With luck, tonight will by my last one without internet for awhile. Tomorrow, the DSL folk are set to configure my phone line for raw DSL, and I will again have civilization at home. I no longer will need to come to the office at odd hours to do work or play. Hurrah! The only slight downside is that, as is common in the industry, they won't give me granularity any better than an entire day as to when the tech will show up, so apart from my meeting, which I can't miss, I'll be staying home all day tomorrow, or at least until DSL is set up. I don't feel bad though, because I've come in for big parts of this weekend and done work things.

I went to the first meeting of the generalists that I've gone to for awhile tonight, and that was fun. Rather than talking about philosophy, we played some really kick-ass open-style card games for the whole time. There's something that's interestingly different between the generalists and PUSH -- I think it's that with PUSH, it's always, at least in my mind, struggling to exist and have meaning, at least partly because it's trying to attract the attention of students who have a lot of other things to do, while generalists is composed of people who arn't quite so busy (nonstudents), and there's not that much of a need for purpose in the group. I wonder if there's a better way for me to think about or contribute to PUSH that will help it feel more stable and solid.

On the way back from Generalists to my office now, I had a daydream, based on all the weird ceiling work they're doing in Baker hall, of there being more upstairs stretching up to infinity, each floor a variant of the floor below, generally less unified and official-looking, more ad-hoc, than the one below. I used to always have dreams of incredibly huge shantytowns, in the vertical and the horizontal (unlike real shantytowns in that way), remains of huge, interconnected offices and similar, all available for the taking. In the dream geometry, somehow, it never felt like anything would fall, nor was there really any single ground level outside. I think some parts of this daydream also connected with the end of the film, The Believer, a film I saw with Debb (I think) a long time ago. At the end of the film, the main character, having killed himself, is shown in what is perhaps a Sisyphesian way, to be running up an endless set of stairs, as his childhood rabbi tells him there is nothing upstairs.

How can it be that my entire life feels like it's losing focus, becoming surreal and recursively self-mocking? Did this start a month ago, or a year ago? The fast forward and rewind keys are simultaneously hit.

A further thought on a recent post -- with our dual-nature, we acquire a tension between them and allow civilization to be the vehicle from one reality to a comprimise. The more advanced society, and the higher our position within it, the better we can isolate ourselves from what are harsh realities for other people. In the non-labour class, the non-starving classes, we don't need to think about people in a mad struggle for power as much. Most of us never get any blood directly onto our hands. Sometimes we do see things from that other reality, people who either cannot be part of our commonwealth, or who break the rules/intuitions in order to climb further, faster, to get ahead. Like when someone weaves in and out of traffic dangerously to get ahead, I enjoy, when capable and not at too great a cost to myself, to alter the situation to bring harm, either as humiliating or as fitting as possible to those who would rise and harm society. Society isn't based on contracts or anything so remotely formal -- it's based on people giving up considerable autonomy and selfishness in order to better the common weath and themselves through that common good. Societies must manage members who are much less cooperative than their neighbours, and I suspect that a lot of our emotions, including spite, are group-selective tools for these purposes. When sitting in on a class on EvPsych, it struck me how blind Evolutionary Psychology is without group selection and memes. So many elements of human behavior don't make sense without those principles, and even if it's difficult to quantify them in practice, they can be strong effects in computational models. Given that they fit so well in the computational model, and there's no reason, as far as I can see, that they would not work in practice, it seems fair to me to, absent further data, consider them as likely existing, just as we may safely assume that game theory as a whole applies to a lot of evolutionary models without individual re-proof of each element of game theory within the model. Data can, of course, suggest we reinterpret this.

I'm getting sleepy. The analysis isn't quite where I hoped it to be when I left tonight, but it's almost 03 now when I'm finishing this post, so it's probably time to go.