Objective truth doesn't matter: A twist on truth-based Relativism

 Objective Truth Doesn't Matter: A twist on truth based relativism

Introduction

So this is a philosophy that I hold strongly, I don't really claim it to be a brand new or original philosophy but I have noticed when I tell people it I find it is often quite controversial. Still, it is a strongly held philosophy of mine. For context my background is in Physics and Computer Science.

The Objective Truth

The first part of this philosophy is that the objective truth doesn't matter, whether it exists or not doesn't even matter. To explain how this could possibly be we need to create a theoretical model of the universal system. For instance, we can consider whether the universe is rational (that is, follows a consistent logic) and whether it is axiomatic (that is the universe has a fundamental set of unprovable rules). Now if the universe is not rational that means the concept of objective truth goes into question completely, you can very easily have a non-rational coincidental universe with no objective truth and just fully subjective experiences that, just by coincidence, happen to align. Or perhaps you have only have one, or no, perspectives on the universe and it doesn't exist, but does, etc, etc. Now if the universe is rational it is either axiomatic or not, if it is not axiomatic then that could imply you could prove everything in the universe, in which case I agree my philosophy does not hold. But until such a non-axiomatic system is shown to exist in this universe I am going to make the assumption that the universe, like all practical logical systems, is axiomatic. 

Now if the universe is axiomatic and we live in this universe I believe it is shown that we cannot prove any truth within this universe. Now importantly when I say prove, I mean to say with absolute certainty, not "something is likely true" but I will get to that later. To demonstrate why we can't prove anything, in order to prove something you need a basis of logical steps, following logical rules, in order to come to that conclusion. These logical steps or logical rules must either be proven themselves in order to complete the proof, or be axioms in which case no proof exists as it is a fundamental building block of the system. The problem is because we did not create the universe and merely live within the universe, we cannot tell whether a rule is an axiom or simply assumed. If it is assumed then the proof is not a valid proof. There is no way to tell what the universal axioms are, you may always discover further and further deeper rules, even if a God came down and told us what the axioms were, they could always be a false God who lies. The only way to know the axioms of the universe is to be the one to define it and we did not define our universe. And no, before you ask, "being unable to prove an axiom" is not an absolute truth, there is always room for me to be wrong!

Now the problem is if we have no way to verify whether a truth is absolutely correct, how can we have any method to prove that a truth is even somewhat correct, or even incorrect. After all, the statement "this truth is 80% likely" is itself a candidate for a truthful statement that, given the above paragraph, itself cannot be proven! There is no way to have any certainty of any kind of statement about the true objective universe, because any statement cannot be certainly proven. Now you may have qualms about this, such as "what about mathematical statements?", I'll talk about those later in the common criticisms section, so you'll just have to be patient! But what this says to me, is that the objective truth is entirely irrelevant, because nothing can ever be proven about it. Even it's existence is irrelevant, whether an objective truth exists or not does not change anything about how the universe could operate.

Now you may say this is absurd, because clearly some things are true right? Clearly the Earth is round, clearly the sun rose yesterday, clearly I exist. I mean, you said you had a background in physics right? But yet you reject the whole notion of evidence and objectivity! How does that make sense? It makes sense only when you reframe the entire notion of what truth is.

The Relative Truth

What is a relative truth? What I mean here is something different from what people often call "subjectivity", because subjectivity implies things where the subject are aware that their statements are opinion based. Subjectivity is based on belief, with a general understanding that one could be wrong, but relative truth is a little stronger than a simple belief. A relative truth is something that is unequivocally and obviously true within a certain frame of reference. I'll give you an example, suppose you were stabbed and then you felt pain, it is a relative truth within your reference frame that you are feeling pain right now. You do not need to question the concept that you are feeling pain, it is obvious and evident that you are experiencing pain. But, to the person who stabbed you, that is no longer obvious, their value system may indicate that yes it's very likely you are feeling pain, but maybe you're on drugs, or have a medical condition that means you don't feel pain, or maybe you don't exist. There is uncertainty outside of your own frame of reference on whether you feel pain, even though it is absolutely certain WITHIN your frame of reference that you are feeling pain (or at least experiencing something that is akin to pain). 

Now a belief is a weaker form of answers or truth that exists within a reference frame. A belief is sorta a hypothesis or theory that could be based on relative truths, but it's more encompassing because there could be uncertainty about validity of the belief. For example, this entire philosophy is my belief, it is not quite a relative truth because it is not self-evident, it requires thinking and consideration on my part and I admit that I could be wrong. Sometimes, beliefs can become relative truths if someone is so absolutely and unequivocally sure about the truth of a belief that there is no room for doubt, that belief becomes a relative truth. The important thing about relative truths is that they are ABSOLUTELY true within the reference frame they are relative to. From our perspective the closest we can get to a true truth of the universe is a relative truth, these relative truths are "the sun rose yesterday", they are evident and are the strongest sources of truth we have access to.

But, you may be asking, if relative truths are the strongest form of truth does that mean everything goes? You know, someone says grass is a green and another says grass is invisible, are they both equally correct? After all, you can only judge truth based on the reference frame that it is in and so if the person who said the grass was invisible truly was certain about it, doesn't that make their truth as equally valid as the person who says the grass is green? What's the point in making statements about anything under this philosophy? Well this is where I introduce the twist I was talking about.

The Collective Truth

Reference frames are not restricted to, well, anything in particular. A reference frame does not have to be about something that is conscious or capable of experiencing the world. A reference frame doesn't even have to actually exist in the physical world, it could be entirely made up! And importantly a reference frame does not have to be a single agent, or a single thing, it can represent a collection of things. This is where we introduce the idea of the collective truth.

While you can have a relative truth for an individual, you can also have a relative truth for a collection of individuals. A collective relative truth is one that is absolutely true for all individuals within that collection. For instance the statement "the sun rose yesterday" is a relative truth to the set of all people who were able to experience, or are absolutely certain of, the sun rising yesterday. Again though, I want to stress, that collective truths are not the same as objective truths, they do not claim to be true without any reference frame or even outside of those collective reference frames, only true within.

This is where the concept of understanding an "objective" universe comes into play. Really, under my philosophy, what we are trying to establish is a universe in which the entire set (or at leas the largest possible subset) of all of humanity agree on. Observation, for instance, is simply identifying an experience that is a relative truth to everyone (or almost everyone). So something like the sun exists and shines on earth, is very clearly a strong relative truth for (almost) all of humanity, and even if someone lived in a cave all their life, if we had them exit the cave and show them the sun, they would establish (we think) the same relative truth.

Now again, belief works the same way as before, it is simply a weaker form of relative truth, but it can exist within collective reference frames as well. This is where the whole concept of moral relativism comes from, societies are simply a collection of reference frames that follow (at least mostly) the same belief. 

Why this matters

I've gotten a few comments about this philosophy, either it is crazy and totally does not align to reality or that it is self-evident and has no practical use to how people live their lives. I want to address both of these points in this section. 

First I want to tackle the "it's crazy" idea. The general motivation of this comment is mostly that if nothing is objectively true and only merely relative truths, then what is the point of trying to argue anything? What's the point in having a belief if there's no real truth? And my argument is that having no "real" truth gives much MORE reason to spread a belief. Because a belief that everyone is certain of BECOMES the real truth, or at least the closest thing you can get to the real truth. The collective truth of all of humanity is likely to be the most important truth that humanity can ever get, it's not an objective truth, the truth vanishes when humanity vanishes, but on purely practical terms it is the highest form of truth humanity will ever interact with (unless, you know, aliens exist or something).

So spreading your belief and convincing other reference frames of your belief increases the size of the set of reference frames that hold that belief. If you were to increase that size to all of humanity, you would have established a powerful collective belief, and if you had made all of humanity certain of that belief, then you would have established the highest possible truth humanity can experience. There is significant motivation to spread a belief in this system, because you can define the truth. 

Now for the other argument, what's the whole point of this philosophy? What does it change? To me, this philosophy changes my perspective on how I deal with the concept of truth or fact. To me, it leaves always room for doubt, and even if I have a very strong belief (for instance, this philosophy!) I am always open to the idea that I could be wrong. That is a more practical view but if I'm completely honest this philosophy holds, to me, just a consistent model of how the universe operates. Does it have to be beneficial? No, it's just the way things are, but even so I think (from the aforementioned point), it can be beneficial.

Criticisms

So this is just a random grab-bag of criticisms to this theory I've heard and my counter points to them.

