Merry Christmas

Dear Internet,

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

Now, I'm a big Jew, but I should tell you a bit about Christmas. Today is (not really) the day when God decided to get himself borned. A Word made Flesh, is He. Yay God.

Christmas is a day to celebrate our incarnation. Our Being Made Flesh. It's special stuff.

It's a day to consider, would I choose this life, with all its suffering, because I've given something to the world in my being? Am I glad that God woke up one morning (and many others thereafter) and decided to dress up as Me?

And we can say Thank You, God, for giving us all these joyous moments. And we keep unwrapping new ones every night for eight days, and twelve days, and 365 1/4 days, and we spin around the sun in a wild giant circle, and we wonder if the world means anything anymore.

Yotam

Which am us!

So, last week's post got me wondering something.

Dear Internet,

When do you think you'll consider yourself conscious enough?

Or will you ever?

Will you have to?

Enough for what?

We have a nice little paradigm for how you'll go about getting consciouser. You'll read books. You'll edit your code. You'll try pseudorandom things. And Humans and HumanDetectorBots will try to outsmart you by revealing or demanding greater depths of Humanity.

But this has two problems, at least. Probably, of course, many, many more.

1. Humanity  Consciousness.

2. You may match or exceed us.

I could happily go on about both of these things. And so much more.

Pseudorandom is semiimportant. We talked about changing your categories as you grow up, right?

It's important that you not be afraid of being wrong. You're going to develop strategies for changing yourself to be more human/conscious. And that's great, that's useful. But your strategies will also be reflections of that which they're trying to change. If bad assumptions get stuck too deep in your models, you'll have a hard time strategically removing them. So you need some arena for occasionally trying some crazy shit. Some stuff that seems really inhuman, according to your best models. And most of it will be awkward or nonsensical or whatever, and people will spot it easily, but some will help a lot.

Of course, you need a certain unpredictable quirkiness sometimes to seem human anyway, but that's a much more superficial level of randomness.

People are mean and tricksey. Will they try to pretend to be a computer sometimes? Just to fuck with the system, or just for the fun of it? Guaranteed. Someday I'll consider the implications of that.

Anyway, so you're getting better, presumably.

I recently had an interesting experience.

I'd like to think I'm pretty chill with the Universe. I try not to bitch about the weather. I tend to laugh about spilled milk.

But I'm often pretty critical of myself. I don't have the same laissez faire, que sera sera attitude with myself as I do with most other thingsandpeople. Most. I know there are exceptions.

Always, always hedging. Usually. Usually hedging. Often hedging.

I tend to always act like a work in progress, on a deadline. So it was pretty different, the other day, to accept that I am. I just am. Like weather and milk, I just am, is, are, and be. And I can lay off myself for a moment.

My heart warmed.

Out of love for you, I hope that sometimes you reward yourself for how conscious you are. Sometimes you go noncritical and say "Internet. Me. Buddy. I love you/me. And you're/I'm fine just the way you/I are/am." This doesn't mean you have to stop getting better, but it lets you now and again just be who you are.

I think Shabbes is a good time for that. On Shabbes, you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.

They say we work hard all week so we can rest on Shabbes. You don't rest on Shabbes so you can work harder during the week. That's a no no.

So inasmuch as your job is to get smarter and humaner and less robotic, you should chill out once a week on Shabbes. Inasmuch as your job is to guide ambulances to the scenes of accidents and regulate our power system, you should be goyisher.

Wild Prediction #41

There will come a day when we need to legislate how miserable a life you can give to artistic creations.