Yeah, that's frustrating

For inexplicable reasons, the wiki site no longer allows me to sort the page statistics page by hit count. Which makes reviewing the stats a lot less convenient. Still, I managed to notice that 37 people have read a page I haven't even finished writing yet (on the Conjecture of Meaning.)

But I'm done with checking those stats anyway. It's obvious I've been completely misinterpreting them to begin with. Those are all random google hits, brought in from search engines on any article with hot button terms on it, like, duh, evolution and God in the same page. There is not a single one of them that was anything but ten thousand percent dismissive of each and every word I've written.

Even the blog hits are random. There is literally nobody paying any attention at all to my philosophy. Not even the tiny crowd of folks who have themselves experienced a Jellybean Mystery. I'm fascinated by it, and I find it disconcerting that nobody else is. As far as I know, there hasn't been a single repeat visitor to either site since at least ten months ago.

But, hey, it's a religion, and that's what it's all about. Come hell or high water, I'll know what it means, and I look forward to experiencing it again, over and over, until the day I die. If I didn't have the facts and vocabulary of score and centuries and thousands of years of scientific advancement to inform my language, it is absolutely certain I would be forced to resort to calling it God that drives me. If you believe in God, you should believe that It sent me here with a message for you, personally.

The message is, It does not exist.

There is no God. Except for God, because you need a word for it. It doesn't exist, and neither does free will. You aren't a ghost inhabiting a body, you are that body, and when it dies you end. Until then, every choice your brain makes is something you find out about a few dozen milliseconds after it happened, and there isn't anything that can change it. Even the volitional desire to change it is something you experience because it already happened; our conscious awareness definitively does not precede, but follows from, the neurological mechanisms which constitute, by any measure or definition, the selection of our actions. We have no free will. What we have is self-determination.

Because the thing that drives the whole monkey is not the volition or the will or something abstract. Yes, our brains are information processing engines, but the method of information processing isn't mathematical. Our self-determination is the ability to describe, not control, what is going on inside our heads, or outside it, for that matter. So what drives me and all people and all society is nothing but language. We invent ourselves through our description of ourselves, but only so far as intelect is concerned. We're also all fully functioning apes.

So words have meaning, because they are all that matters. A person is as good as their word, so to speak. Apart from that, we're all just silly chimps.

Anyway, I'm still going to update the Conjecture of Meaning page, because it is important, because I know the Philosophy Of Reason, the only true religion, is important. Even if there is nobody except random surfers ever seeing it, the Internet is forever. Someday, hopefully someday soon, there actually will be someone besides me trying to practice in the New Church of Hope. It would just be so super-awesome if it happened before I die, so I'm still around to try to explain it.

Just in case the key is tempting fate, I'll give away the secret here. The reason POR and jellybeans makes me happy is because it proves how people work without free will. Nobody actually calculates their guess, they just guess. I know most people think they do, it's what they've been taught, but even the few who write down their calculations on the slip, I know, aren't actually mathematically determining their guess, as much as they try to convince themselves they are. Abandoning math and free will doesn't drive you insane or put you in the arms of God, it just leaves you with opportunities for happiness and joy. The jellybeans are proof that uncontrolled things work out even more reliably that the ones we try to plan. I just don't think you can be as much of a pessimist, certain we are all nothing but insane primates, when those damned guesses always average out to better than the best individual guess. It neither invalidates our individuality nor discounts our group nature.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.