The omnipotence of copy-paste

I recorded an impromptu, long voice message on a street that felt of significance to me, and recorded with very, very low quality. Link to SoundCloud.

I transcribed it as I could underneath.

Hmmmm, copy-paste.

I feel I've been under the illusion of copy-paste for decades in my life.

In general, my life has been spent interacting with computers. I have been playing video games, walking through adventures in video games that I guided myself throughout, expressed my choices into, computers, stories within computers that I followed, and I tried to solve, and I traversed one time and another time and another time, because it was entertaining, and it showed me new things, and I was happy to PLAY with them! To feel the success that... to feel the success of what I achieve, ... and I moved from one goal to another to another... and I enjoyed it. And I played video games, and then I began to learn programming, and I learned then how computers are so... predictable. They're designed to be reliable. They're designed to, for its process to be repeatable. Over and over and over again, to be absolutely reliable, as much as humans could engineer. And, so... I grew up with this... unspoken knowledge ingrained in me that... that life is repeatable.

That is... well, something I feel I learned, that I believed. That life is repeatable. Because I experienced it in the world of computers.

And... *sometimes in these games there were times where I had a choice to do one of several things, and I wanted to try them all. But when I tried one option I couldn't try another without starting the game over again from the very beginning. So I began saving the game, and I would be able to save the game, F5. And give it a name, and say "oh, F5, I guess I am in the kitchen". And I knew that I would be coming upon a dangerous situation soon, or that I had several choices, so I'd save the game so I could, so I could explore them all. And that was my strategy, I realized "oh, I'm at a crossroads right now, I can take one of many choices, but I don't, I don't have *to just choose one of them*, I wanted to try them all. So I saved the game, and then I *took my choice, and explored, then if something bad happened, then* I would just restore, and come back to the saved game, and I was exactly in the same place, exactly, no change. Nothing different. The state of the game was *identical* to before. And so it seemed to me that... I think I believed, I learned that life is repeatable. And each moment is... saveable. I can *keep upon* this moment, when it had multiple choices, and then I try all of them. I just need to... somehow bring some control.

And so, I continued playing games, other types of video games, adventure games, strategy games, role-playing games, shooter games. And *.........*. The game was repeatable. It was, it was a state machine. And I was the... director of the state machine. No, the explorer, the explorer of this state machine, as I didn't so much guide it, as I explored it.

5:37

And the way I see it, I believe I spent a *large* amount of my energy in life into computers. Into the world of computers. Into playing computer games, into learning how to program. A lot of my passion went into "oh, I want to program! I want to make things that make things! I want to make things that are useful and that work by themselves, and tools that just... provide some kind of utility! Either to myself or to others, and to... sometimes to *****. Just, hmmm. I think **. I felt a strong affinity to computers. To computer games, to computer programming, to **** about computers. And then I studied **, and I realized "oh, that's helpful for this work", and then I realized people had to somehow... physically manifest the concept of logic and reliable logic into the physical world, which is *respectively somewhat unreliable *****. And then, I got to grow up, and my family brought me to study, Computer Science, and then I went to work, and then the *value* that I obtained at work was through the value of my, these predictable things I made, and which I simulated and ran **, iterated over, over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and tens, dozens, hundreds of time sometimes for a single project. I had been working in the framework of repeatability for decades. Because computers, even as I grew up, the expression that computers themselves could have, their capabilities, grew up with them. They grew up in how faithful the sound recognition and sound expression could be in computers. And it grew in how faithful displays could be. Color displays, they went from the CGA, to EGA, to VGA, to Super VGA, to... there's an XGA somewhere? And then, they began measuring, no longer by VGA, not by these acronyms, but by numbers. OK, how many pixels do we have? And oh, we have 720p, and then oh 1080p, and then 4k, 8k, 16k, which I've seen sometimes in specifications. And... I feel that just, this, feeling of repeatability just grew into me, and I believed that the world is repeatable. Because I could satisfy a lot about my expectations of life, what I knew about life, through computers. I could see whatever landscape I wanted on the computer. Before the internet perhaps not so much, but I could see the *main* of it, and then the internet came along and I had access to BILLIONS of images! Billions of images! That are accessible to my fingers. I think about something, I type something, I type it into my computer, or device, and I got just what I wanted. Oh, I wonder what the ** whatever ** looks like, and I type it in. Oh, there it is. Oh, I wonder what Bach's music is like. And I just find it, and then I say "oh ok, that's it! That's it. Yup". But I KNEW ingrained in me that, within computers, within the world of computers, everything is repeatable. Everything is *precisely* repeatable. Not a BIT of information when running reliable programs. Which is, the preferred way to do that, when we want things to be predictable, to be reliable. We run them because we expect to get some utility from them. And utility tends to be predictable. ** predictable. Oh well, at least entertaining.

11:26

Umm, but anyways, I feel like **, I feel I got ingrained into me that life is repeatable because, I was viewing life *through* computers for such a long time. And then, and I knew, I learned, I experienced that the state of computers is predictable, it's repeatable, again and again and again. We can make it do EXACTLY what we want! Minus, hopefully, negligible lower layer stuff. But what the user sees, should be exactly the same. Predictable, predictable, predictable, repeatable, repeatable, repeatable. So long.

