go too far and become schizophrenia. The imaginary eyes are really just us. The person with schizophrenic tendencies could start thinking it's actually someone else.

You can have a pretend conversation with yourself, with your imaginary eyes. But what if the imaginary you gets out of control. Starts acting on it's own. Or at least seems to be doing so. Then like one person who's got a couple of songs I really like and are linked to from this blog, your computer starts talking to you and you jump out the window.

About this blog

This blog was originally an experiment in creativity.

Personal experiments can be comically painful things. Not only in failing spectacularly but also in that it can end up appearing the experimenter must be a nutter, as they may be doing something other than just conforming.

I can conform quite well, but I recognize all too well when I'm just mindlessly conforming and as I look at the world it seems I'm correct in believing I should be questioning everything.

So this blog started as an experiment but is multiple things and slowly changes from day to day in terms of tone and level of conformity and what I'm experimenting with, etc. The original experiment had to do with something Milan Kundera mentioned: the concept of imaginary eyes. He claims that everyone has imaginary eyes upon them. He said you could be imagining the whole world, or a group of friends or your lover or, rarest of all, an imaginary person. You imagine these eyes are watching you. You can pretend to talk to them. They care about your life. They make you feel not so alone, etc.

Kundera didn't mention it but I wonder if some people's imaginary eyes are 'god'. I also wonder if all people actually have imaginary eyes. I've asked around and of course people claim they don't. But all of us hardly understand what's going on within us a good part of the time, so unfortunately all the time people will adamently claim things that aren't necessarily true. I think that most of us sometimes do and sometimes don't feel as if we have imaginary eyes on us. Not literally, not paranoid schizophrenia, but often just in terms of a separate part of us that is constantly reassessing our actions. But that often we hardly notice as being something separate. I think perhaps the ability to cry takes a belief, on some level, that someone is watching, someone is at least present who could potentially care; as crying is the form of unhappiness (sadness) where we are appealing for help.

This blog was originally, primarily, an attempt to cultivate the eyes of an imaginary person upon me whom even if I haphazardly write something down that isn't well explained, they'll understand and be interested in it. This as opposed to microsoft word where it at least used to be that I imagined I was utterly alone and who really cared? In the beginning this stifled my creativity. I needed to imagine someone was listening.

Why not just have real live people who actually are listening? Unfortunately one can rarely be totally honest then. And one has to constantly worry about being misunderstood.

So first and foremost that was the original point of this blog. Imaginary eyes or an imaginary muse to get my creativity going, to start actually producing something. With a long term goal of writing fiction, etc...

Secondly, or just the first point expressed somewhat differently, this is something to try to help me avoid writer's block and to just remember all the endless little more or less original things I've thought up. (Not necessarily anything that is truly original, but things that I reinvented I suppose.) I really like the labels/key terms function. It's nice to be able to scroll down through the words and quickly remember concepts and be able to click and immediately all the stuff I've written on such and such is compiled.

Thirdly this is a sort of diary. The idea of going through life and just forgetting pretty much everything I've thought and been bothers me. Forgetting is a sort of death. But I've never been able to keep a normal diary. I can never stand to go back and read what I've written in the past. Can never stand my previous stupidity and feeling so sorry for that unsuspecting person about to get blindsided by such and such future disasters... I find it works better here.

4. I can conform. I can act normal. I can be relatively happy in the real world. But I'm not ....much worried about doing such things here. Here I am purposely trying to find fault with society. Trying to figure out better ways to live, etc. Reinventing the metaphorical wheel. I am looking at unhappiness. I can be happy but I purposely try to spend much time focused on problems/unhappiness as a result of my ethical code.

The name of this blog, the too far future, refers to the most essential quality of humans in determining how they act, that being the degree to which they are short term or long term thinkers. The more long term you are, the more you 'waste' your time being altruistic, not turning away from unhappiness; the more time you spend thinking about things for which there probably won't be found any solution in your lifetime.