What about mathematics?: So the argument here is that Mathematical truths are self evident to anyone, for instance "1+1=2" is true whether or not someone believes in it right? Now if you've been paying attention you may actually be able to answer this question for yourself based on the text above, but there are two points I mentioned.

  1. The reason why we cannot prove objective truth in our universe is because we do not know the axioms that the universe were created with.

  2. Reference frames can be things that DON'T actually exist!

The reason Mathematical truths skirt around the whole notion is because they are actually relative truths, disguised as absolute truths, it's just that they are relative to the VIRTUAL reference frames of the mathematics itself, and are objective WITHIN those reference frames because they are defined axiomatically. 

To give you an example that better illustrates my point. Suppose you said "imagine a world where a man had a red shit, is it true that this man has a red shirt?", is the answer always yes? Well, what you've done is given a reference frame and asked about the truth of something WITHIN that reference frame, this made up world that you created. You are then able to determine what the truth is within this reference frame by following the logic within that reference, that is that the mans shirt is red, and so clearly you can answer yes. But the answer is only yes within this made up world you've created, when you ask it to someone you not only hand them the question, but the entire universe that the question belongs in. I call these "virtual" reference frames. And while we can determine the truth of the statement within that virtual reference frame, we cannot determine the truth outside of that virtual reference frame. And indeed if you were to ask that question to someone and they disagreed with the premise, that there is a world where the man's shirt was red or that the man's shirt wasn't really red in this world (even though you stated it), then they could very rightly have an answer that is not yes. 

Now mathematics is a tricky example because the validity of mathematics is a very large belief (or even relative truth) to a vast majority of humanity. So we have something that is at the highest echelon of possible truth to humanity, and is also a virtual reference frame that can (provided anyone agrees with the premise) always be true within the mathematical reference frame. So it makes sense that people sees this as the most powerful of truths. But it's important to remember, despite the fact it seems very truthful, it is not actually a proven objective truth that mathematics applies to our universe. There could be for instance, a very minor error that is almost entirely unnoticeable, but still exists, that causes the logic of our universe to ever-so-slightly differ from the logic of mathematics. In fact, quantum mechanics suggests that there are minima amounts of certainty that one can have about the mathematical value of any physical properties, so these errors could certainly exist within a common physical framework!

Is this philosophy an objective truth? This is the classic "If everything is relative, is relativity relative?". Again though, I think if you read the first section you'll already realize the answer, it doesn't matter. This philosophy does not attempt to try and put any assertion of the nature of the objective truth, whether it exists or not, or what it could be, rather it simply says the objective truth is entirely irrelevant. So is this philosophy objectively true? Yes, no, it doesn't make a difference, the only way we can actually experience truth is through relative truths. Now in my own reference frame this philosophy is NOT a relative truth because I am NOT absolutely certain about it, and I think if anyone truly believed in this philosophy they would also have to have some level of uncertainty about the philosophy itself. But that to me is ok, it's ok to doubt. 

But everyone has shared experiences, doesn't that prove an objective truth? No, it doesn't prove an objective truth. If you provide that the universe is rational, and thus has a consistent logic, then being able to make predictions on future events and seeing things obey the same actions given certain stimuli certainly implies that you are gaining to an actual logic. But there are assumptions here, that the universe IS rational, that you ARE observing these events, and none of these are proven, so the whole concept is still not proven. Now, some people would say that it is simply absurd that the universe could be anything but rational and objective and look, I sympathise, to me it is also absurd. My own belief is that indeed the universe probably DOES have some kind of objective truth. But I also hold the belief that, well, it's possible it might not, and even if it didn't the way the universe worked would be completely unchained. Just because something is weird, does not mean it's false.

Again, with this philosophy I am not trying to say an objective truth doesn't exist, I am only trying to say it doesn't change anything whether it does or doesn't. All we can really model of the universe is our relative truths. 

Conclusion

So that's my philosophy. I don't know if it's particularly novel, I have talked with a bunch of people about it and it seems like a lot of people are quite surprised by it, but it could just be the wording that ticks people off, I don't know. I formed this philosophy when studying physics. I am autistic and I had difficult understanding or accepting other people's points of view. To me, the concept of relativity was absolutely foreign and dumb, things exist, and people who disagree with that are wrong. Then I studied Einstein's theory of relativity and that changed things.

The whole concept of Einstein's theory of relativity is that, for some properties, there really isn't a solid defined truth. Sure, you can come up with concepts like proper time, but regardless different reference frames will see things differently and for all intents and purposes, will experience those things differently. Something moving fast will see something stationary as moving fast and in slow motion, the stationary thing will also see the thing that's moving fast as moving fast and in slow motion, both things move in slow motion relative to each other, so what's the real answer here? Well, there isn't really one.

I guess seeing that concept in physics, something I held very dear, opened me up to the idea of others peoples views and perspectives. Yeah, maybe I ran a little wild with it for some people's liking, but I think it is consistent and it has helped me become a much more friendly and understanding person. I've experienced a great many awesome things, from different people, by keeping an open mind, and this philosophy helps me keep my mind open.

Halo 2 Random Shotgun

The Halo Random Shotgun

So the video above is my random shotgun, it's a Halo 2 shotgun that shoots one of 19 random projectiles that range from pistol bullets to tank shells, it's totally unpredictable and there's probably a chance that when you shoot it you'll die. It's pretty cool right! But did you know doing this actually took me all day and uses some of the most ingenious hacks I've ever done? Let me explain!

The mod Cursed Halo created by InfernoPlus is a Halo mod that I am inspired by and I wanted to make a mod for it in Halo 2. One of my favourite weapons in cursed halo is the D20 grenade, a grenade that fires a random chaotic effect. I had always wondered how he was able to do this, as I don't see any other mods that involve random effects, so I decided to make a d20 shotgun, a shotgun that shoots random projectiles.

Harder than expected...

So to understand the problem you first must understand how Halo modding works. Halo mod tools does not have access to the actual Halo engine, instead we have access to "tags". Tags are the configuration of objects, there are many different tag types (weapons, vehicles, effects, etc) and they govern the objects behaviour. Having only the configuration to modify may seem limiting, but the good news is Halo was designed as a very open sandbox game so actually changing the configuration gives us a huge amount of freedom. Not only can you change the fire rate or how much damage bullets do, but you can also change the physics of the bullets, which bullet a weapon fires, the model a weapon uses, the animations, and even import your own stuff.

So there's a lot you can do but the limitation is that you have to obey the engine's rules. Anything that's hardcoded in the engine you cannot change yourself, for example the engine hardcodes that 7 needles from the needler causes an explosion, so this is something you can not change. So if we want to create a custom weapon, we have to do so by utilizing behaviours that already exist in the game, mixing and matching them to make our custom weapon, but we cannot add new purely novel behaviours or change existing behaviours. 

With that in mind I have some unfortunate news, randomness is not a behaviour that exists natively. There's no "random" function you can call in a tag to get a tag to do something random. Instead, the fields already have to support some randomness behaviour to begin with, otherwise you can't use this. And, unfortunately for us, what projectile a weapon fires is NOT a random behaviour, it will always be deterministic. So, then how did I do this?

Firing Effects

What projectile a weapon fires is deterministic and not something you can change, but I did notice an interesting flag that said "randomize firing effects". When you fire a gun in Halo it makes a noise, has some muzzle flashes and what-not, these are known as firing effects. A weapon can have multiple firing effects and then cycle through those firing effects to add a little diversity in the animation. Instead of cycling through the firing effects sequentially, by enabling this flag you can cycle through the firing effects randomly. Ok but how does this help us? We want to fire projectiles, not show fancy lights!

Well the key is that a fire effect uses the tag type effect and effect, luckily for us, is the most abstract and general tag type. An effect, which controls everything from sounds, to particle effects to explosions, is basically a container. It contains a set of effect events that each have a series of parts, each part can spawn an object which can be anything from a sound, a weapon or... a projectile. You see where I'm going with this? Instead of spawning projectiles the usual way through the gun, instead I can spawn a fire effect that then spawns the projectile, I can then add many fire effects each with different projectiles and have them randomly cycle through!

So I did this but it took a while, fire effects are not guns they don't have the same information as a gun. For example when you fire a projectile you cannot just say fire inside the retical, you have to say fire from a certain point in the 3D model itself. Alas though I figured it out (mostly, you obviously see some bugs in the video but I'll talk about that later) and in no time I had a shotgun that shot out a rocket or a needler randomly, not using any actual projectiles.

