The sense of "I" - the physical and the mental

23/02/13 06:24 [Saturday]
I have been thinking about the sense of being "I". Probably the origin of these thoughts this morning was a feeling - from the wear and tear involved in packing for our removal and most specifically from getting up and down into the loft - that I am growing old, and a realisation that I will not endure forever and also that I am not quite the same as I was as a child (and yet, by counterpoint, I am still "I" as I was in those days).
When I was going through puberty I used to have very strong feelings that it was very odd that I should be "I", that is this person born on that particular date and living through those particular life experiences. It seemed such a statistically rare thing, that I should be this person and no other.
I suspect the strength of those feelings I had related to the personality type I was (to put it like that). In other words I was half way to being autistic, because of the way dopamine operated in my brain (and autism, Asperger's and schizophrenia are surely all closely connected), and therefore felt very powerfully that I was an individual separate from all the rest. This feeling I had was obviously exaggerated too by my being an only child.
And it is still a question of interest to me, what is it that makes me "I" or, to put it another way, how to explain the mechanism in human beings which lets them know they are each an individual with bounds in time and in spatial extension.
Readers who follow much of what I write will not be surprised at my conclusion that what creates the sense of "I" in people is the fact of evolution. What "I" am is whatever is preserved by mechanisms of self-defence combined with whatever is passed to succeeding generations. What is passed to succeeding generations is the tendency not to die, and what "I" is is the ensemble that doesn't die. My skin dies fairly regularly, and (I suppose) every cell in my body dies in the course of my lifetime, but something - the tendency not to die, or more physically the structures implementing that tendency - does not die until the final catastrophe. And after the final catastrophe, if I have had children or otherwise transmitted the tendency not to die, some part of what is "I" lives on.
What I am saying, in more practical terms, is that when I fight to remain alive (or take steps less vigorous than fighting, although to say fighting brings it out more powerfully) what is "I" is the part - or in fact the structure - which nature gives me the innate feeling I must preserve. This is not any particular portion of my body, because I would feel willing to sacrifice a limb or other body part for the sake of "self"-preservation. It must be some complex structure - involving the continuing ability to think, unarguably - which even though it is complex I have innate understanding of (even though I cannot say what it is except approximately through writing an essay). But whatever it is evolution has led me to know that it exists and to understand it for the practical purpose of tending not to die.
It seems to me (to take the matter a little further) that people fall into two broad camps, that is those who are more physical in their attitude and those who are more mental (which latter is a bit of a pun, I admit). Those who are more physical will have it in their nature to perpetuate the tendency not to die by procreating children. In this case I am tempted to say what is "I" - for them - is their DNA, since this is what gets preserved from generation to generation: and the 'structure' it gives rise to is a particular body type plus a particular way of looking at the world deriving from the results on the brain of the DNA blueprint. Furthermore such people will not come close to being autistic because they need to interact with a member of the opposite gender in order to procreate. They are not selfish in that they accept that their children will not be identical copies of themselves but will share part of their partner's DNA. Of course the largest part of humanity leans to this end of the spectrum of people who are physical in their attitude. This follows from the fact that procreating children has been the readiest means of transmitting the tendency not to die, failing a very complex interwoven Society to preserve more abstract structures.
People who are more mental transmit the tendency not to die through ideas - abstract structures - which when implemented (in a Society capable of implementing them and saving them beyond the one generation, that is through libraries, universities and more recently developed informational networks) protect and preserve human beings.
What I gather from the internet leads me to suppose that mental people are likely to be more successful (counted as a proportion of 'Society') in future. People who do little but think and who in earlier times suffered feelings of isolation affecting them adversely now have a resource of emotional support, and moreover can get their ideas across without needing wealth or a specific position in academia. Society in Britain (and likely other jurisdictions too) through the ways of the Government machine is striving more to include ideas from all species of persons, including those who are mental to the degree of mental illness, in formulating policy for the way forward.

