Heyo Stupid O'Clock!

I really should be showering and then sleep. But instead, here we are again: the inaugural stupid o'clock post of August 2021.

I chanced upon the news that Qatar and Italy would be sharing the gold medal for high jump, and a small wave of happy emotions flowed through me for a bit, before the usual voicelessness takes over.

It's the same as the rain that I reported earlier---it came, it went, and the overall ambient temperature was still hot, though decreased by about 2°C.

These days, a difference of 2°C can be a matter of life and death, especially during the hottest parts of the day.

As Sundays go, it wasn't too shabby. Having curry chicken for dinner is always a good pick-me-up, calories notwithstanding. I dug more imaginary dirt as I was following some of my favourite VTubers' latest hijinks.

I also transcribed 乙女解剖, first in the original C♯-minor key, and then transposing it down to G-minor key (as sung by Okayu), before finally transposing that to fit a B♭ instrument like say a tenor/soprano saxophone, or even an F 大笛.

It's challenging for a saxophone---the range goes all the way to instrument high A, about the lower altissimo range, so the most useful candidate to play it would be the tenor saxophone as opposed to the soprano saxophone (hahahahaha... good luck with that).

In the case of the F 大笛, it ``just'' goes up to .6 using 筒音作2̣, (equivalent to :2 using 筒音作5̣), which is surprisingly playable.

I still need to shove in some rehearsal marks to make it easier to find the sections corresponding to stanzas, but other than that, it is mostly ``done''.

I do need to work on 21/06-29 though... the tune is still sitting in a sound file and not transcribed out to score form for actual composition. Maybe in lieu of passive entertainment (reading, watching YouTube videos), or passive ones involving the use of my still-screwy right thumb (controller-based games, mouse-based games), I can work on that instead.

Voicelessness. I wonder why that word came to mind as I write out this stupid o'clock entry. Could it be some kind of internal channelling of some sort, or is it just happenstance? Eh, I don't really know, and I'm not sure if I care enough to want to know.

I think that as I write here, I sound more and more incoherent.

Maybe there will be one day that I will stop updating this blog completely, maybe even deleting it. Maybe, just maybe.

Oh! I remembered something. Soma---this was the game that Ninomae Ina'nis was playing over the past three days. It's a game that explored what it meant to be ``alive'', and thoughts about consciousness.

If we accept that there exists a meta-entity representing the sum total of the information that represents who we are, then perhaps a successful isolation of this meta-entity, in whatever convenient space and encoding, will allow its transmission from one vessel to another, like how a computer program may have its binary code copied from one computer to a completely different one, or in a closer analogy, a virtual machine paused with memory dumped being copied wholesale to another one.

However, that successful transmission doesn't answer the meta-meta-question: which of the two (or more) copies will ``I'', the current conscious entity piloting this skeleton mecha in a meat armour exist in? Is it both, the ``source'' only, the ``destination'' only, or neither since any form of such information transmission requires a stop-the-world scenario, which basically means that the ``I'' that had been piloting the skeleton mecha in a meat armour has effectively died.

No, sleeping and waking up doesn't count, because the mind (widely accepted as where consciousness sits) isn't completely stopped the way a virtual machine's entire state is static on pausing with a memory dump. One may not be consciously aware of things while asleep, but one's mind still has some level of continuity from one moment to the next. Subconscious mind changes are still changes, and there is no one that can definitively claim that only the conscious mind constitutes that meta-entity that is the sum total of all the information that represents who we are.

If the spirit is taken to be the name for this meta-entity, does it then mean that those of us who are saved by our Lord Jesus Christ will have our spirit safely copied out of the dead hardware into the other as yet not well understood hardware to ``run'' so that we (in spiritual form, the essence of who we are) still continue to exist, while those who are not yet saved are doomed to letting their spirit be ignored by Him after corporeal death?

I'm not drunk enough for these thoughts. I think I'll stop here for now and go get that shower and sleep that I talked about.

Till the next update.