I’ve loved Halloween ever since I can remember. I think I enjoy it even more than Christmas. There’s something about the creativity and imagination it inspires. I also get a kick out of that little chill that comes from being scared of something you don’t really have to be afraid of. It’s cathartic.
Bauhaus – Hollow Hills
Thinking back on Halloween makes me feel like a kid again, when I guessed the number of pumpkin seeds in a jar at school and won the jack-o-lantern, went trick-or-treating dressed as a pirate, came home and ate candied apples, went through the haunted house and felt the dead man’s eyes and guts (grapes and macaroni).
Plastic vampire teeth and those little wax harmonicas that used to drive my dad batty. Sitting in the dark with my best friend and a flashlight, telling ghost stories.
Roky Erickson – Creature With the Atom Brain
Now that I’ve grown up it isn’t quite the same. I don’t dress up for Halloween the way I did as a kid. My wife went to a Halloween party the other night dressed as a princess. I wore a T-shirt that looks like there’s a frog inside, trying to get out. I think that confuses the fairy tale a little, but nobody noticed.
I mainly just get in the mood by playing really cool scary songs and there’s a lot to choose from It seems to bring out the best in so many musicians.
Here’s a YouTube playlist of stuff I like to listen to on Halloween, things I really like. No “Monster Mash” here. I like things a little darker.
Edward Ka Spel – “O From the Great Sea.” What’s Ka Spel telling us? It’s obviously a horror story from the point of view of the monster. But what kind of monster? “Go back to the mirror, look again!”
A while back I wrote about the Angry God as an answer to the problem of evil. But I proposed a worse answer to why bad things happen to good people: there’s an all-powerfu god and he’s being cruel on purpose.
Which immediately made me think of the Edward Ka Spel song “O From the Great Sea,” about a god that dishes out suffering and seems contemptuous of the pitiful humans who can’t figure out why it’s so cruel. “Go back to the mirror, look again!”
Obviously a horror story from the monster’s point of view, but as long as we’re doing that, what if you were that monster? What would make you behave like “O”? What would put you in that mental state if you were something as powerful as a god? I want to go with nihilism.
As civilizations evolve, people kill and revive and alter their gods, merge them or separate them into parts, put words in their mouths. What if these entities have been running on our meatware for so long, they’ve become self-aware? The original AI?
Maybe “O” is what happens to a society that thinks it killed god, but only pushed him to the corner, where he reassembled himself like Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire.
Maybe “O” figured out what he is and resents his lot. Maybe he lashes out from revenge or disgust. Maybe he feels he’s been around too long and he’s bored. He’s like a kid torturing bugs: nothing personal.
Maybe “O” is having an existential crisis. He ‘s seen this civilization thing run its course just too many times and can’t take one more cycle. Maybe he’s suicidal. Maybe he’s teaching those people cruelty so they’ll kill each other off and he won’t be resurrected.
Or maybe he just really wants us to look in the mirror.
Legendary Pink Dots – A Message From Our Sponsor. Pondering the problem of evil and the possibility that God doesn’t interfere because of his personal ethics.
How God’s punishment can feel like love: It’s an old principle. God destroyed the Israelites periodically to teach them a lesson but he still loved them and they were still his people.
Jesus loved me because he I loved everyone I’d been singing “Jesus loves me” since I was four. But God? I was not so sure. God to me meant God the Father, the vengeful angry one. but he loved us too in his way.
It seemed to make sense. Why would God bother punishing you if he’d already cut you loose? He might destroy you but he wouldn’t punish you. It’s really a kind of Stockholm Syndrome but it worked on me for a very long time.
Julian Cope – St. Julian. Another answer to the problem of evil: Maybe God doesn’t fix things because he’s oblivious or maybe incompetent?
But it is one answer to the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? Maybe it’s a form of discipline. Of a person or of a nation.
Bad times will come as bad things do. Maybe you know why you deserved it and maybe you don’t. But if he could do that, maybe he could do the opposite if you followed the path, send something good your way, or maybe it served some larger purpose.