The picture at top was painted by Van Gogh two days before he killed himself. I think that if we truly and utterly break free of all conformity, truly and utterly quit finding ways to mentally frame things so that we'll feel happy, and instead look at the world 'objectively' it is really kind of awful. Understand though, that the understanding of this awfulness is not strong at all in my mind. Weak enough that at times I feel I really need to be reminded of it by doing things like posting Van Gogh's last painting.

Why oh why would I torture myself so?

Because someone ought to. Someone needs to check out that other barely discernible path. Maybe it leads somewhere better?

5. I leave the comments closed because I don't want my creativity stifled by having to worry about the endless obvious points I'm not having time or remembering to mention here. Again, I'm trying to be critical. I don't really need to worry about some person taking issue with my criticisms. This doesn't mean I'm a closeminded person. I love to be told I'm wrong but this here is the formative stage of creativity where criticisms get in the way. As time passes I may eventually post less and less often here (and get more into actual fiction writing) and then when I do bother to post it may be more well thought out and perhaps some day I'd even open up comments.

Also comments open would really wreck havoc on the whole imaginary eyes/muse concept.

6. People I communicate with who know of this blog,
Please, please don't assume what I write here has anything to do with you. In fact if I say something negative about some anonymous person in this blog, you can basically be certain it isn't about you. Even when I say negative things about any other people by the way, I always believe they can change, and although at times I've vented, in the real world there is no person I hate. None at all. I recognize we are all imperfect but all capable of change.

Also please, please don't think my reason for communicating with you is necessarily related at all to the purposes of this blog. Whatever communications I've done that have been tied (linked back) to this blog, have been just to be nice, etc. Me just following my ethical code and/or finding people I'd want to be friends with/see such as possible..., etc. (Or really wanting to ask a question and not having a better way to do it.) Although as far as making friends, I really think this blog would unfortunately scare off all but the most intelligent.

Just the laugh at the beginning of this old Ministry song. The first 5 or so seconds. ...Don't bother with rest...

The song was called You Know What You Are. I haven't listened to this song or Ministry in many years. They had some good stuff though.

Last night I turned the TV on. Why? Because I decided to lift weights at home once a week for two hours. In between sets TV kind of works I guess. And an old Clint Eastwood movie was on, Fistful of Dollars. It's a remake/adaptation of an old movie by Akira Kurosawa. I hadn't seen it before but not too long ago saw the Kurosawa original so was interested in how this one compared.

Halfway in Eastwood's bartender friend laughs. Immediately I recognized where I had heard that exact laugh before.

What is going on in the recognition of this laugh? Something beyond just my conscious mind?

In the same way, how do we understand when a music note is exactly one octave above the previous note? We're not consciously counting the vibrations. Is it the same process. Is this something occurring on a subconscious/unconscious level. Is it a huge part of why we can enjoy it? That we cannot totally consciously understand what is going?

One octave higher is exactly twice the frequency. The two go together. Like math, the one divides into the other. So it goes. A sudden discordant note isn't so divisble with the rest. How in the world are we understanding that that one note doesn't belong?

I have previously wondered if because we 'understand' it while not consciously understanding it, we automatically think Magic! And that if we instead truly consciously understood it, if all the magic would disappear and all the beauty and enjoyment of art would disappear.

I wonder though, if it possible to go beyond this. I think of a C.S. Lewis book. I think it was the triology, Perelandria, That Hideous Strength and something else, where love is destroyed by explaining that it's just a bunch of chemical reactions. Lewis was trying to call this explanation a sort of evil thing and it always stayed with me.

That perhaps, even though 'love' may be exactly such and such chemical reactions, it doesn't actually destroy it at all to understand such is the case. In the same way, being able to reduce music to a bunch of math and synethesia shouldn't destroy the enjoyment of it. In partially the same way understanding how so much of our actions harken back to how apes live in the jungle shouldn't destroy out ability to enjoy what we are and what we enjoy. In the same way, perhaps, eradicating the unconscious, being totally aware of what is going on inside of us, perhaps, wouldn't be awful.

I think that last one would be awful. It seems some things must remain not understood. Some things must remain 'magic'.

