This is what happens when I paint; I come back the next day intending to touch it up, completely repaint everything, gradually ruining it, then panic, feel the blood rising, continue to paint, irrevocably destroy it. So sad I ruined yesterday's work, which I was pleased with.

Finished the Mechanical Mind, which made me think I may be too dim-witted to follow the point of the sophisticated philosophical arguments it brings up. Later self-preserved by concluding that the problem was with the incoherence of the arguments, not my own intellectual limitations, which though wrong is much more acceptable to my image of myself as the next big thing.

Watched a documentary about Wittgenstein, which I identified with: hermit tendencies, profound love of Tolstoy, depression.

Have had to take that disgusting painting off the easel, good God.

No guarantees of progress in art. It would have been better if I hadn't even bothered today.

Regression to the mean. Not driving, not going out, not working, laying around, over-eating, reading pathologically, insufficient human contact.

I have eliminated almost all stressors from my life this week, and I'm really enjoying focusing on reading, researching, reflecting, painting. I'm not challenging my comfort zones, and it feels good.

Read What We Cannot Know, thought about the limitations of language. Can all knowledge be expressed in words? The voice in my head speaks English. Could it instead represent in a different mode? With maths? Am I trapped by language into thinking in a limiting way? The limitations of language are at the heart of many of the limits of knowledge.

Maths is a non-verbal way of representing information, but is it too a paradigm that will actually limit our access to knowledge? Is there another more powerful mode of thought?

You can 'follow the maths' to understand, on a certain level, quantum physics. But when you translate the maths to language, the understanding is lost. Can you really understand quantum physics through words, or do they limit what can be expressed?

Gödel's incompleteness theorems; there are always statements that are true but that cannot ever be proved from within the system. Yoo cannot prove, mathematically, that mathematics is free of contradictions.

Felt like I made some progress with painting today, and am glad I've overcome my inertia and have finally picked up my brushes and started to learn.

Felt knackered and achey today, so stayed in bed more or less. Read up on words and consciousness, talked to dad about it all. Is thinking possible without language? What is thought like before the invention of language?

Very interesting to learn about people profoundly deaf since birth learning language late in life.

Read Yuval Harari's latest book, Homo Deus. Interest in the narrating self, that we write our own story and believe it. That actually we are just biological algorithms and the stories we tell ourselves, such as the idea that we are individuals with free will, are comforting delusions.

Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented. Yuval Noah Harari - Homo Deus

Most people identify with their narrating self. When they say, ‘I,’ they mean the story in their head, not the stream of experiences they undergo. We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn’t matter that the plot is filled with lies and lacunas, and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death (and perhaps from even beyond the grave). This gives rise to the questionable liberal belief that I am an individual, and that I possess a consistent and clear inner voice, which provides meaning for the entire universe.Yuval Noah Harari - Homo Deus

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is the kind of book I would write. Speculative, sloppy, breathless, a syncretic amalgam of other books with only a modest addition of new thought. Very easy-reading, tolerably interesting, the humanities student in awe of science.

It's more or less an admixture of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, Steel; Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature; Niall Ferguson's Empire and The Ascent of Money; Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow; Dawkin's God Delusion; Kurzweil's Singularity; Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness
and Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Everyone who reads all these books is groping in the same direction, building up layers on a new understanding of who we are and what we should do about it. I get a sense of convergence, that a lot of people are simultaneously attending to the same questions and approaching similar conclusions, and that if one person doesn't think or write the next chapter, another infallibly will.

We always return to the twin monoliths of happiness and death and must decide how to turn towards one without falling in the shadow of the other.

Nothing in the comfortable lives of the urban middle class can approach the wild excitement and sheer joy experienced by a forager band on a successful mammoth hunt.Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens

So perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narrative of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful and find happiness in that conviction.Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens

We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens

Watched some art documentaries and felt emboldened to get out my paints and learn to paint. I will paint more from now on. I don't want a muddy mess, I want to learn and inprove, and to do that I need to fail, repeatedly.

Looked at old photos, skimmed through my old audiobook library, realised how few things that I have read, seen and done I remember. Lately I've forgotten the names of Velazquez, Heironymous Bosch, forgotten that I went to Hungary, forgotten that I had in fact watched one of the art documentaries I saw today before. So much discarded, life is not an onward march up an ever-accumulating pile of knowledge and experiences, it's an uneven slip downwards towards an increasingly featureless landscape.

Quite looking forward to more mooching, loafing, slow living.

Reflecting on my interview experience and how the company infantalizes its employees with branding, toys, free snacks. A big caring crèche that you never need to leave or think beyond, the 'perks' of which are designed solely to increase your productivity to the company.

Enjoying Chomsky's assassination of the media, his dogged, exhausting case-study approach to expounding his theory of the propaganda model of media. Established power sets the terms of the debate, implicitly bounding what can be said and thought. If I were to design a modern state from scratch, I would ensure I had agents in the newspapers, Hollywood-equivalent, radio, who could influence the tenor of the messaging to the state's needs. The press can think itself is free, within the confines of permissable thought.

I'm slowly understanding just how much real-world power word-choice has. You can nudge, circumscribe and misdirect without conscious detection, by carefully choosing what you say, when. You can trigger a network of associated concepts in your audience's minds that they cannot help but activate when you use particular words, the bounds of the word's related signification spilling over into the interpretation of the rest of your argument. You can carefully control this pollution, and light up an interconnected series of unbidden nuances just by planting a poweful word in a particular place. Spin, propaganda, marketing; the moulding of new reality.

Nightmare-filled night, busy day hopping around London and back to Cambridge then Suffolk. Bewildered by the incomprehensible lifestyles glimpsed in London, with wealth untold. Potentially facing the choice of sacrificing my time and remaining piece of mind to play catch-up to unobtainable and almost certainly undesirable material comfort, but at immense cost of time and space for independent thought. The great homogenising miasma of capitalist enterprise is billowing around me and I don't know whether to offer myself up to it or to continue running.

By popular demand I drew something other than myself tonight, which was a blessed relief as I'm thoroughly haggard.

Tottered through five hours of interviews and tests today. Cannot imagine finding a day job (serfdom) as meaningful as everyone I spoke to claimed they found their work. Can you not see that you are bleeding your life away to line someone else's purse? Can you really not imagine something more meaningful, and thus see your job as a terrible opportunity cost? Terrifying that I may have to return to this world of small-vision, driven, credulous drones. How easy to harness them to an office with free food and snacks and a bar! How easy to whip them up into cultish devotion by preying on their need for meaning, and telling them what they do matters! When actually it is a business, designed to extract as much money as possible from everything it touches. Offer me enough compensation and this bad taste may fade enough to be palatable.

Blank low-grade hotel room.

An interstitial day, waiting for the interview tomorrow.

Always over-complicate my responses, equivocate. Don't want to be pinned down - don't like how Chomsky quotes adversaries and says 'X maintains', in the present tense, excluding the possibility that their stance has changed. I don't want people to say 'Sam maintains', I want it to be known that I only maintain that which I believe to be maximally expeditious, and that changes from moment to moment.

But belief can also be inferred from behaviour. Mostly my behaviour is similarly avoidant and non-commital. How do we find out what we believe? By telling ourselves? By observing our own behaviour? By being told? All of the above and more, no doubt.

Lopsided, malproportioned sloppy drawing, but not sufficiently bothered to self-censor and do a better attempt today. Here it is; bad work.