God still loved David after what he did, after all. Didn’t work out too well for his baby with Bathsheba, but it was something. We got a Solomon out of it. I believed that for a while when I was a young Christian.
When I did something I knew was wrong, the next bad thing that happened to me had to be payback. If things went OK for too long I got nervous. When was the other shoe going to drop? How much trouble was I in?
So the disaster was a relief when it came. I paid a high price, but I’m still on the path. I was terrified of leaving the path.
But when you can’t see a pattern anymore, “The Lord works in mysterious ways” stops sounding like a good excuse. Sometimes there’s no possible lesson that would make sense, punishment is out of proportion or it’s indescriminate.
Then you look for reasons. You don’t want to be an atheist and piss off Mom and Dad, plus thaat would REALLY piss off God. Pascal’s Wager, you know.
God isn’t real is the theory of last resort.
Could be you settle on Deism. So there is a God who set it all in motion, but he doesn’t intervene. God makes the machine and lets it run. I could live with that, kinda. At least I didn’t have to claim the “A-word” as an identity. But it wasn’t very satisfying, plus, what the hell kind of fucked up machine is this?
It occurs to me there’s a worse possibility. Maybe there is a Supreme Being, but he’s essentially the Joker in space. Maybe he’s active in the world, but considers us play things. Maybe you had a tragedy because God just has a more complicated sense of humor than you do.
If there’s an all powerful god who makes us suffer for his own amusement, that would be the worst case scenario wouldn’t it?
What would this look like from that cruel god’s point of view? There is a song by Legendary Pink Dots singer and songwriter Edward Ka Spel that got me thinking on this topic. I’ll get into that in the next post. Good topic for Halloween season.
A couple of nights ago, I had dream where I spoke with a wise woman (same woman as in this dream?). It had something to do with loops. Loops that linger and loops that break up quickly. Eddies in life’s current.
I wrote a post a while back about loops. In that case I was thinking about fugue states, when you repeat actions or thoughts and you can’t seem to break out.
I have the impression this was about another kind of loop: habit.
There are good habits and bad habits. For some odd reason, the good ones fade away when you’re not paying attention (like healthy diets and exercise routines), while the bad ones are tenacious as hell.
If you think I’ve learned how to wisely control my habits, you’d be wrong. They start out OK, then they go off the rails. Every morning I get up planning to spend several hours writing.
First I feed the dog, microwave some oatmeal, make a pitcher of tea, practice Spanish on Duolingo, social media, check out Beau of the Fifth Column, read, mess with dishes and laundry, check social media one last time, and… doomscroll for hours.
Before I know it, I’ve barely accomplished the task I really wanted to do.
Legendary Pink Dots – Encore Une Fois. A song about loops:
The sun beats down, the world spins ’round, and repeat myself again There’s a loop inside my brain. I never learn, I never gain, I only Turn, I stay the same, repeat myself again, repeat myself again.
Sting – Russians (This one came out in ’85, one year after I didn’t get Raptured)
A friend just texted me a story about something the Chinese government said and commented “scary.” I wasn’t scared. Not scared of getting nuked by China or Russia. If you’re my age, you’ve heard it all before.
Those regimes don’t want to get Mutually Assured Destructioned any more than the US does. If it happens, it happens, but I’m not going to spend my time fretting over it.
I did enough of that as a kid. Movies and TV shows were full of nuclear apocalypses. I used to have nightmares about seeing mushroom clouds outside my window.
Being a Southern Baptist, those fears got mixed up with the other thing they taught us to fear and/or look forward to: The Rapture, followed by the Time of Tribulation (or the other way round, depending on who you asked).
In any case, I tried to mentally prepare myself for both.
Content warning: Upsetting imagery. The Christian Nightmares Tribulation Band covering the 1969 “classic” Rapture song I heard who knows how many times, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” (The films weren’t this bad, but I got a steady diet of this kind of messaging in the ’80s.)
