Reducing the Input

luka

Well-known member
I’m on one of these serene breaks right now in the most rural Donegal (standing in the only corner of the house that gets 3G so I can talk shit with you wankers)

Bored out your mind. Pining for London. Sick of lichen and granite and the turgid sea. Sick of the surly, suspicious locals. Sick of the bracing air. Desperate for the carbon monoxide high, the particulate matter in the throat.
 

luka

Well-known member
The other thing was not drinking or doing drugs. Being left with very few options if you wanted to change the way you were feeling. And mostly eschewing distractions. No internet. No friends. No phone calls. No PlayStation. No films. You can drink coffee up to a point. Have a bath. Go for a walk. Read a book. Jog on the spot. You end up trying anything. Wim Hoff breathing tutorial on YouTube. Give it a go. See what happens.
 

luka

Well-known member
Some days feeling so fraught I'd drink a herbal tea and listen to ambient. Zones of feeling I hadn't entered in years.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Your mode of perception on the internet and tv is very analytical. Everything is broadcasted with intent, it's there for a reason, it's there for you to find out what the reason is behind it, to decode it analytically. Your brain goes in sorting mode, what's important for me, what pertains, categorizing these immobilities and fixities. An enternal sequence of innumerable events.

Real life is flowing, free, no fixed points, it's not there for a reason, it's not information that's packaged with specific plans, it's just there in constant flux. You can't analyze you have to intuit it, sense it. It's a difference function of the brain I think.

I also find such distinctions interesting. Online as a sort of metaphysical environment, offline as physical. To be sure, the correlation isn't so clean, but there generally seems to be one.

Another correlation to online/offline is, perhaps similar to your points, a difference in signal-to-noise? Like you say: everything is broadcast with intent. Surely, there still remains the possibility for signal error (grand or petty), but seeing as the metaphysical space is entirely sculpted by human will, might there still be a significantly higher signal/noise ratio? Sort of like a distillation of intelligence's world-forming/world-reforming abilities.

"Natural" environment -> rural environment -> urban environment -> online environment -> ?

Can this kind of development be figured as a vector? If so, where does it lead us beyond here?

What precisely does this vector measure? (vector here understood to be... directional and quantitative? Aiming in a certain direction with a certain magnitude?)

As we progress down this line, our communicative abilities become... purer? Does that mean more homogenous? More immediate? Less drowned out by environmental signal-effecting factors, by noise?

Perhaps in an absolute sense, there is less and less noise from the outside. But in a relative sense, our signal remains dampened by noise that is attributable to our own confusion, attributable to our own non-deliberate/unintentional signals? A sort of noise that is effectual before the message is even sent?

So, to an extent, the signal/noise ratio remains mediocre, but is becoming increasingly... immanent? Immanent noise?

That is: the factors that prevent my expressions from more purely reflecting my intentions - these factors are less and less environmental, and more and more internal. Similar to how doubt can destabilize your confidence, how doubt can sever your idea of what you are trying to say from your idea of what you are saying. As environmental noise is filtered out, noise-by-way-of-doubt is given room to blossom? Is this afforded by the ever-increasing opportunity we have to refine our messages before we send them?
 

version

Well-known member
Unless you become a monk or something, I think 'reducing the input' is a stepping stone rather than an endpoint. You shut some things out in order to turn your attention to others as opposed to just shutting things out. I stopped looking at the news etc and the time and energy it freed up went into reading, watching documentaries and exercising. I didn't just sit doing nothing. My mind a blank.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Unless you become a monk or something, I think 'reducing the input' is a stepping stone rather than an endpoint. You shut some things out in order to turn your attention to others as opposed to just shutting things out. I stopped looking at the news etc and the time and energy it freed up went into reading, watching documentaries and exercising. I didn't just sit doing nothing. My mind a blank.
Have you found yourself less drawn to watching the news than you were before, and more drawn to reading/exercising/learning than you were before? As if our addictions were not only malleable, but malleable by our own will?
 

jenks

thread death
I remember when 9/11 happened I’d spend whole days consuming news, flicking between channels, it was still dial up internet and no smart phones so pages took ages to load on line. I felt that if somehow I watched enough, read enough, listened enough it would begin to make sense. I think sometimes that modern life is like that but all the time...one more click, one more link and it’ll reveal something. Does that sense?
 

version

Well-known member
That reminds me of what I said about podcasts in another thread. That they convince people they're doing something productive because they're ostensibly about something serious and informative.
 

jenks

thread death
You can convince yourself you aren't wasting your time or doing something frivolous because it promises to teach you something.
And you can’t get this stuff from The Guardian or wherever cos this is the pure unmediated stuff - the real radical voices etc And sometimes that is the case - real gems from the outside but often it’s just poorly written and just contrary for the sake of it.
 
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