I’m writing again to see if it miraculously makes me feel better while I wait to see the neurologist for the first time. It doesn’t seem to be working.

I can’t decide if it’s good or bad that I’m symptomatic for this visit. Communication will be challenging, but I did myself a solid during periods of clarity and wrote down everything I would hope to communicate today.

My uncle Bill was correct yesterday. He called me to wish me well and let me know he may be at Mayo today if he is lucky enough to get a call. It’s not knowing that is the worst part right now. Not knowing what is happening and how bad it is. He has it bad, and Mayo may be his last hope, but he knows the name of his assailant. I don’t know if we’ll get to put a name on my condition today, but it should be a massive step in the right direction.

After my call with Bill, I realized that he has my favorite voice. It somehow encapsulates all of his siblings, my aunts and uncles, and wraps it in a sweet southern lullaby that soothes the heart. He is a singer-songwriter who nearly broke through like so many others. After the call, I found his appearance on Star Search from 1986 on YouTube. He did great, and it was the best thing I’ve seen in a long time. Like this campus, he exuded calmness and peace with a heavy amount of pure happiness on top.

I was called into my appointment before finishing this post.

Is this turning into a journal?

It was not supposed to be a journal, or was it, and I didn’t realize that until now? As long as it is not just a diary, that should be fine.

It is like magic writing this. So far, each time I have written, I’ve immediately felt better.

I changed out of my pajamas and put on full clothes in case I have to go to the ER if things get bad.

I thought about leaving that as the last sentence of this note just in case I didn’t make it through the night or just gave up on this journal after this note. I guess this last paragraph is just as good but perhaps mildly less ominous.

Signing off, love

Deadman

I was, however, quite pleased this morning when I remembered Robin William’s name, which I do remember forgetting in the past.

That opener is specifically for the AI construct that will be eventually based on me just to give it some grounding on my pop-culture baseline.

Day 15428 started with a lot of fear. That's because day 15427 was pretty scary. I wrote that first post in the morning upon waking. The day went on to be pretty decent, though, relatively speaking, as I never felt as if I needed to be taken to the ER to stay alive. We were even able to go out for some Italian ice and walk a little over a mile in the south Georgia spring heat.

That all means that today is starting with much less fear. I have found that anytime I feel improvement in my health relative to the latest trend, my mood improves disproportionately for the better. That seems like a good thing to me.

A couple of notes on the notes from day 15428.

I'm not sure what this whole publication will look like as it grows or fades away, but I suspect the first day is probably on the mark. There will probably be a good mix of longer headier pieces that start with a narrative or point that may get lost or confused and shorter little posts capturing bits of the stream of thought of the day.

Here’s to another better day, love

Deadman

We have had concerns about our plans from the beginning, mostly centered around the fact that unbeknownst to us at the time, we selected an outdoor location in an actual rainforest, giving us 50/50 odds of a legitimate downpour.

Now I'm worried about two more things. Will I be alive then? And if so, will I be in a wheelchair or too frail to attend?

These are not things that would have crossed my mind a couple of months ago, obviously. Aside from the rain plan, the biggest concern has until now been the number, size, and cost of the dinosaurs involved.

I am a deadman. However, thankfully and obviously, only in the prognosticative sense at this time. This publication is part coping mechanism and part master plan/last-ditch effort to strive for a form of immortality.

The pace at which my body approaches physical death seems to have rapidly accelerated recently. This could undoubtedly be a ruse, one that was necessary to ignite this project. If it's not a ruse, the odds of completing this publication are low. We all have our fingers crossed for the ruse version, and unless we get the all-clear, my coping will be heavily wrapped up in this... whatever this is.

As for the striving for immortality bit, there are multiple ways to define immortality, and this publication is intended to give me a shot at least a couple of those.

I'm afraid continuous physical immortality seems to be out of the question at this time, so I am required to take solace in a different type of immortality, the propagation of ideas. What are we really, if not the sum of our ideas.

The written word has been the most prolific tool in humanity's immortality toolbox, at least in sheer usage and effect size for propagating ideas. It took the crown from the spoken word just as its friends, recorded audio and video, are anxious to do to it. For the written word to provide the thoughts of its author persistence through time, the thoughts have always had to be compelling enough for someone to want to reproduce them, possibly many times over. That is until now. With the autonomous digital archive and copy machine known as the internet, how compelling a set of words is is no longer that important, at least in terms of persistence. How fortunate I am to be around and in the position I am in, simultaneously with this technology. It provides great relief for the impotence felt when facing the desire for immortality.

If you can accept that my words are me, if only in a very low fidelity sense, me, I will at least achieve this most rudimentary form of immortality - that is, the persistence of my ideas - by putting them down here. If the words only live on as an arrangement of atoms that make up the bits on a hard drive or its future compliment, I will have accomplished leaving a long-lasting change on the fabric of the universe. Granted, if that's the maximum outcome, I don't think that would be very gratifying. But hey, that's something, right? (There’s a lot more nuance to the ideas I’m just glancing over here that I hope I will be digging into some other day.)

Gratification demands more than mere persistence in this context. Propagation is the key. While persistence works across time, propagation works across space. Together they combine to measurably affect the universe's evolution. As alluded to before, the propagation of ideas generally requires that the ideas be compelling enough to be consumed or spread. Traditionally this has required a viral-like spreading among the populace. While one can hope their ideas are interesting enough to go viral, as it were, I think technology may soon give us another way to increase the persistence-propagation change drastically through space-time without the need for virality. I’m speaking of AI, of course.

If I can get down a thorough collection of the ideas that capture my essence, I can either bank on them being compelling enough to spread through time via persistence and propagation, OR I can bank on them being compelling enough for a single AI construct to be created to embody those ideas. If we can get to real AGI before we destroy ourselves, I don’t see this scenario, which I have completely glossed over, being out of the question.

I bet you didn’t think this is where this would be going, did you, dear reader? I suspect surprising directions will be the general theme of this publication, that is, unless there are only a few entries ever posted, as that would be the most expected outcome.

Until next time or never again, love you,

Deadman

Subscribe now