Killian's Brain Dump Purpose and Death - 06.02.2022 It's so strange how we are all living our lives trying to ignore or distract us from the fact that we will all, one day, sooner or later die. One part of it scares me to shits, but the other one kind of fascinates me at the same time. We know so little about it, yet it is the most certain thing, or is it? Who knows? Some people have persuaded themselves to believe that they do in fact know, but do you convince others of it? The purpose of this brain dump is for me to create what Ernest Becker describes as an immortality project. In the book he wrote "Denial of Death", which he wrote on his death bed as he was dying from colon cancer (which luckily I checked through my DNA sequence on 23andme, I do not dispose of the two genes called MUTYH-Associated Polyposis that would have given me a high probability of contracting, especially for norther european men). His theory is that everything we humans do, whether we build bridges, or invent iPhones or what not that brings humanity one step further, is to promote our conceptual selves. Because our physical selves, our bodies that sleep, eat, poop, snore and all that, will eventually die, we try to compensate by immortalizing conceptual selves. So people build statues of themselves in rock, because rock stays the same shape for an awfully long time, which now makes me wonder; it that why we build tombstones out of rocks? That would make sense,, anyways.. What I would like my thumb stone to be, or my immortality project, is essentially a digital avatar of me. Meaning, what I will eventually do is to record my appearance, voice and facial expressions in front of a camera reading a specific script made by https://synthesia.io/. This costs about 1000 dollars, but then once this has been made, you can eventually create an API so that this avatar can respond as me to questions that it is asked. So my thinking is that if I would like this avatar to be as similar to me as possible, it will eventually need a lot of my thoughts, experiences as possible. I will need as much data as humanly possible to create some form of a neural network, so that the avatar resembles me as much as possible. That will be my "statue", or tombstone or whatever you want to call it. This is the first day of creating my immortality project. A completely unfiltered, unnarrated and raw brain dump, so that I will be able to copy myself to the highest extent, and create something similar to as if you were to go on a video conferencing call with me. I think this sounds a bit weird to people these days, but I'm pretty certain there will be an entire industry dedicated to this. Preserving people's sense of self. Their immortality project. I wonder what people would be willing to pay actually to have something like this created of them. For me, I know that I'm willing to pay the 1000 USD required to make the avatar, then spend countless hours writing out my random thoughts, and probably the hosting costs associated with it. That actually brings in another issue then, will it cost me to host this avatar in perpetuity? I will need to create some kind of passive income stream that will eventually cover the hosting costs forever? Also, someone will potentially need to maintain the website, or avatar, or servers or whatever forever, which means either they get paid, or they do it because they genuinely think it's interesting, or that I did something interesting or useful enough outside of this immortality project to deem worthy of their time to maintain it. Or there will be a service, or a company doing it for people in mass. I guess there are probably countless of opportunities for maintainance, but I am curious to see if I can make a habit out of writing out these thoughts on a daily, or at least super regular basis. It's also important for me to really not have my thoughts filtered, to really be me. All the Death in one year - 07.02.2022 The year 2020 was a weird one for the World. We had a global pandemic starting which was completely new to everyone. It was even new to someone like my grandmother, that was almost 80 at the time. I asked her if she had ever experiences anything similar, and the answer was a very straight forward; no. I thought maybe there might have been some other deadly virus spreading in the world, but I guess the reach and interconnectivity of the world was nowhere close to where it was in 2020. After 2020, I think it might have temporarily decreased. In fact, I was in Bengalore, Zurich and San Francisco in January 2020, I used to travel all the time. Like so much, it was pretty insance, but now I'm getting off topic. The point of this specific page was about death. Before 2020, I had never been to a funeral. I have seen people die and dead people, but never seen the sorrow that comes with having all the loved ones present, realizing they will never see the person ever again. In 2020, I went to 3 funerals. Boom, three in one go. Or actually, technically it was only two funerals, and the third one was an assisted suicide. Which I was on vacation with my wife Victoria in Cyprus, my grandma called me up to announce that she had decided to end her life. Similar to what my grandfather did a few years earlier. So two weeks later, I found myself in her apartment, with my father present, her two neighbors, which she became very close to in the years after my grandfather passed, her younger