I ran into a problem when I started using weapons like the beam rifle. When I fired rockets I could fire them with a random spread of velocities (something already inbuilt within the effect) and they would spread out like a shotgun. But when I tried to do it with the beam rifle, it was all in one line. I eventually figured out that the beam rifle is not a point-scan weapon, rather it actually DOES have a projectile that just fires EXTREMELY quickly, and the velocity I was firing it out of the beam rifle added to the velocity innate in the projectile and thus was not able to deflect it. So I just increased the effect velocity a tonne and boom, it worked!

So then I ended up adding 19 different effects with different projectiles, all was looking good, I was very excited. Then I went to finally make my shotgun! I added the first fire effect, then the second fire effect, then the third one and then the- wait, what do you mean there's a cap of 3 fire effects? You mean I can't add a fourth fire effect? But I have 19 effects! And the d20 grenade had at least 60 different effects! What do you mean I can only add 3!? This is... this is terrible!

A stumbling stone

So what I was doing was evidently not the right way to do it, but it felt really close! So I thought I could still keep doing it! I decided that the effect object itself might have some randomness, remember an effect is made up of some effect events and each effect event is made up of parts, surely there was something I could do. So I asked the modding discord on thoughts and not many people knew what to do, so I just had to set out and do some experimenting.

So first thing is that in order to spawn multiple projectiles I was using an effect events parts, each part would spawn a single projectile, and so I would add maybe 12 parts each spawning one projectile, but this couldn't be a source of randomness because the parts would all spawn at the same time. No place for randomness. But what about the effect events? Can they be used to add randomness?

Yes! Kinda... The effect event has a flag called "skip fraction". Basically how effect events work is you have a chain of events and the game runs through each event sequentially when the effect is triggered, however an event with a non-zero skip fraction has a chance to be skipped, thus not being played in the chain. This is very promising because we could have to effect events, one that fires needlers and one that fires rockets, and have the effects have a skip fraction so that the needlers would get skipped and the gun would fire rockets instead.

Unfortunately, this isn't how it works, each skip fraction is calculated independently. So for example, if both your needles and rocket effect had a skip ratio of 50%, then you'd have a 25% chance of both effects firing and a 25% chance of no effects firing. Alas I couldn't figure out any way to make only one effect occur, and I was kinda upset because I worked all day on this! So, I decided to pull the trigger and do something I was avoiding doing.

I downloaded the Cursed Halo files

So I went onto Inferno's patreon and downloaded the files for the d20 grenade to figure how he managed to create these random effects. And oh my god, the thing he did was absolute genius.

So first off, props to me because I was ALMOST right, the thoughts I had were almost completely correct, I just missed one step. And it's a really cursed step coming from the cursed halo mod. So remember how I said effect events happen sequentially in the chain? Well, the new event in the chain will only trigger if the current event finishes playing. So, what if you just have that event play for like... an hour? Well then if that event gets hit, then no other events will play for an HOUR or until the event chain is reset (by firing the weapon or switching weapons). 

So that's the key insight I got from the d20 grenade. To recap, you have two effect events in an effect, something that shoots needles and something that shoots rockets. You say the needles has a 50% chance of being skipped. If the needles is skipped, you fire rockets and the event chain ends. If the needles is not skipped you fire needles and then only move onto firing rockets once the needle event finishes, which it does after one hour of sleeping. So yes this means there is a kinda subtle bug where if you just stand idly for an hour after firing the shotgun then the shotgun will randomly fire all on it's own, but that's a pretty minor bug I can deal with. 

Conclusion

Halo modding is crazy and I'm actually having so much fun! But work on the weapon is not over, there is the obvious bug of the weapons not always firing straight. My THEORY is that this is because the model marker that the weapon fires from, called primary_trigger, which is always at the end of the 3D model, is sorta all over the place. So if that's the case I may be able to solve it by adding a new marker that's a little more static. But that's an adventure for another day!

Learning for Joy vs Utility

For a little while, maybe the least few years, life has been really good. But, at the same time, it's been incredibly boring. Sure, I have done some amazing things, got a brilliant house, work part time in a nice job, moved in with my partner, got a cat, getting a dog, have a pool, life is good. But something was lost. Connection, learning, philosophizing. 

When I was a teenager I used to write an online journal at thefurryforum.com and I used to write many things in it, my life, my philosophies, my projects. Random thoughts I had, mathey stuff, mathey questions. I wanted to do that again so I did a few attempts, I attempted to write it here, I attempted to write it on Twitter, but none of it really stuck. The reason I think is because I didn't write this stuff for me really, I wrote it with the expectation that someone would comment on it or find it interesting. What I'm learning, is that through reading meditations, sometimes it is good to create a catalog of things,  stream of consciousness style, just for me.

So this blog is now gonna be used for updates, weekly I'm hoping, about things I'm thinking about. And because we're talking about it I guess this post will be about exercising the mind.

Learning to me is the greatest past time someone can do. It feels good to learn, it feels good to know more things, I've always loved learning. But I've come to realize there are two types of learning, learning for joy and learning for utility. Learning for joy is the learning I love, learning things for the sake of simply knowing them, without any action or consequence necessary. Learning for utility is the learning I dislike, because it is more a means to an end, the end being what I want to do, it becomes a chore.

For example, when I learn about some networking concept in order to do my job at Google, I dislike this aspect of learning. Is it because I dislike the actual topic? Networking to me doesn't seem so bad, it is interesting. I find it really interesting how a completely decentralized system works, how routes are discovered in a way that has no global management system, it's actually very impressive. And still I find the concept of the internet sort of mind boggling, and I do find it interesting. Yet learning about the internet in relation to work is not interesting to me in the slightest. Why is that?

Perhaps it is impatience or rather distraction. I learn networking for work because I want to do a task, whether that's implement some new feature or learn more about the service that I'm running. So when I am learning the concept I always have it in my back of the mind how this concept relates to the task, and what I need to do for the task. Learning is a complicated road, you need to swurve and swivvle to your goal, it isn't a straight line, but I'm impatient. I want to complete the task quickly, so I don't take the road where it goes, I try to create my own road. Instead of learning where learning takes me, I force myself to learn only that which allows me to do the task. This defeats the curiosity, ends the adventure, and makes learning just a tool.

But why the impatience? Is it because if I'm learning to achieve the task there exists stress. I have to achieve the task in a given time, with a certain expectation given upon me, and so I need to learn quickly. And that stress, learning quickly, it makes a chore of a game. If you had to clean the floors, it might be a relaxing and nice thing to do, where you can clean the floors little by little while listening to music. But if you had to clean the floor with the expectation of someone else, then it becomes something else, it becomes a chore, it becomes an expectation, and that makes it harder to have fun doing. But no that is not the reason, because even learning to achieve a personal project is still something I dislike.

I think for learning for a personal project, the annoyance comes because I am so eager at the result. I want to achieve some awesome goal but learning takes a long time. I want to animate something but learning to animate takes years and I'm impatient, I don't want to wait years to animate my dreams, but I have to. Learning no longer becomes the point, it becomes the obstacle, maybe that's it. Learning for utility the goal is behind the learning, you have to get through the learning to get to where you want. But learning for joy, the goal IS learning, you are already there. I think that's what it is.

So maybe if I want to get better at learning for utility, I need to see the learning as the goal with no direct end result in mind. This is harder then it sounds. But maybe for drawing that's what I should do. Learning to draw should be fun because I''m learning a new skill, maybe I will never end up drawing and instead will do 3D animating or something. But learning to draw can still be good, it is learning. I should draw more.

I'm going to commit to write blogs more in this pose, just to myself, maybe link people when I want. Give deeper insight. The goal not for public consumption, but for the act of writing itself. Just like learning.

My Old Poetry

 So I was browsing some forums I used to visit and discovered a bunch of my old poetry, so here it is, for you to enjoy if you'd like!

Ordered from approximately my favourites to least favourites

Hidden Beauty in Numbers

Scattered meanings, ambiguous code,

Laying the foundation of logic's abode,

Secrets embedded, let that be told,

covered in grey, hiding the gold.

Men see the scatter, focus on chaos,

See the divergence, believe it's mythos,

They see the dots and not the lines,

Not the curves or shaped divines.

But in these whispers holds such beauty,

From purposed null to small infinity,

To the fragile touches of chaotic functions,

To the amazement of Euclidean perfections.

And the further you go, the sillier it gets,

Until each new fact is one you cannot forget,

All ideas, thought to be obvious,

Shown to be elaborately marvellous.

The vector space of the universal system,

The fundamental axioms of absolute reason,

This is mathematics, and please believe this to be true,

That through the lectures is a new universe, waiting for you.

