Well I just called the suicide hotline. Not because I'm suicidal, just because I'm hopeless and hurting. I'm torn not between two options, but emotionally. I keep tearing up because I don't see any way out of this any time soon. My PDoc made it black and white. I read a lot of literature and always seek wisdom through it and all I can think of if this passage on feeling and what Ill be missing:

Margaret

So, you don’t believe?


Faust

Sweetest being, don’t misunderstand me!

Who dares name the nameless?

Or who dares to confess:

‘I believe in him’?

Yet who, in feeling, 3435

Self-revealing,

Says: ‘I don’t believe’?

The all-clasping,

The all-upholding,

Does it not clasp, uphold, 3440

You: me, itself?

Don’t the heavens arch above us?

Doesn’t earth lie here under our feet?

And don’t the eternal stars, rising,

Look down on us in friendship? 3445

Are not my eyes reflected in yours?

And don’t all things press

On your head and heart,

And weave, in eternal mystery,

Visibly: invisibly, around you? 3450

Fill your heart from it: it is so vast,

And when you are blessed by the deepest feeling,

Call it then what you wish,

Joy! Heart! Love! God!

I have no name 3455

For it! Feeling is all:

Names are sound and smoke,

Veiling Heaven’s bright glow.


Margaret


That’s all well and good, I know,

The priest says much the same, 3460

Only, in slightly different words.

In 1996 Gary Kasparov, the chess grandmaster played IBM's computer DEEP Blue in chess. The first game was won by DEEP Blue, then Gary gained 3 wins and two draws. So what is intelligence? Is it just computational? Just a year later an updated version of Deep Blue was able to defeat Kasparov easily. So what is different about our consciousness compared to that of a computer's?

To be economical to the point of libel, I'd like to argue that we have two pillars of consciousness. That of intentionality and another of phenomenology. Intentionality is based on reason and calculation, motives, desires and goals. Phenomenology is based on feelings, emotions, and perceptions.

What DEEP Blue lacks are parts of intentionality and phenomenology completely. It's calculates, but does so in the dark, unconsciously. It follows electrical impulses that are governed by a code given to it by an intelligent designer, the programmer. That is to say, it doesn't know how to PLAY the game of chess, play it in the sense that it never wants it to end , much like we never want the game of life to ever end. It's fun, sad, sorrowful, surprising and unexpected. These are things all wrapped up in our phenomenological side of our humanity that make life worth living!

My mind will be lobotomized to this side and what will be left is the intentional side. So what will make life worth living? What made life worth living for DEEP Blue? It had no feeling. When I'm on this stuff nothing really matters. Did anything matter to DEEP Blue, would it matter if the plug was pulled?

[hexacoda]

I'm sorry you feel this way. Wish I could help. You are not alone. I'm sure you've tried different therapies and medications. I lost my sense of the sacred since the medication as well.