Introduction

31st March 2011

I have never read a blog before, let alone written one. Why then, you ask, should I read this one? Without wishing to alienate anyone, I cannot answer that, as each person will read, or not, for their own reasons. The more pressing question is therefore why I have chosen to write and what it will be regarding.

I am a philomath, a person who loves to learn and understand anything and everything. When I read a book I will select non-fictional works on economics, philosophy or science as they provide greater enjoyment to me than stories do. I also have an unusual perspective on things which is in part due to my upbringing but also due to the way my brain works. I have aspergers syndrome which is a form of autism, but they are just words to arbitrarily group people. I was never brought up as different or special, my mother only started dropping hints as to her suspicions once I had left home, leaving me to learn about it for myself.

Asperger's and autism are regarded as spectrum disorders, which means the extent to which they effect people is different. I tend towards the lower end and suffer no significant issues with day to day life, passing as "normal" most of the time. As such I have found my "disorder" to be far more of a gift than a hindrance. Certainly I have more difficulty doing some quite simple things when compared to others but in other areas I make up for this. Having strengths and weaknesses is good if you are aware of them as it allows you to play to the strengths while allowing for your weaknesses.

One of my obvious weaknesses is a lack of empathy. I really struggled to gauge or understand how others would perceive a situation intuitively as most people seem to be able to. Although in early life this made social situations more awkward, it did encourage me to study how people work, their choices and actions and so forth. Knowing I lacked empathy, a very important social tool, I unintentionally became somewhat of a psychologist. This would not have happened had I been able to intuit such situations, but instead I needed to really think about why people act like they do. I now find I am often able to tell people why they have done something even when they cannot themselves. They intuitively do something, yet for me appreciate why I have to understand the logical motives behind their actions. This approach I have is part of the reason my perspective is different to most, but it is not the complete storey.

As far as anyone can prove, we only get one shot at life. This is grossly unfair in many respects as when you think back at your first go at almost anything else, you generally make a complete mess of the situation. Life is a compilation of many situations where you simply get better at stuff the more experience you have gained. It is nearly impossible to teach someone a lesson, they need to learn it for themselves. Despite this fact, one of the main reasons I have for these writings is that I feel having an honest account of another persons perspective and experiences would be useful. Kind of like a guide book for life without being presumptuous enough to assume anywhere near close to the required amount of knowledge to offer a comprehensive guide!

This is however not the only reason for these writings, any task which achieves multiple goals is all the more worth doing. There are three topics which stand above all others in their allure to my learning  and desire to understand and these are;

1.  Utopia, a design for society which critiques things we presently do that are detrimental and ways of solving these issues that are practicable.

2. Consciousness, what is it, how does it work and what would that all mean?

3. Grand unifying theory, some things in the universe don't make logical sense, should they? If they should then can we suggest any models that explain what we know in a logical manner?

Each of these is a tremendously broad topic that has been studied by many great minds. I have ideas on each of these topics, some optimistic, some bogus but all very difficult to express and explain to others. I find by trying to express ideas in the written form my own understanding of things becomes more structured, the mental image I have of the thing becomes better defined and robust. I also personally find that getting the correct meaning from a sentence requires you have a degree of understanding of the person which that sentence was written/spoken by. As such I will be writing about ideas that relate to these three topics while also justifying my point of view both logically but also based on my life experiences.

One day I would like to write a book on these topics but to do that I need clarity on how to present the ideas, this not being my strongest point it seems very sensible to put those ideas out there in this format, giving me practice at expressing my ideas and also allowing others to provide invaluable feedback. It is an odd blend of content and also an ambitious one, if people do read this then I suspect certain aspects will be more or less interesting to some that others. I will try, for that  reason, to be clear with headings and so forth allowing people to pick things that appeal to them. I will also try to tailor what I do in future based on any feedback that I get.