Note: This post is backdated. I am writing this post in 2018 because, as part of the Big 2017 Remigration, I have decided to delete most of the posts because they were too embarrassing and sparse on information, but figured I might keep a rundown of the highlights.
2010, on this blog:
- “I think I should delete my entire website. The main thing I learned there was only lots of PHP/Javascript hackery.”
- “Wonder if I’ll be famous someday and people will go quote-mining in this blog nobody knows about.” Nope, unless “people” includes your future self.
Ah, and here we are in the depressive fear of death slash advances in neuroscience slash the Technological Singularity section of this blog. It’s long and unoriginal, but at least it seems pretty heartfelt. Here’s the opening of the first post:
I still need to talk about this.
I am currently living in a discontinuous, unpredictable state of fear of death. I’m not sure when it started. Probably sometime just before we started reading The Road, and it just keeps coming now.
At the beginning I wished for ignorance and solace, just to forget the whole thing, but now I’ve realized that I’m going to have to face it, and possibly sooner than I would like, and I’m in too deep now.
Here are some of my fears.
This is followed by musings on the lack of existence, on tortured or repetitive immortality, on the meaning of life, on the hard problem of consciousness, on the existence of God, on the nature of existence, on the creationist theory of light being created in situ, on the Singularity, on qualia, on the copying of brains or consciousnesses, on philosophical zombies, on cyborgs, on wireheading, more on the Singularity, and then, abruptly:
I have decided to stop being existential.
Win-win.
But in the middle of the sequence of posts, there’s a part that goes like this:
This is a vast and disturbing topic. I have a sort of timeline planned out: make IMO in 2011, study abroad at Stanford or something, become another mathematics professor, make people happy, come back to Taiwan and get math education off the ground. This is what my future would be like if the rest of the world stayed more or less stagnant.
Which is not going to happen. (Okay, I know, I left the part out about overestimating how genius I am. Fine, maybe I don’t make IMO in 2011 or 2012 or ever. Aside the point.)
I thought my ego would have mellowed out at this point…