In the Closet (I wrote this when I was 14 and hadn't come out yet)

It hangs off me like a mutilated limb,

Restricting my movements and freedom,

Striking pain with every lurch forward I partake,

Causing a strange savage suffering, eating away.

As mentality fights my body,

In a war my body cannot win.

The agony to scream without voice,

To cry without a sense of despair,

To hide from the inevitable reality I must confront,

To feel the demented pride of successfully hiding

From others and myself;

The perfect poker face.

I know this is unnecessary

To cause myself so much distraught,,

Which in itself consumes my well-being;

For the only reason this is taking place,

Is to my credible dishonor,

I am afraid.

Embarrassed, I'd look at myself

Denied to see what I truly am,

With insufficient courage to accept myself

Question my very existence, and seeking logic

For why this abominable abaddon,

Had been leeched on to me.

But I will consistently pursue

The one ambition that grapples me with hope,

An angels hands, would give me courage

To accept my one and only fate,

And to come to terms

With who I may love.

Would You Kindly?

Sunken deep, surrounded by darkness,

Lies a utopia, purposed and free,

Where whats yours is yours, no exception,

So come in, come in, would you kindly?

Altruism the root of all evil,

have parasites fester above the sea,

Which one man sought to put an end,

So follow this man, would you kindly?

Carved deep from the sweat of a brow,

Lies a market, freer than free,

All is owned, none is shared,

So buy my product, would you kindly?

Heaven is gone, but hell is too

All that's left here is you and me,

In this city we have our rapture,

accept the rapture, would you kindly?

Atlas came to see the end,

He came with a strange decree,

When he comes to tell you his plan,

Just shrug, would you kindly?

So when you see the man, oh man,

The one who is our big daddy,

Follow his words, follow them carefully,

KILL SLAVE, would you kindly?

Power's Paradox

Men see in the sky,

Themselves as something more,

Risen on a pillar of gold,

atop a cold hard floor.

Scrambling to their prize,

they strive to rise but fall,

Seeking only virtuous means,

To attain the dream they call.

And as they fail, they fail,

And slip closer to the wall,

Breaking their promises,

And bending the law.

To succeed they succumb,

Into darkness they fall,

For power for powers sake,

Is no real power at all.

Yet while downwards they sink,

Upwards they roar,

Gaining their vision,

They finally become more.

But sitting on a throne of bone,

With dead men as their thrall,

They learn that upon a mountain of skulls,

even the great look small.

Weight

What is weight? Is it simply M-G?

Something that's described physically?

Do things have more weight then we can see?

Weight that exists immeasurably?

In the abstract world of peoples minds,

Is this weight not simply a property?

A property of meaning, purpose,

That exists even unknowingly?

Take a flag, a series of patterns,

that makes and breaks nations certainly.

It's not the flag, or pattern, that's power,

but weight that exists abstractly.

Is the pen mightier than the sword,

because the pen has weight invisibly?

Can a weak king rule a strong country,

because of this weight on society?

Perhaps this weight is most important,

In determining a destiny.

The most powerful force that exists,

entirely in ones fantasy.

So stop worrying about the seen,

And increase this weight exponentially.

Because then you're a king and a god,

who's exploiting this weight, successfully.

Unit 731

Voices stop in blood stained soil,

Remnants of the chaotic turmoil.

The creation of a perfect hell

trapped in a lost concrete shell.

A feat of the extraordinary,

in terms of their treachery,

in order to survive,

in order to thrive.

Pain of the surreal,

Essence of death's meal.

They, with standard defiance,

claim the name of science.

Each "log" processed,

Each disease assessed,

Experiments of the grotesque,

logs begging for eternal rest.

Blood-stained puss drooling

while logs bodies start pooling.

Trapped in small cages,

injected with contagions.

Biologically tested,

in disease, logs nested.

Moving into the operating room,

the real pain will begin soon.

Bodies opened for weeks on end,

50,000 in this trend,

Organs removed and analysed,

Facilities filled with logs cries.

Vessels rapture,

beyond torture,

each infected,

each vivisected.

The infection spreads,

until all are dead

and those who remained,

will be then detained;

Pushed into the furnace,

as logs surplus,

screaming, "I'm not dead!"

as the inferno fed.

These voices unheard,

for reasons absurd,

They teach lies,

as the story dies.

Forgetting is insanity,

crimes against humanity

But i will not let them run

from unit 731

Luggz (Rest in peace buddy)

There is a scottish fox that I know,

Whose very fur is the colour of love,

He can be rugged, he can be fierce,

but at the same time soft, delicate as a dove.

He has a dark side he likes to take form,

but it's all in good faith and fun!

The truth is he is extremely nice,

he is caring, thoughtful and warm as the sun.

He is a foxeh I'm extremely glad to know,

Someone who's friendship I'd never try to sever,

Someone I can rely on, someone I can trust,

He is my luggzie and I'll love him forever!

The Cringey Computer Scientist (It's self aware, don't worry ;))

You know who I am? I am a compsci Student,

You know what I be doing? Coding C 'cause I'm fluent;

When you see me walking, you see me with a stride,

cause I'm always following the rules in the style guide.

Don't you know? Well I'm a fierce damn hunter

Gonna find you in my graph, You think I'm a nutter?

FOOL! nothing will ever beat my perfect ADT,

find yo' Dracula hidden in my binary search tree!

So don't come knockin' for my hunter.c

Cause it's somethin' I know you'll never be,

Know your quicksort fool? Median of three?

Ha! And to think you believe you can beat me!

So if you think we can't beat a post-grad,

You have then truly gone totally mad,

Cause I'm up here, in coding heaven,

Owning the assignment in comp1927

Symphony of Loss

Joyous darkness, pain of trance,

dancing happily in tune of silence,

No more cares, no more wonders,

broken mental cadence thunders,

Troubles exposes the tone of mind,

When there's none left of your kind,

You drain of emotion, the rest of agony,

And compose your own deranged symphony.

Not of music, but of thought,

Staccato of pain ones surely sought,

Break the skin with a trill of steel,

Just to remind yourself you can feel.

Thinking troubles a slur in legato,

Each sad thought, itself Marcato,

The condition ascends worse and worse,

Impossible to escape this endless curse.

Drained, lost, no where to go,

Desperate to be staccatissimo,

Nothing matters, don't care anymore,

It's then the soul will stop feeling sore.

Happily dancing to silence, as said before,

For soon the sorrow will be no more,

Live this moment, define your persona,

For now the song has reached it's coda.

Do As Thy Wilt

Do as thy wilt, a sun blocked in the sky,

A red orb of kings drips blood,

the king of the dead in crimson water,

Skewering himself on a dead tree.

Do as thy wilt, a friend, a foe.

The black swordsman runs,

A bandaged hero, raped and tortured,

This world is no longer for thee.

Do as thy wilt, the sky drips,

The love of his life in someone else,

Darkness shrouds the landscape,

The very world begins to bleed.

Do as thy wilt, a mountain of screams,

Terrifying fears, his friends, his men,

The end, the end, four gods appear,

The hands that hath planted the seed.

Do as thy wilt, a voice, calling,

A castle far away in skulls of cobblestone,

No, you are the only one,

Sacrifice all that you know.

Do as thy wilt, see them burn,

Each one lays there lives for you,

You reap what you sow from their souls,

Your men, your love, you loathe.

Do as thy wilt, wrapped in a fist of stone,

Your guts hammering away, shouting your name,

Your love whisked away, devoured by a blob of teeth,

Let it end, let them end, today.

Do as thy wilt and emerge,

A femtosecond of guilt, washes away,

You are an angel of your own making,

Their dreams upon you lay.

Do as thy wilt, glorious god,

Let them suffer, take them for yourself,

The only thing they ask, as you rape,

torture,

kill,

betray,

save,

damn,

conquer,

only one command, you must follow,

at all costs...

Do as thy wilt.

Stop

I wake up seeing the sun shine,

burning my face, killing my time,

All I want is to forget the sky,

cover my face, close my eye

dream of tomorrow and wait to die,

living is necessary, it's a lie.

We think of death as darkness,

a void as a void of voidness,

but no guilt or despair,

leave me there,

I want to stay alone,

my heart my metronome,

let it stop, let me rot,

no reason but biology

asking my philosophy

breaking my neurology,

think about astronomy

for as long as the stars burn

I shall yearn

for me to be among them

back in the void again

no sound, no sight,

no darkness yet no light,

not even knowing,

never really showing,

worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry,w orr, wor,r

Vacuum

I'm Weightless here, right now,

Floating in nothing, I don't know how.

