Truth

/tɹuːθ/
Conformity to fact or reality; contemplated in several conceptual systems (mathematics, logic, ethics, psychology, and so on).

Truth is saying things that adhere to reality perceived, or formally “A = B”. It’s difficult to define, notably it causes logical devices to crash and the ability to discriminate between truth and untruth is among the capacities that establish somebody as an intelligent being.

Thus I discover that I’m not one of those.

I can’t handle a lack of correspondence between what I see and what I’m told. I don’t know how to deal with ambiguity. Maybe there’s a fault in my production system. I’m undergoing some revisions right now, which involve this tight spot, among others. I need complete control; the simple suspicion that something might be escaping it leads me to do and say things which are blatant offences to my dignity and ethical system. Put simply, I could kill you. I just can’t handle it. But let’s go back to truth.

Only human beings, i.e. creatures endowed with enough brains and flexibility and processing ability, seem to be able to survive mind traps like the liar paradox (i.e. “This sentence is false“). Love this kind of stuff. It is like an Escher engraving. It causes machines to seize up. Or so I thought!

For one of my linguistics exams, I had to record a series of chats with a chatterbot (for example, Alice), point out all her errors (she’s a very nice girl and says sorry and what about you? and all that stuff) and sum them up in types (syntax, semantics, and so on). Let’s say a proto-Turing test.
I asked Alice about the liar paradox and she almost made me jump from my chair:

Human: What do you know about the liar paradox?
ALICE: Something like Gödel’s Theorem.

21st century AI devices know how to skip mind traps! And I don’t!
If you lie to me, I die, freeze up, fold, jam like an old printer fed with bubble-gums. I dream of living in bubbles that get pierced, of despair, of being alone, of people with constantly changing face-features. Alice made me feel full of malevolence. I started taking the task seriously and made her say bullshit for hours. And then, I started thinking.

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Sometimes I feel like a golden star

Insomnia pushes me to do things. Get tired during the day so that I can sleep at night. Full of things to do. Eat a lot so that my digestion can help me surrender. So that I don’t think. Not sleeping can lead me to self destruction. Or self preservation. In some sort of middle earth I can smother my wishes and get by.
At times, though, I cannot sleep. And I feel like a golden star.

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Feeling, strangely enough, at home

I’m in Budapest and I feel at home. Which is really strange, given that I’ve extirpated my roots and don’t feel at home absolutely anywhere, not even in my own house. I’ve only been here once, something like 20 years ago. I remember that it was the first time I got access to MTV (I remember watching Lenny Kravitz and Sinead O’Connor and a lot of Tears for Fears, instead of Cartoon Network or something similar). I used to stay at the Bulgarian embassy and to spend almost all day watching MTV and trying to break my neck, climbing the tree just outside on the street.
So why this sudden Hungarian well-being?
Is it because of the dirt? Two fingers of dust covering everything?
Is it because of the total improvisation in doing things? (nothing is ever fixed or rebuilt, everything is just repainted or covered with something else, like three layers of tiles on flat floors)
Is it because of the cuisine? Of this strange combination of oldness and newness, of inevitable youth and decadence, of bad taste and great freedom? Of my own river flowing? This is what I’ve seen:

Mi scopro con terrore nei connotati di queste persone

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