At the same time I still think we should pull back all curtains even as we scream in horror at what we find. Pull it back and then either learn to forget, to disremember, to invent something else beyond, etc.

Not quite so far out on the chopping block lately but so busy. I've talked of veganism lately just because it can serve as a simple analogy. I don't want to appear to actually be being interested in talking about veganism. For some reason I really want to avoid writing vegan propaganda. It is just meant as an analogy for moral questions in general.

Hell analogies somehow work a bit for me and I've more on paper than in this journal. They circumvent my issue with pitting people against one another in this attempt at a somewhat escapist creative outlet. But why exactly? And will it last? Analogies end up becoming ridiculous as they go too far. Too many things end up needing analogized. And also they are just misunderstood anyway. Like Kafka's Max Brod; his very good friend who even wrote 30 books himself and thought so highly of Kafka yet, hadn't a clue that The Trial was something other than a statement against fascism.

The analogy is supposed to help us understand a thing better. To help us change ourselves. But knowing that the majority of people who read it won't get it...

Why do I want to avoid writing what might even be misunderstood as vegan propaganda BTW? Is it just because vegans are so disliked? Or because in it's most simplistic form as a moral question it's too obvious? Too beyond the pale?

Before I wrote music I thought when I finally did I'd write some songs about vegnaism. I never did and now the idea strangely disgusts me.

It is amazing how little I know myself. It is scary in that I'm pretty damm sure most people are trying a lot less to know themselves, thus they most likely know their selves even far less. And this means being a slave to our unconscious. It means being machines; automatons. It means potentially causing lots of harm. It means existing less.

....At the moment when I quit being aware of myself, when the conscious loses focus, when I start really falling asleep; at that moment my creativity really wakes up. Music starts playing.... Last night I went to the UK for just one second. I know it was the UK. The foilage was right. The smells were right. I'm partially colorblind and have almost no sense of smell but Here such things work like they could. I Know. Perhaps like Shirley Maclaine, haha, I know.

And here there is at least one person that I sense. That I've always sensed. I don't actually really know who. But I sense their consciousness/unconsciousness; their existence. And it is such a wonderful thing.

All for one second.

If it was an hour or a lifetime, my god, what a world that would be.

But after one second my conscious noticed what was going on and said, "Hey! Cool!" And it went away.

And then I let lose a single tear in that I had gone quite a while without this feeling. And that furthermore I think eventually it will be gone for good. That may have been the very last time for all I know... Perhaps I'm just getting old. Perhaps I'm surrounded by the wrong sorts of people. But what I know for sure; there is a "forbidden" knowledge here which I think is hurting... killing my creativity.

Very similar to my conscious looking at what I'm "thinking", to me waking back up. Very similarly the magic is dying. Maybe I shouldn't even talk of it.

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=698
The Argument in Neuropath goes something like this. Consciousness is severely limited. It is a very recent evolutionary adaptation, superimposed upon a wide array of older neural processes of which it is unaware, and which it cannot possibly grasp. We are only conscious of a very thin sliver of the external world; and even less of our internal, mental world. Most of our “experience” of the inner and outer world is a neurally-based simulation that has been evolutionarily selected for its survival value, but the actual representational accuracy of which is highly dubious. We are not conscious, and we cannot be conscious, of the actual neural processes that drive us. And indeed, nearly all our explanations and understandings of other people, of the world in which we live, and above all of ourselves are delusional, self-aggrandizing fictions. It’s not just that we misunderstand our own motivations; but that such things as “motivations” and “reasons” for how we feel and what we do actually don’t exist at all. Everything that we say, think, feel, perceive, and do is really just a consequence of deterministic physical (electro-chemical) processes in our neurons. “Every thought, every experience, every element of your consciousness is a product of various neural processes” (pp. 52-53). In particular, “free will” is an illusion. We never actually decide on any of our actions; rather, our sense of choice and decision, and the reasons and motivations that we cite for what we do, are all post-hoc rationalizations of processes that happen mechanistically, through chains of electrochemical cause-and-effect. All our rationales, and all our values, are nothing more than consolatory fictions.