Reality and Skepticism

Today, my friend was talking about how she is getting laser eye surgery soon, and how after the surgery she will see halos around light because her eyes will be so dilated. This made me think about how we view reality. It is funny that some things we see and think "this is reality", and some things we see, and without question think "this isn't real".  A good example is the haloes that my friend will see. She will see the light coming from a lamp and think that it is real, but the haloes of color around the light are just an aspect of her dilated eyes and not real. But, this is a deceiving idea of reality, even though it is one that is commonly held. If we look at something blue, the light reflecting off of it hits our eyes, and our brains interpret those light waves as the color blue. But really, that something is emitting a ton of light waves that we can't see at all. So, if we could see the object in reality, it would look a lot different than the interpretation our mind makes for it. This is true of all color, because all color is is our mind attempting to interpret a short spectrum of light that bounces off of objects. If not constrained by our minds and eyes, reality would look a lot different than what we see.
So, to think that we are directly seeing reality is naive, because we are only seeing our mental interpretation of reality. We take our perception of our senses, and view it as reality, when really it is just our perception. It  makes sense that we think we are seeing and interacting with reality, because it is all we can possibly know. If we can't trust our senses, we can't know anything about the world, and if we can't know anything about the world, we can't successfully interact with it. But, since the only 'view' of reality we get is through our sense perceptions, it seems like we need to have a way to verify that our perceptions are accurate in order to justifiably believe that we are seeing anything that even closely resembles reality. But the only way to test our senses is through other senses. I can go to a doctor and take a hearing test, but i only 'know' the doctor exists by seeing him, hearing him, maybe smelling or feeling him. Aka, I only 'know' the doctor exists because I am trusting my senses. So the doctor can't verify that my senses are working because i need verification of my senses in order to verify that the doctor is real.
Basically what this leads to is the realization that senses can't verify senses. Coupled with the fact that the only way we have to verify anything is through our senses, and we get the conclusion that our only means of verification of reality is unverifiable. Therefore, we aren't justified in believing our senses, because we can't verify them. And since our senses are our means of justifying every single other belief we had about reality, we aren't justified in believing anything at all about reality. So, when you see that light and the halo around it, you can say the halo isn't real, its just my eyes, but you should also say the light isn't necessarily real, and neither is the light post it's coming from, or the ground it is sitting on, or the body that this thought is coming from. 

hahahahahahha

watch this video. That is all. 

Dubstep

Seems like people are really mixed on dubstep. So many people are vehemently anti-dubstep, and I kinda wonder why. I think it is the future of music. There are two trends emerging in the music scene, and they are autotune and dubstep. both have been around for a long time, but both are just now getting really popular. I can see why one would hate auto tune, it takes the talent out of music. It can be a cool tool, but so many times it replaces real talent. Dubstep takes just as much talent as any other type of electronic music, and you're definitely living in the past if you think that electronic music is all untalented. Sure some of it is, but the same is true of any genre. I actually think that dubstep on average takes more talent because it cant just use one trance beat for 5 minutes, it has to be unique and mix it up. Plus, the beats are sick. Nothing beats the hard grime beats that penetrate through to your bones. I don't actually have much to write except a general wonder about why people hate dubstep when it's obviously awesome. Heh, here's some videos.

Anonymous

A bit ago, I was talking with a friend, and brought up a flyer that I had seen circulating the interwebz "from" anonymous. It was called Operation Skankbag and I thought it sounded pretty cool. The basic story is an artist put an image of a starving African child carrying a handbag and a chihuahua on a shirt and started selling it to raise awareness about Darfur with a statement about the materialism of pop culture. Louis Vuitton thought the handbag looked a little too much like theirs and sued the artist. "Anon" posted a flyer saying lets take down Louis Vuitton's site.
So, I agree that taking down the site isn't gonna do anything really, and everyone's time would be better spend doing something about Darfur, donating to charity, etc. But this kind of vigilante-ism against a huge company who are being bitches to a woman who is only expressing herself is still cool because it gets across the message that big companies being asshats for no reason is only going to get them negative press.
Anyways, my friend said that he really didn't like the group anonymous, and I told him he misunderstood. Anon isn't a group, it's everyone, it is the internet. The media has started to portray it as some highly organized terrorist cell, but anyone with a brain knows it's more likely 15 yr old kids sitting in their mom's basements "hacking" because they have a lot of time on their hands. Either way, the idea of anon as a group misses the point that anon is anonymous and therefore can't be defined by group ideology.
My friend argued that once the media, or some mass of people defines something as a group, that something becomes a group. For instance, there are 15 yr old kids who identify with anonymous and say they are part of the group. They release flyers with the logo, and write "For we are anonymous. We do not forgive, we do not forget. Expect us." This implies that the people who wrote the flyer identify with a group named anonymous. So, since there are people who write under the banner of anonymous, and it has been defined as a group, and people identify as members, anonymous is a group. Maybe it wasn't, it wasn't meant to be, but it is now; even though it is loosely defined and unorganized.