We are sold

22/02/13 05:38 [Friday]
I don't keep my diary anything like as fully as I did in years gone by (when the dopamine in my brain was a greater flow, that is before I was on the present régime of dopamine-blocking medication). I do now upload my Twitter posts to my website colinbrough.co.uk monthly, but it is possible a coherent story does not emerge from perusing them.
I had been living apart from Dawn but in January she returned to the bungalow we are trying to sell in Kingswinford, with the intention of living here with me until it should be sold, at which date we move to Harworth near Doncaster which is the village where she grew up. We have now had an offer for the bungalow which we have accepted, so if things run smoothly it is sold and we shall be moving. We have also made an offer for a house in Harworth which has been accepted, although the lady in occupation there has yet to find a new place. We hope that all goes according to plan so that we can move home within say two months.
In preparation - driven by Dawn's vigour - we have been packing a lot of our belongings.

Computer records and other records over the years

29/01/13 14:31 [Tuesday]
I have noticed as a general principle that when my level of ‘activation’ gets going the brain cells oscillating more (that is the neural structures with increased rates of firing) bring out memories of sequences from my past. More than this I become enthusiastic to organise and make sense of the remembered sequences. More specifically I have found that after interludes - sometimes very lengthy, years-long, ‘interludes’ - in which my thinking has been suppressed by dopamine-blocking medication (at too high a dosage: this is what I mean) I become earnest, and sometimes vigorously enthusiastic, to fill-in what I missed, not so much by thinking after the event - because the sensory data to base the thinking on has been lost forever - but instead by putting together what memories I do have to reconstruct the sequences that I think must have occurred. If I become over-concerned, that is obsessed, with thinking through what I should earlier have thought through (in the case of complete, and especially if it is sudden, withdrawal of medication), my thinking becomes confused and irregular. In the past this has led to prescription of renewed high dosages of dopamine-blockers.
For example in the summer of 2004 after I had suddenly stopped accepting injections the preceding autumn which I had been having at very high dosages since 1987, I became wholly overwhelmed with confused and mistakenly based effusions of thinking (part of which involved my sleeping very little) so that in September 2004 I was sectioned for the fourth separate time in my life and detained at Bassetlaw Hospital.
I am now becoming interested in sorting out past sequences, starting with the period 2009-2011 and working things out in reverse to cover those years, this period coming to my attention because then I had more-or-less ceased to upload an online diary. The interest arises on the basis that during and following my detention over the winter of 2010-2011 I was made to accept injections of Risperdal in the middle range of dosage which was not so bad as having very high dosages as in earlier decades but still it rather suppressed the thinking I would have had it in my nature to do. Since I am now on the reduced dosage in the lower range - thanks to the good sense of the psychiatrist who was responsible for my case during that most recent detention and for a few months afterwards - I have gradually over the months of 2012 to the present time been recovering my powers of mentation but without anything like the rebound (as indeed I regarded it at the time) of 2004.
In 2007 I had got into something of a volatile state - again because I had suddenly come off the medication I was accepting throughout 2006 - so that in December 2007 I fled the park home Dawn and I had been occupying part of the time, which was located near her family south of Doncaster, and returned to Kingswinford where I had lived most of my adult life - in fact up to the year my parents died. The increasing disorganisation of my thinking can be traced in the fact that I was keeping regular computer archives but these had become desultory by the end of 2007 and then petered out (certainly until I felt at the end of 2008 that I should try again to keep records of what I had done but then and until recent months now the archives I put together were irregular in time and disorganised in structure).
Nonetheless in 2008 I was still uploading an online diary as sort of a record although it was not such as to require proper structuring. Some months of that year - June and December I can say for sure - the activity in my brain was in such flood that I did not keep up with the blog. Instead I wrote my effusions in handwritten notes, and indeed some of these were scanned in 2008 and formed part of my blog then, and now recently I have been hoping to make it more complete. I was also becoming suspicious that what I put on my computer was subject to interference in the form of deletions and alterations and in tandem I was interested in recruiting help from real-life bodies - Government bodies, I mean - to look into and put right the wrongs I had suffered over the decades, and indeed (this leading to ‘amplificatory feedback’) the wrongs I believed I was suffering in trying to recruit the help.
The upshot of this was that instead of putting up an online diary I started writing to MPs (and others whose addresses I found from Who’s Who) and simply as a record saving what I wrote on the computer without otherwise much rhyme or reason. In truth it has been considerable work to put together the computer records from 2009-2010 as a dated diary, and I am still processing what I have before I can publish it.
But, as I said, I am operating a reverse sequence and recently included in my blog my diary from March 2011 when I was in hospital at Bushey Fields (the psychiatric hospital for Dudley). When I was hospitalised in September 2010 I was very concerned to keep records of what I thought was happening and did so in the form of numerous texts to members of Dawn’s family some of which I can trace copies of. Today I am working on January 2011 because that month I was on leave from what was a very extended detention and did some diarying on the computer whereas in the February I was back in hospital and have sparser records. The reason for this I’m sure was that the medication I had been on in the autumn which was resumed in the February was having the desired effect of reducing my thinking overflow. The records from February 2011, made in hospital, are in the form of notes within my Filofax.