No sound can be heard, pitch nor tone,

Micro to Macro, I'm here alone.

I can see a vibrant sun flare,

It's majesty, can't help but stare,

It's radiance would make me boil

In this freezing cold turmoil.

I'd float here, my soul escaping,

Nothing to stop my arteries breaking,

Protected only be elasticity,

It's such an ominous reality.

I can't help but ask, what kills me?

the radiation that you cannot see?

Or would I simply freeze in a snap?

Or float into a pressure bomb trap?

Either way, I'm by myself,

with endless deteriorating health.

No air to breathe, no particles near,

This is truly our worst fear.

In some ways, it's kind of peaceful,

Even despite me being so fearful,

For I know, we'll all be one soon,

As I become part of this very vacuum.

Sleep

A piece of peace,

A calm that's almost unreal,

No vibration of sound or light,

Just how I'd like to feel.

Calm, soft, cool,

Floating slow and steady,

Drifting through a void,

Trying to be ready.

Darkness is ahead,

Stress, pain or violence,

But that's later, not now,

Lets remain in our blissful trance.

For now float,

Prepare for what is coming,

Close your eyes, exhale,

For soon you will be running.

Violent Shanty

Leave the rafts and on the ships as ordered!

Get on the decks and make sure all is boarded!

Load the goods, make sure all is sorted!

We shall sail, our enemies be quartered!

Oh what fun it is to voyage the seas!

Sailin' on the wood of our precious trees!

For we will sail to be what we want to be!

And purge the society, our true enemy!

Burn the ships and give no mercy!

Never let them trick you with curtsy!

Burn the villages, kill all civies!

Let them know of our Treachery!

Oh the fun of the brawl!

Take a minute to take in it all!

Watch them as they feebly crawl!

Why they drown we shall soar!

Come all, you know you want to!

We fight for the ones who are all true!

Never be deceived, they don't have a clue!

So come, all we ever needed was you!

Wishing Upon A Star

I wished upon a star afar

To seek my very destiny

Without any flick or glimmer

the star didn't listen to me

I got up upon my red roof

I reached my hands to touch the star

I strained to discover the truth

But I could only get so far

I was disappointed as hell

So I walked and began to cry

A loose plate snapped and then I fell

and hit the ground to nearly die

I lay there in pain on the lawn

Staring up at the nights cosmos

I slowly awaited the dawn,

frowning at the star, being cross

“Why can't I touch you!?” I screamed

crying tears as my body bled

The star came down like I dreamed

It saw me, this is what it said

“Mortal, the one who seeks it all

seeks future of his very soul,

uncertain of what is ahead.

Only pleasure.” is what it said

It flew back up into the sky

Leaving only such cryptic words

I lay there still, I didn't cry,

Thinking of only the absurd.

Only pleasure? What does that mean?

So angry at the stars advice

was it fake, was it just a dream?

Its words only there to entice

Finally, I then realized

Only pleasure was not knowing

for discovery mesmerized

with certainty never showing.

Always something to discover

I'll always search for knowledge

Get up and you'll soon recover

for understanding has no edge

Once wished upon a star afar

To seek my very destiny

Answers were on my own radar

but no sign of reality.

The Lil' Photon Who'd End The World

He moves through miles of space

Moving so fast, he'd win the race,

Meeting the blue dot, he got caught,

And plummets to the sky with grace

Breaking through the gradual wall

He comes down to meet us all,

Sees the view, his awe renew,

and he starts his great fall.

He decided he will stay,

And he comes down in a ray,

breaks into your home, so he can roam,

and change the littlest thing in the littlest way

A building made of stone,

he hits a block of silicone

Changes a bit, and that is it,

His disaster is more than prone.

The roof turns to sky,

so the tridents can fly,

The situation clear, it's become nuclear,

And all the men die.

Each hit releases more of him,

They scatter as the sky goes dim,

And our little friend, became our end,

How fragile is the system.

These Blue Eyes

I see blue eyes,

focused with pupils sharp,

focused in the future,

I see not art.

I see the reflection,

A great ambition,

Opportunities flood,

but they lack inspiration,

I see a face,

stoic in its nature,

gazed and aloof,

the face of rapture.

I see something lost,

And something gained,

with all the pleasures,

I still see the pain.

I see confusion,

I see intrusion,

I see infusion,

I see pollution

I see I am blind,

These ideas cloud my mind,

I don't see the present,

and what I've left behind.

The Broken Verse

Well, I guess it's not enough to try.

   I work and work to never get high,

                                                        I dunno why,

It just leaves thoughts to pry, leaving my mouth dry,

       As I contemplate what words I try to defy,

Why lie?

It's my pride that I'm trying subside,

I'm going for the ride to protect my hide,

  I'll do it with or without friends by my side,

Would it matter if cried or died as I slide

   in depression I lied,

for I committed the crime of no time,

  as expressed in rhyme, as my only sign of

                          sanity in vanity in a perfect line.

Let me stay to flay the clay of realities tray

                                                  of missed opportunities, gone away,

So I may lay to see the high marks of today

                      and say hooray, in vain

Doesn't matter anymore, we're all educations whore,

  We draw the floor and answer the call,

                                                          and we get only charges.

So we get clawed by the ravenous horde,

  Only to get discord in trust of a lord,

                                                                               that's society

So, it's over, no plea

nothings for free, there is no key,

let it be, I try to see,

but all I get...

                   ...is the failure that is me.

Your Faith Was A Lie

Leave thy body, hold onto me no longer,

For thou hast had time to feel loving embrace,

Ye rejected life's living promise,

To seek the promise of eternal reward.

Leave thy body, thy will be done,

Rejected ideas, thou's living sanctum,

Be passed onto our lord, our father,

Pray you that you were right.

Leave thy body, find the truth,

Seek to prove your own delusions,

With hope of an existential utopia,

You shall find nothing.

Leave thy body, goodbye my friend,

I have never knew ye, but I knew of,

You have left us and all humanity,

To seek the fake eternal paradise.

Why Do I Do?

My mind behaves like chairs walk,

Thoughts unwanted begin to stalk,

Images seen flash me by,

To make me drift into the sky

There is no explaining it's process,

Only that chaos is in its excess,

Hidden variables always unreachable,

Cognitive bias clouds all that is teachable.

The hardest thing to know about me,

Is how I imagine all that we see,

For even I cannot truly know,

How my mind decides to go.

Lost as my conscious swirled,

I am trapped in my own world,

Locked in a cage of self perception,

Only key is my own deception.

I am not, never was, in control,

All I know, that I see, is fable,

A slave to my own psychology,

A meat puppet of all biology.

Until finally the angel dawns,

To pick me up from the field of thornes,

And wash my mind from that unclear,

Only when I am no longer here.

Computers

Silicon, still synthetic,

Electric pulses, shoot within,

move only in one, interpret only once,

Loaded, Doped, the process will begin.

Current flows throughout creation,

Messages received, machine code generated,

Received from Meta-language,

Higher process translated.

Electric pulses, turned to light,

Flows through time and space,

Same message, in many different directions,

Each packet, organized for the race,

Such a simple process, interpretation of such,

Connecting one mind to consensus,

Allowing our representations, to communicate,

Allowing the creation of global nexus

Something invisible, but yet so clear,

The light emitting off the monitor is us,

When we leave our reality; our world,

Revolving around a universal serial bus

No more, concepts of soul,

We are all one now, the collective,

The hive mind, peak of humanity,

To offer such various, infinite perspective,

The internet, us together as one,

Join us, become the synthetic norm,

No longer held to ties of ourselves,

Just relax, integrate yourself, allowed to conform.

We are no longer individuals,

We are no longer ourselves,

We are no longer anything,

But the electric currents of these realms.

Terrible Transcendence

Hold the hope that keeps me here

The force that stops me floating away

Grasp it with ever gasping fear

For soon I shall not see the day.

please, oh please, I plead to you,

Don't let me lose my only hope!

Without it I know not what to do

The only concept I have to cope!

Fearless and smiling optimism

To pessimistic bloody tears

I shall not think of cataclysm

To open the door to all my fears

Leave my body and my mind

For the universe would never care

For co-existance of any kind

may be just too much to bare

Why oh why! I scream and cry

As I begin to cease humanity

Why friends and love dwindle to die

As I transend to infinity

No hope is left! It is all gone!

Leave this place to go alone,

I will embed to the forsworn

To vanish any way back home.

