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At the emotional level, I find it’s interesting to think of my moods in terms of homeostasis. In principle, I would like always to be calm, happy, productive and cheerful. With the accumulation of years of bruising experience, I should by now know to avoid those actions — like yelling at someone — which are sure to have a bad effect on my mood. But my common sense can still be overridden by a conflicting homeostatic drive — such as defending myself against some perceived slight to my self-esteem. It’s striking how easily I’m shunted off into new trajectories. If someone smiles at me, my mood goes up; if the neighbor’s gardener turns on a leaf-blower, my mood drifts down.<\/p>\n
My moods continue to vary even when I do manage to be behave optimally and think nice correct thoughts about everything. I might suppose that this is because my moods are affected by other factors — such as diet, sleep, exercise, and biochemical processes I’m not even aware of. But a more computationally realistic explanation is simply that my emotional state is the result of a class four unpredictable computation, and any hope of full control is a dream.<\/p>\n
Indeed I sometimes find a bit of serenity by jumping out of the system and really accepting that the flow of my moods is a class four computation akin to the motions of a fluttering leaf. It’s soothing to realize that my computation must inevitably be gnarly and uncontrollable, and looking out the window at the waving branches of trees can be a good reminder.<\/p>\n
Buckminster Fuller once wrote a book called I Seem To Be a Verb<\/i>. His dictum brings out the fact that the individual is a process, an on-going computation. In the same spirit we might say:<\/p>\n
I seem to be a fluttering leaf.<\/i><\/p>\n
One shouldn’t place too high a premium on predictability. After all, the most stable state of all is death. We stay chaotic for as long as we can, postponing that inevitable last output.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Holiday blues setting in already? No blues here just now, I'm feeling happy, but just to have something to blog, I'm posting a possibly topical excerpt from The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul This quote is (C) Copyright Rudy Rucker, 2004. At the emotional level, I find it’s interesting to think of my moods […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}