12:30

And, and then today, I went to see a concert this morning, a chamber orchestra of Moldova played in Bucharest, and I attended, **. And, as I paid attention to different artists performing - the violins, the cellists, the director, the soloist - all their expressions, all their, their, their particular gestures, their particular nuances of who they were - how much emotion they showed in their face or, how much their body vibrated when their fingers vibrated on the strings, or whether the strings' bow would break off. I mean, it was the ***, not the first one. Or the unexpectance of... heh, expectation is also **... the unexpectance of a piano, that I didn't realize. Or the off-timings sometimes that artists had, and I could feel that there was a *little* off-timing in, and the director would adjust it somehow to bring it all to, back to alignment. And I was realizing... this moment is unique. It's unrepeatable. Absolutely unrepeatable. There is no way that... it's simply *is* unrepeatable. It's... there's no... ** in a ** repeatable. When one simply realizes or appreciates the VAST, infinite richness of flow, of physical flow. I mean, through computers, I've seen music as... MP3s. And... what's that? Napster. In the Napster days, *****. It just struck me how... curtailed of a version of life I was seeing through computers. Or, I think there's been times when I hear, for example, music through computers. It may be the *highest* fidelity, it may be the *highest* precision of sound recording, and even ******* these details of what's happening. And yet that moment, the place where I was sitting, the emotions that I was feeling, the context that I was in that exact moment, the exact day, the exact way that my body felt. The exact way my body reacted to all these emotions, my *own* flow.

16:50

So myself, AND associated with the music I was listening to. It was simply unique, it was un-repeatable. Absolutely unrepeatable. And that's when it struck me - I think I've been believing all of my life, in my... in the omnipotence of copy-paste. I think that's it. The omnipotence of copy-paste. Because, ummm, in computer world, in computer world, programming world, the world of people... yes, in the world of computers... what was I saying? Hmm.

18:09

Ah yes! Because in the world of computers, copy-paste is, is this, it seems to encode the, the... the core values of computation. Repeatability. *** encodability. And for so long, I believed that life is encodable, and life is repeatable. Like, I can copy-paste anything with computers. I can copy *some text, I write sentences, I press Ctrl-A, select all, Ctrl-C, then Ctrl-V, and then, oh! I have two copies of the text! Easy. Oh, and I can do that with, **** ah! two copies! It's the same thing, it's repeatable. Ah, ok. So, I can also copy a book, or... *, or a video! An entire movie, just oh, copy-paste. And I have two. Two of the exact same thing. Even an image, an entire computer image, in any format, ISO or DMG. The entire state of an entire computer, which, when one uses a computer, is like one's entire world. Like, oh the world is here. And if, somehow I want to have two versions because I, hesitate about the choice of ***, so I want to have two versions to... settle things up. Ok! So, copy, paste! I have two images! It can take long, it can take up a lot of space, but, it's repeatable! It's this capability that I've believed so long. That Life. Is. Repeatable.

20:25

**, I found **, I would say, undoubtful evidence that it is not! It is not! repeatable. Life is not repeatable. And it's not that I didn't KNOW yet that the physical world is analog, ****, is, is, is, not repeatable, like, I knew that! I know that. Since *** I know that things that are repeatable, I think I believed *** on YouTube to keep track of! I think that ************. At all. And, hmm. 

22:21

And I think the belief leads into is ****. Why would I want to attend this concert in person? I don't. I just want to hear the music. I've heard the music, ah, it's amazing. And then, **** all the details about ****, whether *** in the face, or behind it, it's not ***! Because I did not see the utility of it, I did not see the value of it. And then, this morning, I noticed a multitude of... **** details. Objects, things, patterns, flows, the attention and the focus of the different artists. And if I *** a reduction to this *****, it's just out of so many details, I noticed how much they affected me! I noticed how much stuff, how they had an impact on me! They... they have an effect on me, and they have unique effects on me! I could say **** are, are new. Are new. They're not very new. They're not like "oh my god! That super **** I saw her be nervous, or I saw the conductor ****, or I saw the angle of the string, playing the string like that, and THAT'S the best. No, it wasn't any particular thing. It was just realizing the things I thought were repeatable are not. They are not. They are... an integral part of life! And if I have noticed them before, it doesn't mean they're not there. I realized how, only copy-pasteable *** experience is. And so it induced in me this... extrapolation in me, that... that the *****. And like they're not. Because they also *** a part. And that's a part of me that I have not explored. This... *** these details, they are, hehe. What I can say is ***** we have no way of encoding it into computers right now. Because it's... in many ways, this *** are subtler, the experience is subjective. When I see a video, I'm seeing the camera's experience. I'm seeing *** through the camera. It's a *** view. There are emotions in that space that I **** feel it!

26:44

So it strikes me that the belief of the omnipotence of copy-paste is cracking within me.

27:14

I know now that there are details in the world that I haven't allowed in. That I have been ***. So... ***. 

27:53

The effect is... some sadness. Of knowing that I have despised things that are valuable. That brings me a lot of sadness, including some sadness that I've been ****.

*** provided important ****. **** even, the premise of the sadness, was, uh... ****** to stay.

So I know now that all my experiences so far are **** realized this.

And if I spent 30 years believing in the omnipotence of copy-paste, and my experience and my belief, or disbelief, have guided me to realize the NON-omnipotence of copy-paste, then ummm, then *****. ****.

****. I feel there is something lost, ****ly.

*****Violin sounds******

*** biased.

I think that's it. Copy-paste. I used to believe in its omnipotence, and its capacity to encompass the world. Now I realize experience... what I thought were negligible details, *** effectively, are ways that I find in me, valuable.

32:18

**dog barking**

*** are things to do about in life. uhhh, expanding. Expanding the mind.... *** expanded. ****** possible. *******. **********.

I realized **** copy-paste this morning.

I just **** some excitement! to feel how life continues to ****. Now that this... *****.