didn’t see it, but I saw you see it

Hmm…kinda of grinding on a lot of internal stuff lately. Kind of trying to distract myself away from that with projects. My dominating emotional state tends to lag reality by a few days. I’m kind of wierd that way. Maybe this is a graceful degradation strategy at some subconscious level, integration time, averaging, noise filtering…smoothing out the randomness from internal signals that aren’t really trustworthy, or maybe just not strong enough to be readable, over the short term. Usually I tend not to feel much…the highs aren’t that high and the lows aren’t that low. So when they are, maybe I have a hard time believing it at first, or making sense of this strange new thing.

I think I figured out what one of them is (a feat; as far as I know it’s completely undocumented except for “you know it when you feel it”), but it’s kind of too late to do anything about it now.

It kind of scares me a little. Emotion, to me, means arriving at conclusions and believing them, even so strongly, and yet having no idea how you arrived at them – almost as if your own mind is hiding something from you. With any fact-based argument, you can see all the information that went into it, see the ladder of logic clicking downward toward an inevitable conclusion. You can (occasionally do) replay it 100 times and watch the exact same process unfold and arrive at that same conclusion, you can patch the input terms with hypotheticals and watch the path of the decision process change in a thoroughly predictable way. But not being able to see the process, to understand why I believe what I believe, makes me feel unable to trust my own judgment.

Emotion makes us do some wierd things sometimes. Things that make us feel silly or even stupid in retrospect. Like going to the verge of violating someone’s trust on the irrational, completely open-loop assumption that something terrible and theoretically preventable has happened, or soon will. Or saying something, getting stuff off your chest, that you know you will regret later.

I tend to be of the belief that there are no wrong decisions….let me qualify that, for those who might not understand, as being that decisions cannot be wrong at the time they are made. They can be based on bad ideas, or bad information, or even ill intentions, but they represent the best you could have done with the information available at that specific moment in time. If it was the wrong decision, based on those circumstances and that information, you would not have made it. Whether you will regret it the next day, with new circumstances and new information, that’s another can of worms entirely.

Even if they’re all moot points, there are so many things I feel like I need to say… but don’t even exactly know what I’d be saying, or how to say it. They always seem like important things…when it comes to the point of actually saying them though, words always fail.

QOTD: “I agree, a house of cards built from mexican jumping beans is more
stable than the firmware they put on this thing.” -Corscaria


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