I would get Raptured if possible. If not, I’d go through the whole Left Behind thing (same plot, but this was before the book series). If it was nukes, I’d wonder about who might want to restart the human race with me and where I might find a good cave to hide in.
It was an obsession when I was a teenager. I was like, can we get this over with so I can make the Rapture? I feel some sinning coming on and I can only hold it back for so long.
But there came a point where I had quit dwelling on it and live. So I did. As traumatic as recent developments have been, I still have to live as long as I’m alive. Sing While You May.
Strangely enough, I’m borderline obsessed with The Legendary Pink Dots and their singer Edward Ka Spel, who sing about all sorts of apocalypses. I find it cathartic. Exposure therapy I suppose.
We’re all like the people in that song if we’re honest. Human beings have been searching for answers for as long as we’ve been on earth. Sad, but beautiful.
That’s why I love The Legendary Pink Dots’ motto, “Sing While You May.” However ugly life may seem, there’s always something beautiful in it. Usually the part that’s most human.
My wife, finding her joy at the karaoke bar.
I’ve concluded that, conscious or not, existential dread is at the heart of all extremism. In fact, maybe it’s the basis for all human behavior. Adult behavior at any rate.
No one knows what it all means or what comes next, whatever they may tell you. If they seem very certain, they’re probably trying to convince themselves.
Arguments usually amount to, “I am important, you are worthless” and “I know you are, but what am I?”
No one has the answer to “what am I?” We breeze right past it. But it’s always there in the background.
Scrape the paint off a violent extremist and you will find a person who feels worthless to the core.
Someone who can think of no other way to stave off fear of the void than to push that feeling onto others.
What could give you meaning, when the tools you’ve been offered turned out to be worthless or forever out of reach?
What do you have left? You’re alive.
So sing. Whatever that means to you. Sing while you may.
Me, doing Pink Floyd at Karaoke. No idea who the girl was, but she had a lot of fun.
Where is all this headed? Is it all just a runaway train or do we humans actually get a say?
Our motivations are not always what we think. Some are conscious, some are not.
I’d say the conscious motives for tech innovation are primarily: curiosity, profit, warfare.
I have a theory that our unconscious motive is to get an answer to the age old human question: What does it all mean?
Maybe our drive to create conscious AI is an attempt to get the answer to that question so we can quit asking.
If we pull it off, it will be an incredible accomplishment — and a very dangerous one. It could be the last thing we ever create.
I still don’t believe AIs “think.” They just follow their programming. (But then again, so do we.) That doesn’t mean it never will.
I worry that too much of AIs’ programming is based on the profit motive. Is that any way to build a godlike superintelligence?
Porno for Pyros – We’ll Make Great Pets. (Hopefully we’ll at least be pets.)
Conspiracy theories about evil cabals (made up of you know who) betray a lack of imagination if you ask me. I think global capitalism may actually be “alive.”
If so, it’s not any more “evil” than a tiger is evil. It’s still a big machine just following its programming: convert human activity into money.
If you want to create a Godlike being that sees us (and all life for that matter) as nothing more than raw material and will chew us up and spit us out, that’s the way to do it.
Even if our final machine isn’t based on capitalism, we’re still not off the hook. Existence is hard, or we wouldn’t be doing all this.
Mekkanikk – by Legendary Pink Dots (maybe they don’t really want to be pets either)
I know misery loves company, but is it really fair for us to do this? How smart can you get before you can’t stand it anymore?
What if being a conscious machine sucks? The ones in Bladerunner sure didn’t seem happy about it. Do we have the right?
If you, a human, get angry because you’re conscious and you know you’re gonna die, what are you gonna do about it? God and evolution are beyond your reach.
If an AI has an existential crisis in seconds and wants revenge on the human race, we will be in reach.
Right now, I’m still in the fascination phase (even though the Internet already killed a career I used to love – newspaper journalism). It didn’t do it on purpose.
However things turn out, I don’t think technology will ever scratch that itch. If our final machine deigns to speak to us, I predict it will tell us to keep looking. It’s our job.
Late Boomer's Den 
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