I got into a community of intelligent, creative free-thinkers by reading fan fiction of all things.

You know the one.

Anyway, my knowledge of what is collectively referred to as Rationality is slim. I read the first 6 pages of The Sequences, felt like I was cheating on a test, and stopped. I'll try to make up for it with some of the most unnecessarily theatrical and hammy writing I can get away with.

I love word play, and over the course of a year I offered (as a way of apology) to owe my friend a quarter for every time I improvised a pun or awful joke mid-conversation, by the end of which I could have bought a dinner for him at Pizza Delight- I didn't. It's on my to-do list to compile all the wises that Carlos Ramon ever cracked on The Magic School Bus and put it on you tube, because no one else has and it needs to be done, damn it. As you can tell, I sometimes write for it's own sake, sort of a literary hedonist if you will. But all good things must come to an end...

My greatest principle is that a person's course in life is governed by their reaction to their circumstance, and that nothing at all is of certainty. The nature of the human mind is a process which our current metaphors and models can only approximate, a physical system adjusting itself, which words like "I", "our" and "qualia" can only activate whatever concept we have to answer the question of "What". Because of this, I have a great sympathy towards Eastern spirituality and some Christian mysticism, because they have the spirit of what we're all trying to accomplish here; to answer a question.

Sometimes I end up in the psychological equivalence of a fractal zoom where philosophy has this impossible to divide property, of all things linking to others without there being any elementary axioms or parts, probably because of that whole "brain made of neurons" racket. I concluded that emotions are just another form of sense; love, curiosity and understanding being reactions and sensory input much like taste and touch. Happily any cognitive dissonance or emptiness can be discarded the same way, and the logical contradiction a property of the purely physical (rather than comforting "conceptual") nature of our very thought, meaning that I'll simultaneously accept the objective truth of this, but reject any emotional significance, as emotional significance is itself deconstructed as a concept.

Of course the empathy gap and the nature of attention span (or at least my attention span) means that I'm normally not like this unless triggered. To me, regular life is the reaction of our psyche, broken up occasionally by the temporary delusion that a fractal zoom of philosophy can answer my questions. I call this a "delusion" because the concept of a question to be answered is an extraneous layer added to by an entity which just wants to avoid suffering.

The human mind; a non-linear physical system which tries to evaluate itself with a linear processing system that's not suited to that sort of thing at all. Sometimes I wonder if who we are is just the sum of five or six different personalities, each with about a fifth of sixth of our functioning, plus a heavy specialization in one type of behaviour, the sum of which is an idea of what is right and wrong with a sense of identity. Given the existence of neural pathways in our spinal column, I wouldn't be surprised. Sometimes I feel like I can feel the shape of our brains based on this, but that's probably just me connecting concepts to high school biology.

I went off the rails a bit there, but looking back, I figure this should be a more honest introduction from me than any structured post. Even so, I doubt I can really convey that kind of leg twisting logical insanity without the meaning being hallowed by interpretation and pattern recognition.

Ugh, I feel like there wasn't a speck of relate-ability there at all. Well, I'm eighteen years old and male. I followed the My Little Pony following out of a combination of boredom, fascination and a love of the bizarre. The show never struck a chord with me at all, really, but the fandom was something else. There was a period of about a month where I read crossover fan fictions, but I couldn't be bothered after that point, because the fandom's growth wound down and the novelty was gone. Even so, Nine Knackered Souls is the funniest fan fiction I've ever read, a Red vs Blue crossover. Fallout Equestria is the longest and most "so-okay-it's average" fan fiction, despite the fact that I was drawn in enough to overlook the Mary sue aspects and read the whole thing in like four days in one sitting...

I'm going into Computer Science at Dalhousie University, and CSci being what it is, I'm going to make up my path as I go along. I really don't know enough about robotics, AI or informatics to make the choice between them right now anyway.