So, for a person to agree with the ideology of the group anonymous, one must agree with all of the operations that the group takes part it. Everything released under the banner anonymous is, for better or worse, a project of the group, according to the new definition of anonymous as a group. So, when anonymous decides to ruin a girls life for being too cocky on youtube, even though she is only eleven, that is just as much anonymous as the group that decides to take down Louis Vuitton for being skankbags.
Therefore, I reevaluated the way I look at Anonymous. I don't like the idea of anonymous as a group because it is a lot of different people with different morals, ideologies and goals. Being part of a group implies a singular ideology, and this can't happen with the group anonymous, so they contradict each other all the time. I agree with some of the things the group decides to do, but I think that anonymous in its new formation as a defined group instead of an abstract entity containing no morality and no ideology, is not something I can stand behind. I'm all for anonymous people hacking or DDoSing people or companies that are being dicks, but I think that people should stop identifying with the group "anonymous", and start actually acting anonymously again. Everyone should act as an individual and participate in whatever they agree with, but acting as Anonymous is stupid, contradictory, not anonymous, and may be dangerous with all the press it is getting.

Meme's

WTF is it with the internet and its picking up on really bad shit and making it really popular? It seems like every other week there is a new viral video on youtube of some horrible singer like Rebecca Black, then in a week or so, there are 400 new videos all parodying Rebecca Black. Now you can see the shittiest song ever recorded in the style of Bob Dylan, Death metal, emo, Sigur ros, etc. I don't think that anybody takes the time to realize that by giving her so much attention, you're not letting her fade away like she should. So, her video gets 40 million views, and a retarded record exec confuses this as actual talent, and signs her. Soon, she becomes the next Justin Beiber, and we have to deal with much more than just one shitty song. I am contemplating whether posting this blog just adds to the problem. It probably does, but fuck it. I think we should celebrate talent and skill, not stupidity. So here's this:

The XX are an amazing band, and recently Jamie XX has started remixing some of his bands and other bands songs, and they are all pretty sick. The XX is really good indie music, it knows how to use silence to convey emotion. The electronic remixes he is doing are genius in their ambiance. 
So, now that I've hated on internet meme's I would like to point out that they aren't all bad. Sometimes the internet points out hilarious things that we should all see  to make our days better. For example this youtube vid has been popular lately:

So epically funny. Anyways, memes can be great, or they can be a trolls dream, but before passing on a meme, realize that you are making that content more popular, and keeping it alive longer. I'm not saying Rebecca Black deserves to die, but her music does. So, instead of posting one of the billions of her vids, I'm gonna put up a remix by nosaj thing of radiohead. Beautiful

Auto tune

There is a cancer entering modern music, and it's name is auto tune. I feel like every new hit  that comes out has some singer who can't sing helped out by auto tune. Now people who have no talent, and could never have released a record are making top 40 hits. On the forefront of the new popular music scene is hip hop and rap, and even it has fallen to shitty autotuning. Every new rap song now has a verse rapped, then an autotuned chorus song by a guy who sounds like he never hit  puberty. All I can say is fuck the modern music scene, i really hope that people get over this robotizing of their voices soon.

Piracetam

Just a quick post today, cause there's not much to say, but recently I've learned about this smart drug, or nootropic called piracetam. It's a cool idea, drugs that make you smarter instead of drugs that make you trip or feel energetic or anything like that. I looked into it, cause if it's possible, I'm definitely interested in all the help i can get. It seems like it's actually legit. There have been many studies done on the effects on people with alzheimers, ADD, other degenerative diseases or brain disorders, and it's always been pretty positive results. There has also been a couple studies done on the effects on healthy normal people, one saying that after two weeks, people's short term memory increases greatly. So, I found some for sale like a month ago on some body builder website (of all places) in a huge tub for like 16 dollars. Its 500 grams, and you do a gram a day (or I do), so it lasts like a year and a half. Not a bad price for sure. The only problem is it is in powder instead of pills, so it tastes like absolute shit. But if you can get over that, it's totally worth giving a try.
I've been taking it along with choline for about a month now, and have started to notice some effects when engaging in memory based activities. For example, I sat down to play the piano for the first time in like 6 months the other day, and started playing moonlight sonata from memory. I really didn't think I'd get very far, because it had been so long, but I got as far as I had ever bothered memorizing, without stopping or messing up once. I was surprised at myself as it was happening. Kinda cool.
I also am learning arabic, and like with any foreign language, there is a lot of memorization involved. But, looking at flashcards after a few weeks on this, and I can start to remember vocab much quicker than before. Anyways, I think it's a cool thing to use drugs for memory and intelligence instead of to just get fucked up. In some countries there are loads of similar drugs for sale in "smart shops." So, I'd recommend giving it a try.