Observations
Emerging from the underground I'm greeted with the dirty neon lights of a massive complex. The place is a bizarre mess of expensive, syntactically luxurious establishments scattered over one of the dirtiest, ugliest urban landscapes in the city. Narrow streets are clogged with patrons, bums and G-wagons. I take a couple of turns and end up if front of an array of crowded donner places. Big Mama, my favorite, is one of the more civilized. Here I order a beef roll and a can of coke and go outside. Imagining the word coke in my head I immediately form a sentence, something like "Damn I wish I had some different kinda coke on me now". It never leaves my mind, runs in the background in a while(1) loop. I don't really do coke casually, too luxurious for me. In my life it exists as an abstract idea, some sort of a "thing in itself". An Abner Jay song, "cocaine, cocaine it's running 'round my heart and it's running, running 'round my brain". And it does! Even when semantically it is not present in my blood, it is simulated somewhere in my mind, in my personal Weights and Measures office, arranged in two unoriginal lines on the surface of a pocket mirror, enclosed within a spotless glass dome accompanied by a fat stack of cash and a couple of photos of some hot chick with fake tits striking naughty poses. The engraving on the attached bronze plaque states "One unit of feelin' good". Quite unique, right? Look I know it's basic as fuck but that's why it's so good. The most direct way of squeezing feelin' good juice from the greedy glands that won't just pump it non-stop in your system unless you play their dumb motivational salience game which is: a)boring and b)stupid and even if you are that kinda person(really rational and well-adjusted) it's hard to play it properly because it was designed without all this civilization thing in mind. But considering the nature of this game you can't really avoid playing it unless you are dead and since being dead means being a loser(or rather not being, but still a L) I'll have to quote another song and state that success is the only option, failure is not. So you better stop thinking and start playing. Of course the right thing to do would be to limit your stimulations, eat normal food, work out, have meaningful relationships with people, avoid staring at all kinds of screens so your attention span won't get sandblasted by ones and zeroes of an endless data stream jetting from society's informational exhaust pipe until you can't concentrate on something for more than a minute. But again, that is L.A.M.E. as fuck, this way you just inhibit your need for feelin' good juice and that is something losers do. When a winner wants something he goes and gets it, he doesn't convince himself that he doesn't actually need that particular things he wants so he can cope with not having it, fuck that shit makes me angry even thinking about it. And you won't really feel all that good, you are not really supposed to, it's not vital. Of course you can and you do feel good sometimes but your only somewhat guaranteed right is to feel okay. So the only way to be a winner is to pick your poison and indulge in it until your synapses are so numb you won't feel shit even if you try fingerfucking them through your nose. So yeah, coke is it. An idea manifesting itself in various stimulants, mostly amps for me. But now I'm sober, drinking cola and munching on a beef roll. The last time I did speed was more than a week ago. Then I've been taking modafinil for a couple of days. Not quite the same but at least makes me feel I'm moving in the right direction. Some messed up directions, huh. But could you say they are wrong? Nothing really is. You just gotta be the guy with a gun.
Each time a decision is to be made available options are all on a specter between "Good now, bad later" and "bad now, good later", each one of them sort of correlating with a phase offset of a sine wave swinging between ups and downs. The latter option is generally seen as the "right" one. Why? It's more sustainable in the long term, more optimal as an evolutionary strategy and the winner creates the rules. The "bad now" option is more desirable in this sense because choosing to start at the bottom still means you are in control making this solution more robust and less likely to cause emergencies. This leads to survival, victory from evolutionary POV.
Loophole: You personally, as an individual organism, don't have to maximize your lifetime if you don't want to. Therefore abuse of "good now" option becomes possible.
Patch in theory: Modify decision making algorithm of an agent to exclude the possibility of the "later" state being overridden while the "now" state is still active.
Patch in practice: Religions etc. basically invention of the "afterlife". Later ideologies. Idea of "greater good". All syntactic, but so is our consciousness-program by definition.
Echoes of our primordial nature, something lying so low it's practically our firmware, same for every specimen, developed with the good of the species in mind. High level software changes with time, becomes more complicated, becomes self aware at some point, gains it's own agenda. Agenda that's not necessarily same with the one that the creator of our firmware, evolution, had, so to say. There cannot be opposing agendas in one system, so the firmware reaches through all the levels of program that support the higher intelligence, it's signal changing it's form as it is passed from an interface to an interface between programs that define what being a human is. Interpretation becoming more liberal with each layer, potential forms the message can take multiplying. Firmware request always have higher priority, so when the original message is ready to be processed by decision making unit it's coated in as many layers of additional data as needed. But there is only a limited amount of layers message can pass until it's meaning becomes too dissipated among all the possible interpretations. At some point high level software gains higher priority. Create enough layers of programming and you can override the firmware. That's the theory behind propaganda, conditioning and all the other MKUltra-esque hacks.
"...Yeah this idea was around ever since Plato's cave and all that stuff..." - I talk while arranging powder composed of speed, ketamine and mdma into fat lines on the screen of my phone. We talk about the whole Matrix thing, fake nature of reality or something along those lines. The line on the right is the one i suck up my nose. It's as big as the one i did 15 minutes ago. That one I didn't feel at all so i went for the second one. Classic mistake, huh. This time i wouldn't necessarily say this decision was wrong though.
10 minutes later I'm in a bathroom stall again, cutting lines, though now I don't plan on doing any of them. I notice glitches in my hearing. Digital kind of distortion, repeating bits of music, phrases, sounds. Soon there is nothing left but fading lines of glitched bits. H-E-E-e-e-e-e A-a-a-a-a B-B-B-b-b-R-R-R-r-r. Vision goes the same way. I see a single vertical line, a feature of interior, repeated all over my FOV.
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I turn my head around and realize I still got the bag with all my drugs in my hand. It morph into something hard, spiky. At this point all I see is an image generated by an AI in real-time. Same features. I cant put drugs in my pocket, so i just clench my fist and we exit the stall. That's where i lose it. Everything is just a mess of geometry, shifting masses of soft, compressed air pushing me around. I glide inside this jelly until i land on a bench. Right fist still clenched around a plastic bag with smaller plastic bags inside. 20 minutes later I was already okay.