The hope leaves never to exist

I return to my mortality

As this world continues to insist

That I return to reality.

Societal Downfall

How much have we lost in the ripples of time?

How much have we lost that never was mine?

Can we go forward, is it even possible?

To move forward in what can only be a spiral?

The fires of hate burns men alive,

As the winds of torment strips them of pride,

The earth of intolerance intolerant of tolerance,

With the sea of sadness pushing back the aberrance,

Oh lord, oh god, oh fuck, oh man,

Is this the duty of all of this land?

To kill and rape and sow the seeds

Of angst and hate that are the weeds?

The weeds of society both men, women,

children and other so intricately woven,

That in the end all there is is nothing,

nothing and nothing and nothing and nothing.

Nothing but our memory for no one to hear,

Nothing but the emotion we left to bare,

How much have we lost through the ripple of time?

How much of that despair is now becoming mine?

The Dark Descent

Daniel... My name is Daniel...

I had... to forget... I... have...

Those words echo in my mind as I creep through darkened bellows,

I crouch, lurching forward into a crippling blood stained corridor,

Chains hang overhead, dripping red liquid pools on the ground that I pass

My only safety is my lantern that brights my path, my future.

Daniel... kill Alexander...

Daniel... Kill Alexander...

I walk into the kitchen, I find nothing of importance.

Some oil, a tinder box, the room is dimly lit by a single candle,

Venturing further, I find the chopped up limbs of swine hanging,

A pot of acid near, nothing I can use... I leave.

Daniel, the shadow comes for you

Remain sane, away from the shadow...

As I exit the kitchen, my lantern lighting a small distance ahead of me,

a most terrible moan beseeches me, a crackling slow yelp of endless torture,

for a half a second, I see a face ahead of me, a mouth drooped down as if melted,

I turn off the lantern, but it's too late... it knows I'm here.

Daniel don't lose your sanity,

stay out of the darkness...

I run in the kitchen and shut the door, furiously finding a place to hide,

Before I can even move a large crack snaps behind me, it's breaking through.

I go to the hanging limbless swine and hide in a pool of rotting blood and flesh,

Each bang getting louder and louder, closer and closer, until finally, the door breaks through...

Daniel, you can not fight,

Daniel, you must hide!

I hear it's choked demented breathing as it enters the kitchen,

It is a dead end, I have no where to run, it is looking for me,

It's knife scratches against the surface of the wall as it walks to the swine,

I hide behind, hoping, praying, it will not see me...

Daniel, do not look,

hide, close your eyes, do not look.

I do not know where it is, I hear it's breathing coming closer,

Its every step straining the floor boards, it is so close,

It will find me, I must run, no, no, I must stay

How do I escape the very death that awaits me in this room!?

Daniel, you must survive

Kill Alexander Daniel, Kill Alexander.

I hear nothing, a sudden silence, is it still there?

I feel it looming over me, standing in one place...

Unsure what to do, do I peak, will it find me,

I gain the courage to snoop around the corner, I find nothing.

Daniel, you must stay sane,

It is of most importance Daniel.

My vision blurred from insanity, cracking eggs echo in my mind,

It has left the kitchen, to where I do not know,

But now I must exit the kitchen, go to where it went,

I creep out, the darkness setting back in as I venture to the unknown...

Daniel... My name is Daniel...

 I had... to forget... I... have...

High School

We are different, but treated the same,

We just jump through hoops;

Taught to fly,

When we're not birds,

Taught to growl,

When we are mice,

Taught to see,

When we're blind,

Taught to think,

When we are nothing.

Left to believe, we are owned,

Not by person, but by paper,

That a number is only us,

And we are merely a mark.

Seen as inferior, treated dumb,

For the real world;

Convinced we should fly,

when we can't even run.

Failure not an option?

Try, try, try

You are limitless,

You should do everything

Anything

Because you can.

NO! we were lying

All these people are better

you are blind, dumb,

You should of done everything

Anything

but you can't.

Our Bodies, led to the wrong path.

Our hearts, guided through the wrong way.

Our brains, tricked and deceived,

Our Souls, stricken away,

Lost to the minds, in order to conform

We become merely machines,

To be used for more machines,

To grow like machines, work like machines,

To think like machines,

To act like machines.

Why are we given hope?

Taught to sing when we can't talk?

Only for the reality to crush us!

That we can't sing, if we can't talk.

Because the only way,

They believe,

The only way to learn,

To learn the truth,

The truth of everything,

Is to live it.

The truth

Is but

A lie.

Don't Be Content

Look for something lost, forget that which is found,

Walk the routine alone, embrace the silence of sound.

Through the clouds of peoples voices and their tyrant commands,

Keep looking for the way to try and escape their toxic demands.

Ignore them, once and again, forever to be true,

Leave their minds from your own body, there is no one but you!

Run and leave and drift through the souls of those militants,

So they can't keep hold of your never lasting innocence.

Don't let these people live through you,

Let yourself be the one to know what to do,

Confidence is a virtue, independence a privilege,

So know what you want as your own image.

Look in the reflection, do you like what you see?

Is it you who is the one now looking at me?

Or is it just a husk, pure form of others creations,

Void of one truth, mental artificial insemination.

Trade security for serenity? Fend for yourself?

Can you take the leap or would you rather be of health?

Sooner or later, one must enter the unknown,

And leave the place, you're so happy to call home.

Vice City

Streets bathed in neon gold,

Blue light shines to get more sold,

The vice of a city echos within,

As the people walk drenched in sin.

Walk in the street, metal in hand,

A trigger to fulfill life's final plan,

Such a small device, a tiny gun,

End a mans life; just for fun.

Pearly white beaches stretch far,

You driving around in a super car,

This truly is the life, can't you see?

A city of bliss and naughty ecstasy.

But you then realize, this isn't real,

It's the image on a monitor encased in steel,

It's just a game, when you get nitty gritty,

but I'll still love Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Men Vs God

Men, men see, men know,

They go and go and go,

Work and live and smile,

Live a life worth while.

Gods, they create, they stop,

Their meaning, they know, is naught.

What a god truly sought,

the ground that all men walk.

Men feel pain and despair,

Knowing that life is unfair,

Worth living they say,

Let me see my last day.

Gods, listen, watch, stand

Illogical, men's land.

They died years ago,

Men will be in tow.

Men, realize, too late,

That life is not great.

All men want to do is fly,

So let them try, let them die.

Gods, want to be born,

In a life full of scorn,

They sit, waiting,

Men fly, damming.

Men live, Men live,

No reason left to give,

Gods don't see the point,

Life

Gods die, stay dead,

Afterlife their home stead,

Men are afraid to see the end,

Death.

Floating among the stars

Blinding light, it casts the darkest shadow behind the wings,

I open my eyes, and take my first real breathe,

looking over into a void, dotted by giants of immeasurable power,

only specs though.

I relax, I hear only the sounds I make,

The wisp of air going into my mouth,

Inhale, exhale, the only thing that is present,

I let go, and I move or everything else simply moves away from me.

The white bars escape my presence, it all floats away,

I stand still, with nothing keeping me down, I'm free.

I turn my head and hold my breathe, to hear an unearthly silence,

a silence captured by the void, for I am present and nothing else is.

I float in space, the rays of the sun gleaming upon my suit,

Brighter than anything I've ever seen.

Yet equally magnificent creations, continuous explosions, nuclear bombs.

All seem like nothing.

I stare back, the earth, the moon, everything, it's all... small.

Am I upside down? Where am I? Is this my home?

I let out that breathe, tired of the silence that is unachievable,

to simply float, forever more, with nothing.

Perpetual Servitude

A servant of thought, sits at his desk,

Shining in pride, reading symbols on a screen,

Ones with lines and dots and circles,

That tell him what to do through shackles

A servant of machine, stands at the line,

As happy as can be, moving his hands,

Putting things on other things as they come,

Awaiting their service from the slave.

A servant of man, stands at the podium,

Full of vigor, projecting some sounds,

Tone after tone, mouth movements flow,

In order to please its real master

Servants controlled by servants,

Cooperation through obedience,

All abide, All adhere,

For Necessity and Fear.

All seek to be free,

Free from their own grasp.

And one day such will happen,

And all will be free,

Through fire and suffering,

Men will be free,

Through ending and oblivion,

women will be free,

For the fires of their servants.

Will come down upon them,

And through the bright flash,

All will be free.

And chaos will rise,

Devolve in Anarchy,

And all will peril in the abaddon,

And all will curse the freedom,

And the slaves will rise,

To be slaves once more,

And all will be gone.