therapist which became her friend as well and her cleaning lady Norma from Bolivia. At this point I already knew the procedure, and I also reqognized the lady from the NGO that supports people at the end of their lives. In Switzerland, where she lived, and where I live, assisted suicide is legal. You need to go through a whole medical process, and it also helps if you've been a member of their organization. I believe in people's freedom to choose over their own lives and bodies, so I think this is a good thing, but I can tell you it seems quite absurd when you are there in person. So I sat there in the other lounge chair next to her. We were all in the living room, facing a large window looking down across a large park with the view of lake Geneva. She was previously asked if she wanted to be in her bed like her husband had been some years prior, but she was very sure that she wanted to sit in that chair, and have that view. So we sat down, and she had found a poem she liked, that her therapist read out loud. The poem was an attempt to be uplifting, mentioning that she didn't want anyone to cry for her. I believe that she chose this poem because during her husband's farewell, nobody cried. I was however a lot closer to my grandmother Mimi, and after the poem, the tragedy of the whole situation hit me, and I hulked out loud. It didn't last for long, because I think mentally I had known this would happen at some point, but I wanted her to understand that I loved her. When I did, I could feel that she understood that she was really loved by me, but the kind of fucked up thing was that she then seem to doubt her decision. She said that maybe she didn't have to do it, and in an odd way asked me if she should change her mind. The thing is, her body had been deteriorating for years. She was barely capable of leaving her apartment, cooking or taking care of herself, but most of all, she was lonely. I think loneliness is the most silent killer of them all. Of course it leads to depression, to stress, to overall negative feelings. I had suggested that she could move from Geneva to Zurich to be closer to me, but she had refused. I understand though, she had been living in that apartment for decades, changing everything in the last years of your life could probably be scarier than an inevitable death. Her son, or my father had neglected her for years, although he would literally pass her house on his daily commute to work. Her other son, my uncle lives between Bangkok and Sri Lanka, so a lot harder for him to come visit. So when I was crying and she asked me what she should do, I stopped and knew that if I said she should stop, that she would eventually suffer more physically and mentally, so I told her she should continue with her plan. One part of me feels awful, but another part of me believes it was the right thing to do, the inverse would have been an egoistic choice for me. I miss you Mimi! All the death in one year part 2 - 8.02.2022 The two other deaths I experienced that year were a lot more tragic than sitting next to my grandmother as she opened a vial of medically improved poison, drank it, fell asleep, then into a coma before her heart stopped. The odd thing about it was that my father felt so weird about seeing her face, that he felt the need to cover her face with the blanket she had on her. I found this behaviour rather strange from him, but hey, the whole situation was pretty weird if you ask anyone. After he and I had left the living room some time later, one of the other participants, I don't know who, had removed the blanket from her head. I thought it made it more humane in a way. And so when he tried to do it again, I said he should leave it, and he did. That felt nice. Anyway, let's explore the other tragedies. The one with Tobias, that had happened some months before my grandmother Michèle. Tobias was a childhood friend from Nyon in Switzerland. We would often go skiing together, and when I was around 14, we would often go to parties together and do things. He was closer to Nico, one of my closest friends, which I consider my brother. In fact, my father used to date his mother at some point, so we were indeed step brothers of sorts. We would share a room and all, and I've known him since I was pretty much a baby. Nico and Tobias were also childhood friends, since they were little kids. On the morning of the 9th of February, Nico called me. He sounded so weird, but also kind of normal. I only received one other call like this, and that was from my mother one time she had been in a car accident, and was a few millimeters from having broken her neck and died. I did some weird things that morning like tying my legs to the ceiling to do full extension sit ups, and I went for a canoe ride and went fishing at sunrise. I think I was in shock. I think I was in a similar shock when Nico called me. I don't remember him explicitly asking me to come to Gland, where he lives, but I know that for some reason I wasn't thinking about it. It only occured to me when Victoria said I should go, and later, Sara, Nico's girlfriend messaged me saying that Nico needed me. So I jumped on the train and came to see him. We spent a lot of time together, but he was under shock. He had very minor injuries in comparison to what I heard, and later witnessed at the funeral. Someone had driven the car and crashed, up in the Alps, and Nico had carried Tobias up to the road before Tobias