Here’s the tail-end of our trip through the US.
I thought we’d sorted it with the last post, but there was this bit left. It’s strange how easy it is to forget huge swaths of time. Yeah, our memories are fallible, but the memories are still there. It’s like our relationship with the information is estranged or something. I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that our minds are our own in this kind of context. We don’t really have everything we know or have experienced at our fingertips and even the things we DO “have” (in the sense that they ARE accessible to us) are limited by whatever process makes them accessible (passively or actively). I mean, we can’t run meaningful ‘searches’ for data in our brains. Try remembering where you left your keys or whatever; for fuck’s sake, we have to go through the day step by step, spoon-feeding our brain the cues to search itself. I’d much prefer a search index-able brain; like, being able to run a query for “keys,” “November, 11th, 2024” and “between 8am and 2pm” or whatever. I’d even more prefer if that sort of thing happened automatically without it being willed. But then, that’d be a bit like an algorithm recommending particular memories and thoughts, which would shape who we were a lot, I think. In the same way that fucking Spotify shapes our music taste or Amazon shapes what we want and buy. Anyone with, say, cybernetic enhancements, would be necessarily poisoned by whatever software was running them…. that’d be a neat sci-fi story. About someone’s cybernetic software only recalling things which made their life satisfying and happy, but paradoxically making the person very unhappy or something. However, I could be Vampire Paradoxing this- maybe it’d be legitimately way better. The brain trust behind Fox News needs to get working on this technology, chop-chop!
Anyway, the Motel sign photos are super cool (in my opinion, obvs). Petrified Forest is (and was while we were there) really beautiful (even if deserty). Really great trip, fun drive, excellent company. If you have any questions, please let me know via a comment. Take it easy!
That’s a blog!