Who is God?

Who is god?

Is he the being that created us?

Through ultimate power, spawned life,

Beauty, love and all things glorious

And yet, created evil,

Allowed us to defy him so we could be punished,

Forbid his creations to do acts he created,

So that we could be judged, when we're finished.

Does that make sense? Who is god?

Is he the being that loves us?

That through all bad times and sorrows, is there?

Always watching with love, someone we can trust?

But catastrophe occurs!

Men die, women tortured and children succumb to illness,

How is love, when a Holocaust survivor writes

"god will have to beg for my forgiveness"

Who then is god?

Is he all powerful?

Is he all knowing?

Is he all present?

Why do prayers remains unanswered?

Why can hope remain so dim?

If god is always at my side,

Why do I never see him?

Who is god?

Become Death

A great fire burns in the sky,

Yet silent and terrifying I see,

A creation of a destruction,

With only a pane of glass protecting me.

Bolts of red hot metal scatter,

invisible men flash behind my eyes,

Seeing all of them burn in agony,

My smile of contempt my disguise.

I see the weight I have created,

hanging over me like a neutron star,

The world shackled by my inventions,

Humanities achievements sure have come far.

In chaos the world has truly become MAD

In order the worlds wars will become cold

For in the brightest of lights, I see the darkest of shadows

I have become death, destroyer of worlds.

Expectation

My son, my daughter, my child,

On a planet hanging by a string,

I wonder what you will achieve,

In what light will you bring

I know you now, but not tomorrow,

I feel what you felt, see what you saw,

How do you live and go?

That makes me look to you in awe

Who are you?

A puppet or a puppeteer?

Do you move as I do

are you far or near?

Can I be happy, or sad?

Are you Life or death, do you fight or flee?

Does it show that time is reversible,

if it is your actions that affect me?

I am on a rope with a pulley,

Plumeting through the fourth,

Never slowing down,

until I reach what I've sought.

You and I, are we alike?

Do we still listen with our mind?

Can I say that I am proud?

Did you finally contribute to mankind?

Impatience

Fury in passion, burning light strikes through,

In the aura of confidence and minds true,

One shivers at the sight of the brilliant invisible colours,

Of others passions that one is left without.

Reap in your own shattered pieces of memories and hopes,

Be left to look at those with angel wings; soaring high,

Why you are glued to a ground made of rotting leaves and mud,

Watching the horizon collapse above you, falling down to crush.

Maybe, if one of those rainbow streaks shines down on you,

Fills you with warmth from the heavenly field,

Snuggled by soft fur, felt to feel the calm ecstasy of bliss,

Maybe then, your doors be opened and life completed.

Until then, you shall wait in the rain,

Waiting for your chance to soar among the others,

Be risen above the pitiless, weak men you have been,

Maybe then, you can be granted back your spirit.

Brick in the wall

From the fire and thrown in the brink,

Locked away by violent instinct,

Let no man pass through this mind's eye,

Freewill will cease to glow, flicker to die.

Individuality never to exist,

Influence of society will persist,

Shuffled into a realm of order,

The world hinging from the border.

We are puppets, puppets we are,

Becoming the proof of societies scar,

A single cell of a body too great,

To even try to care about it's own state.

We are taught to conform,

Taught to be nothing but the norm,

They're trying to make you so digital,

Telling you that you're so miniscule.

You, to them, are a just a number,

Just one with money and labor to plunder,

Why doesn't anyone stand and say no?

No one seems to be willing to let ideas flow!

This is what they do to you and me,

A truth that only so few people can see,

When Machine like behavior is their infatuation,

You wonder why this is what they call "Education".

Tsar Bomba

Imagine if you will, I placed a candle,

On a rocky cliff, in the shadow of night,

And I pulled on a match in which I struck,

To set this lonesome candle alight.

Imagine if you will, I placed another,

A metre apart, now on some clay,

I burned the new candle, and placed another,

And continued to place more until the day.

Imagine if you will, I did this forever,

Until every corner of the earth was in flame,

Every ocean and mountain, every crack and crevice,

There was no area that the candle did not claim.

Imagine if you will, these candles had burned,

From even before I had begun to place them,

That when the universe was birthed, the candles ignite,

Across the earth throughout all of time's stem.

Imagine if you will, the earth on fire,

Ignited by candles from time's beginning,

And all the energy and power released,

Was condensed into one, single happening.

Imagine if you will, this happening was quick,

In a split second, in less time you could think,

And this happening was created by no less than man,

And this happening had happened in a single blink

Imagine if you will, the power of these candles,

Burning across the earth, across time, like a star,

Imagine if you will, the true power of man,

The true extent of our creation, the power of the Tsar.

Cognitive Collapse

Numbers have patterns, and life does as well.

I see myself as part of a larger pattern, one that binds us all together.

For I influence all things and all things must influence me.

My bubble of impact moves outwardly at the speed of light,

existing without form, existing without time.

A storm is coming, all these bubbles, all these webs,

The temporal wind disrupts all that I can see.

I stand against it because I can, because I ought to.

But no one asks why they move forward,

They only do, automatons of influence.

They are shadows amoungst the storm that is my mind,

Perhaps I am the only one who exists,

Perhaps I influence nothing but myself.

If past actions influence the future,

why can't the future influence the past.

I can sit down amongst the rain,

the hail, lightning and sparks

I will always remain here.

Without form, without time.

My bubble forever expanding

Even when I am no more

No more, never was,

never will be.

Stop Hiding Bitch

We all have our secrets, our hidden desires

fears, hopes and dreams, we're all just liars

What we see and what we know, so intrinsic

So forgive me if I'm a bit pessimistic

We all say what we don't think

Think what we never say

And try to hide from what we are

Try to make the thoughts go away

(But they won't, they're here to stay)

So hide, hide, hide, it's so pointless

Because all it does is cause you so much distress

There is nothing you can do, don't hide it

Must not fight it, must just learn to live with it

We lie, to others, to ourselves

No matter what we do, we'll always lie

The truth kicks us in the heads,

burns us, hurts us, until we die

(Let yourself go, learn to fly)

So accept it, Accept your fate

Accept all the things at stake

and just leave, leave your haunt

Don't give the truth a chance to taunt

Live life, live it to it's fullest

Don't worry about what you really believe

Your true self is fueled by your thought of it

It's fueled by the way you decide to perceive

(Feed it and it will succeed)

Don't hide from yourself

Don't fight yourself

Don't deny yourself

But accept yourself

What You Did

Innocence gone to waste,

My sense of will, yours to taste

demented conceptions of the best

Lingering pain to never rest

Burn my soul with your stare

Do not what is right or fair

Such words mean nothing to you

and your delusions of virtue

Corruption fornicates inside

Words say promise but always lied

Keep your hands of rusted possession

They mean nothing in bloody recession

Cheat the system

Disturb the rhythm

Only one way to beat them

And that's to join them!

Like a virus, evil spreads

Leave us without any heads

For our minds are lost and gone

into this deep, dark abaddon

Mandlebrot

Twirling, spiraling, looping, spinning,

zooming to nowhere, trying, flying,

So Simply Complex, running, flowing,

the thumbprint of god, gliding, sliding.

From the imaginary, zooming,

From one simple equation, fleeing,

Creating a universe, roaming,

More vast than ours, magnifying.

Mandelbrot,

The fractal,

The Skeleton galaxy,

The eye in creation,

The limitless void in space,

The beginning and end of time.

Time

Tick Tock, says the clock,

Time be-a tickin' away and away

Always forwards, a runaway train,

To hope, pride, chaos or dismay

Slows down for no man,

The inalienable consequence of existence,

Put things on hold? well;

Just remember of times omnipotence.

Want to do more?

Well you better hurry and catch up!

Because times already ahead

And you'll be left behind; a vulnerable pup.

Chaos theory? Well it's just that!

A mistake made will be worse and worse;

Time is impartial, it is above,

It doesn't care if you're not in a hearse.

You WILL die and time WILL end,

but that's just the run away train again.

So live your life running after time,

A rat race against a god, like a vicious friend.

Some Edgy Thing

Please, no more, it's gone on long enough,

Just let me be, for once, just let me float in nothing.

I hate the boundaries of living space,

The boundaries given by my own imagination.

Why? Why can't I transcend this gap,

Transcend from darkness to see light and love,

I'm just stuck here, things pile on and on,

the intensity of the weight on my back.

PLEASE! It's going to crush me! Everything!

I plead you! You've had your way with me!

Get that breathe of death away from me!

