#computer
Close to the end of dead week now. On the verge of crying on the first floor of McHenry Library. The world gets dark, but the dark in my head is fading fast. Paranoia and fears come to a close.
Of course the world is real. Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory. He talked about negative feedback vs. positive feedback. I don't know what was so significant about it; I had already know the difference earlier this year, about April or May, when I was first trying to read the book. But I felt something significant this time around. (Not to mention I proceeded faster through the text — a good sign.) — Hyperbole and a Half: "And then I'm going to have to try to explain that no, really, it was funny. Because, see, the way the corn was sitting on the floor... it was so alone... and it was just sitting there!"
It took less than a minute, I think, to daydream and chase after the visual intuition. Prof. Williams had said perception was recurrent. Higher-order processes tune lower, incoming sensory signals by way of inference. But inferences necessarily have to be bounded for accuracy. Perception is tuned for negative feedback. (Perception strives to converge to the real world, in all its block expansion, in the unidirectional flow of time. Even when we remember, recollect, reconstruct the past — we have an "anchor" point, a starting frame, and then travel along that short thread to some ending.)
If perception was a positive feedback loop, all of us would go mad. The world wouldn't even need to do anything. The erroneous information constantly feedbacks into the brain and the mistakes self-magnify. I remember — or I'm instilling into that memory now — at the height of my second big trip in May, those 20 or 30 or 40 or whatever minutes when time and space felt stopped and plugged, I never felt like I was drifting out of reality. (Even that first big trip, I was gone, but I wasn't in another dimension. I was gone like — like deep sleep. Not even conscious. Resting? Wakeful dreaming? That's another metaphor from earlier today. A showerthought. Good on me for collecting it.)
From my bibnote: "the modeling question is whether deviance is just higher variance still “anchored” at the mean, or an upward slope of the mean that eventually — inevitably, it must, the brain is evolutionarily TUNED for negative feedback — even if the slope goes up, there comes an inflection point that goes back down — errors correct themselves, cancel out, the brain returns to its genetic and electroimpulsive heritage — all trips, all vacations, all fears, all dreams, all delights end — THIS TOO SHALL PASS — like the clouds over the moon".
I must sound so scatterbrained now, but I'm as here as I've ever been. Listening to the "evermore" track. Listened to "closure" and "long story short" earlier. The mushrooms perturbed that feedback loop, 6 months ago, clearly, surely, I know it from my memory. But it's over now. The lingering delusions, the gray wisps, are coming to a close, asymptotic, monotonic. It'd be easy to die. When I despair I think of myself as weak, static, a monolith. Blast off into another trip, see if I can fight it, see if I can keep myself together again. But I've never "been" together as closely as I would like to think, except in times like now. It's easy to give up. It's far harder to keep living. — "‘I’m so cold,’ [Rebecca] cried, huddling into herself. ‘It’s not outside, it’s winter inside. Cold as death,’ she added. [...] / "After half an hour, she unfroze, regained some of her warmth and animation, said: ‘It is winter. I feel dead. But I know the spring will come again.’"
Drenched into winter now, but I feel more alive. I'm not touching mushrooms again. I don't need to. The message was in my brain for years and years prior. Make that old knowledge knew, make it epistemic modernism: My self was never all that settled, that permanent to begin with — "would it be enough / if I could never give you peace?" — They just made it worse, for these past 6 or 7 months (six seven!!!). I'm back. I love the boredom, how