was picked up by a helicopter and flown to the hospital, where he died that morning I got a call from Nico. The case is still ongoing, and Nico is getting in a better state, but a lot of people, many of them his friends have turned against him in a bitter way. I guess people want someone to blame, but I find it cruel and immature the way they are treating Nico. I went to the funeral with Nico, stood by his side the whole time. The weather was divine, next to the lake. The weird thing was that about 1 year after the funeral to be exact, Nico surfed waves one the lake right outside that building where the funeral was held. First of all, surfing waves on a lake is extremely rare, because its a lake. And secondly, Nico and Tobias would actually go to Portugal on surfing trips. It might be a coincidence. The other horrific funeral I went to was Céline's sister's funeral. I had only met her a couple of times before, but she was the mother of two, in a toxic marriage, and the story is that her shrink prescribed her two medications that shouldn't have been mixed, and so she died of this combo. Pretty sad, and there was a lot of crying involved, the two young children are the ones I feel the worst for. Secondly is Céline, who now has assumed some kind of motherly or feminine duty of sharing the family's values and savoir vivre with them. I think there might not be a better person in the world for that role. Céline showed me, and taught me to be a much better person intrinsically, I would maybe want her to be the godmother of my children one day. Balance - 9.02.2022 In the Bhagdhava Gita, they talk about Samsara. The circle of life, and of the death of the ego, which is roughly translated to Adman. One time at the early beginning of Covid-19, I had invited many friends to take LSD together. I think we were about eight people. During that night we would sit for what felt like hours quietly in a meditative state listening to songs I've never heard before from a French friend, Antonin. As I'm generally quite extreme in everything I do, I decided to take a lot. Like double of most people, and 4 times more than for those that were trying it for the first time. The first hours were good, with vivid colors, and hysterical laughter. I get cold and need a blanket and all the usual things that also happens when I eat mushrooms. But after a few hours into quietly meditating with my eyes closed, I had an elevated feeling that I could connect to something larger than me. In one way, I felt that we are all connected, part of one thing. Everyone is me, and I am everyone. This checks out if you look at it from a scientific point of view too. I mean evolutionary theory, we all stem from the same organisms, we break down, and eat the other organisms and it becomes us. But this was a lot deeper and showed me how our consciousness are connected. With my eyes closed, I was drawn deeper and deeper into something that in that specific narrative, was more true than anything I had ever experienced before. I saw samsara, or the circle of life. How there is no beginning and no end to anything. There is only infinity. Even in the world around us, the smallest things we know, start to look awfully similar to the largest things we know. Think about it. Atoms are essentially round objects that attract other round objects to spin around it. The more round objects with spinning things around it, the bigger the mass of atoms. The way I'm describing my thinking does not justify the thinking at the time, but the way we view planets, solar systems and galaxies to me seems awfully similar. We currently think that quarks are the smallest particles in the universe, but what happens when you divide a quark into two? What are quarks made of? In math there is absolutely no end to how much you can count on, we just decided to start from zero. Zero is the balance between minus and plus, which takes me to the other thing I saw in my trip. I saw that absolutely everything in the universe is related to each other and therefore balances itself out. This one is a lot harder to give an example as to what I mean, but lets try to go from small to high. If I lose an arm, my other arm will quickly become a lot stronger in order to compensate for the lost other arm. When I lived in india, we used to have a snake problem, so we would remove a lot of snakes from the dorms and bring them far away so they couldn't return. What happened next was that we started having a rodent problem, and so we eventually had to stop removing the snakes, because they would make sure that there was a balance in the rodent population. Btw, snakes don't want to hurt humans, same with wasps or sharks or any of these animals that people have some strange phobia against. If you are confident and non-violent towards any animal, they will be more scared of you. The only exception might be polar bears. When I lived on Svalbard, we always brought a rifle with us because polar bears really see us as food, and when there isn't anything else around, there is a very high probability that you'll be their next meal. So what I really mean by balance is closely tied to my notion to interrelatedness. One change in something, will impact something else. Just as on a scale, if you remove weight from one side, the relationship with the other side will change, and it will move the scale. Hence, there is a balance relationship between absolutely everything in the