Persistence

12/01/13 08:11 [Saturday]
I was watching Stargazing Live the other evening and the question arose of whence the fluctuations in the universe derived, where by fluctuations I mean the presence in certain parts of objects with mass - for example planets (but more basically particles) - or other things which differ from one location to another (for example electromagnetic fields). In other words why is the universe not the same throughout its expanse, that is empty or an unchanging sea of some force (which means empty since there is nothing for the force to act on) or an unchanging lattice of mass (which means empty since mass has no meaning but for either gravity or inertia due to it)? Some answer was given relating to the speed of the initial expansion in the fraction of a second following the Big Bang, but the answer which satisfies me is that quantum fluctuations at the outset of the universe led to the lumpiness it now has.
What I myself have been thinking as a consequence, though, is that there is a natural propensity in the human mentality to believe things must stay the same unless there is a reason for them to change. Before Newton came up with his First Law people believed objects had in their nature to be still unless some force acted on them, and the First Law altered that slightly into 'had in their nature to continue in a state of zero or uniform motion' unless some force acted on them. So people think the universe ought to be the same throughout space and time - an unchanging sea you might as well call nothingness - unless there is some reason for it to be different in different locations and at different times.
What this is is the human presumption of causality. It is in human nature to believe that if things alter (from place to place or from time to time) there must be a causal antecedent to the alteration. Modern physics is slightly freeing us from this presumption, in that alterations at the quantum level occur randomly, that is unpredictably and for no reason. Of course what has led to the human insistence on causality is the fact that thinking that way has helped us survive in the context we are in - life on Earth - and the theory of evolution is accurate.
However the way human beings think on this Earth need not be a guide to the way the universe operates outside the Earthy realm. Thus on the scale of the imperceptibly small - the quantum scale - and also (I say) on the scale of the unthinkably big (or lengthy in time) changes arise without cause.
Given all the things that could happen to our planet from one day to the next it may surprise some that it persists day after day: why doesn't it just fizzle out into vapour or nothingness? My answer to that is that it has proved valuable to us (including animals) in evolutionary terms to presume that things go on day after day. I suppose some day it will fizzle out but anyone remaining will get the impression that I have fizzled out. (Hint on humour: this is the end.)

Consequence or inconsequence

07/01/13 08:14 [Monday]
I was going to tweet about one thing leading me to another so that if I introduce too much change (or am subject to too much change) I do one thing then have to do more in the knock-on then have to do more to retrieve mistakes and alterations and so it goes on possibly without end. But less so now I am on dopamine-blocking medication. I cannot tweet it though because there are too many words to it.
One of the things on my to-do list (prepared early this morning soon after I got up) is to scan the remainder of my Filofax diary for 2012. However I cannot get at the scanner because it has stuff on it as a consequence of Dawn's return to live here at the bungalow until the bungalow is sold. We have her stuff scattered all over the place here where it was off-loaded from the van it was brought in.
The knock-on task then was to clear the top of the scanner. This led to me putting items left over from Christmas in the Welsh dresser we have in the living room. That in turn led me to realise I had not catalogued all the items (mainly documents) in the Welsh dresser on the occasion recently I was cataloguing so much. So I have catalogued them and things still remain now on top of the scanner. So I have not done my scanning.
Anyway, the dopamine-blocking in my head results in my sensing how boring this is - cataloguing about cataloguing - so I will now grind to a halt. I will however mention that on the higher dosage of Risperdal I was on last year, anything I might do struck me as boring, empty and devoid of consequence before I started it. So it is a matter of balance: do so much but not too much which the average observer would declare inconsequential.