You hurt my friends! I have to help them!

NO! Let my soul back! GO AWAY!

THERE IS NOTHING MORE TO SAY

Left in the bitter cold, the foul stench,

pity and agony, no where to turn.

Be back once more, no where to run,

leave me so I can think of numbers,

You've done enough already, good bye,

In darkness I revel seen by no eye.

Furry Pride (yes... I wrote one of these)

We are ones that stand proud

In the face of a bitter humanity.

We hold ourselves, paws side by side

To output only sincerity

For we are furries,

We embrace our true nature,

Not blinded by conformity,

Or scared by such rapture.

We live these lives

Perhaps in secret,

Those emotions in us

Only ours to interpret.

But here, right now,

We'll stand tall and proud

As we discuss our lives;

We are one of a crowd.

So embrace yourselves!

Paws, tails and scales,

Remain intact

through all of life's trails.

For there's only one thing

The world should see

Us saying, "I'm a furry,

and that's fine with me!"

Discordianism: Pure Chaos

For a long time I felt a need for spirituality. I don't exactly know where that needs comes from, perhaps it's a desire to feel special or be in the place of the unexplainable. I remember talking to someone who believed they could cast invisible fire and thinking how awesome that must be to believe these powers are possible. Funnily enough, I felt this need in particular after watching the show "Vikings" which had a lot of scenes reflecting the cool and interesting (but mostly exaggerated and fictional) spiritual happenings of Norse Paganism. So I had sought to fill in a new spiritual side of me and adopt a form of spirituality, maybe even adopt a religion.

And yet such a pursuit was very difficult because of something fundamental in my belief system, I don't believe in spirits. Or more so, I don't believe in the metaphysical, I believe that all that exists is the physical, it's interactions and the abstraction of those interactions. Not believing in anything spiritual or supernatural makes becoming more spiritual pretty much impossible, or so I thought. In my soul searching I came across a religion I had not heard of, something that was truly unlike any religion I've ever seen before. It was a religion that was almost impossible to grasp and extremely difficult to learn about, but this to me made the religion more like a puzzle which made it even more interesting. Over time this religion became something more than a curiosity, starting off as something simply funny and now becoming, maybe, a true religion that I believe in. I'm talking about Discordianism.

What is Discordianism?

I had thought about writing this article for a long time but I kinda always hit a wall at this part, because Discordianism is really hard to describe. There is the literal history of the religion which I could talk about, the internal lore and the philosophy but none of this really grasps the Discordian mindset, a sort of feeling that's not so easy to describe. But for now these things will have to do.

The literal history of Discordianism is kinda unremarkable. In the 1960s two people under the pseudonym Omar Ravenhurst and Malaclypse the Younger decided to take it upon themselves to invent a parody religion. The religion was designed to make fun of contemporary religions at the time, particularly Christianity, by inventing a sorta counter-culture religion, an anti-religion. It is designed to be funny and not take things seriously, particularly it is designed embrace the absurd and the banal. The two wrote down this new religion into a book called the "Principia Discordia". The original writings of this book has since been lost to time with no original copies still existing, so the Principia that you see now is simply a retelling from what people original got from the book. Anyway the book, and the religion, spread like wild fire and actually resulted in quite a movement in the 1960's.

But how does a parody religion go from being a parody religion to an actual religion with real believers? This is in part because of it's unique philosophy on life and the universe. I should first mention that the biggest tenant of the religion is to not take anything, including the religion itself, too seriously. A hot dog is the holy food of the religion and the Principia itself is littered with jokes and self-aware paradox. People who take things too seriously are usually referred to as "Greyface", and while this is usually taken antagonistically it is never with scorn, because you can't take "not taking things seriously" too seriously either.

I think that comes to the philosophy of Discordianism which is fundamentally about chaos. Chaos is taken as holy in Discordianism and is taken as the true state of all things and the state to strive towards. This however creates some interesting paradoxes such as, if everyone is striving to chaos isn't that a form of order? Instead of shying away from these paradoxes Discordianism actively embraces them and says "Yes, ye Saint, nay shall one strive only for chaos, for chaos without order can become an order and so one must strive to be truly chaotic by rejecting chaos when it suits" (not an actual quote). So discordianism is actively a religion about paradox and confusion and so it actively hammers down on these paradoxes tenfold, which is why the religion is so hard to explain. For example the five rules of Discordianism, known as the pentabarf, are contradictory and one of the unspoken rules is to actively not follow any of these rules (including this unspoken rule itself). The discordian humour is both in its parody of the occult and it's self aware logical inconsistencies. Again it's hard to explain. Luckily there is a more traditional theological story to go with it.

Our Goddess Eris

Discordianism does have a deity, the Greek goddess Eris or (to the Roman's) Discordia. The original version of Discordianism effectively followed the same myths the Greeks had about Eris, namely the Judgement of Paris. In this Greek story, Eris, the godddess of discord, was not invited to a wedding between Peleus and Thetis because Zeus believed Eris would just cause trouble (to Discordians this is known as "The Great Snub"). Eris, angered by this, created a golden apple inscribed with the words "Th Kallisti" (which roughly translates to "The most beautiful" or "The most fair"), she then throws this Apple of Discord into the crowd at the wedding. Three goddesses fight over the apple each believing the apple belongs to them and through a series of events this leads to the war of Sparta and Troy, the first human war. While in the original Greek myth Eris is seen as evil and an antagonist, the Discordian perspective sees her as an endearing protagonist, bringing mischief and true chaos to the world.

Discordianism however is a religion about chaos and so this traditional narrative is not necessarily always followed, nor is it encouraged to be followed. In fact originally, Malaclypse the Younger did not believe Eris to be a real goddess (like Omar did) but instead a personification of true chaos in this universe, a philosophical idea as opposed to a true deity (something I subscribe to). Furthermore the original mythos has been widely discussed and new additions have been added, particularly the introduction of Harmonia, goddess of order and harmony (also a Greek deity, though in some texts Harmonia is also Eris). One thing that is now often accepted and alluded to in the original text is the distinction between disorder and chaos. The general idea is that there exists true chaos, a fundamental uncertainty at the brink of the universe that has no form or function but simply is. Arising from this true chaos is "Order" (personified in Harmonia) and "Disorder" (personified in Eris) which are apparent manifestations interpreted by humans. And while most religions embrace the order, discordianism instead embraces the disorder.

Funnily enough this distinction of order, disorder and chaos actually has some reflection of true modern physics. Quantum Mechanics, for example, is fundamentally chaotic and indeterminate as an observed system in a quantum superposition will "collapse" to one of it's states randomly. This apparent randomness is fundamental and is not explained any further in QM, only that it simply exists, this is the pure chaos. However, the nature of the chaos is well defined and behaves orderly, this means that statistically these chaotic events will cancel out and create an apparent order (like what is classical physics). However this order also creates numerous interactions that can become hard to describe in real world systems, this is a form of disorder that is also fundamental in physics. Order, Disorder and Chaos are all described here and are fundamental, but the most fundamental is the initial, unknowable, chaos. And don't even get me started on the nature of entropy.

The In Jokes

So that's a bit about the philosophy and theology of Discordianism, but as I stated this only really scratches the surfaces. Because this religion is fundamentally disorganized there's not some single location that explains everything, discordianism is a sort of unspoken culture full of in jokes. Some of these in jokes are fully described in the Principia and the illuminatus trilogy (a fictional story being heavily influenced by Discordianism), this includes things like the rule of 5's (everything comes in 5's, or is somehow related to 5's) and fnord (a word that exists everywhere but people are simply conditioned to never notice it). Some of these in jokes are a little harder to describe, one is kinda a concept of saying things that don't make sense but sound like they make sense, kinda like speaking similar to zen proverbs. Others are more systematic, like operation mindfuck which was a massive culture jamming movement of the 1960's and 1970's and to create countless ridiculous and satirical conspiracy theories (particularly relating the illuminati).

Some people truly and wholly believe in this religion, including the theological aspects of the religion. Some people incorporate the philosophy of the religion into their paganistic views, practicing magicks in the name of discord. Others, like me, take the religion to scratch a spiritual itch and to encompass the philosophy of embracing chaos and not taking things too seriously into our daily lives. The religion started off as a silly satirical religion, but given that is decentralized and chaotic it is only natural for it to evolve into something it was not intended originally. Discordianism is a parody religion that evolved into a true unique philosophy and a true religion that has many followers to this day.

While I didn't put Discordianism on the census, I'd still consider myself a follower of this religion, in whatever respects that mean.