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Thomas Solley Senior Thesis 10/15/2014

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Taken from Facebook Note. Jammin' in the grad-student lounge, wishing I could have a greater social presence this semester. Hard to believe that half the term has already gone by -- and I've survived!! I already feel the longing to let it all go though.... To take time off, and to do something besides homework and classes. I've learned so much in my time here... Yet so little. So much theory, very little practical application. It seems my time here has taught me much -- I've come a long way from the sad, angry boy I was at the end of high school -- yet I've done too little to change the course of my own future. I came in with plans -- so many plans -- for where I would go after this, hoping that college would teach me the things I needed to fill-in the black boxes of my own designs and theories. Yet my take-away thus far has been "oh how little I truly know." This is the meme of academia, or so I am told... Yet while I watch my peers get internships, co-ops, and job offers -- where they have opportunities to apply their knowledge in practical applications -- it seems all my work has been in theory. Even the cutting-edge, where I wished to be a leader and a pioneer, has only shown me how great the disparity is in the distribution of technology... How even research relies on money. Where money seems to control everything -- access to materials, equipment, scientists, and facilities... Work that is meant to be pushing the frontier of human "experience" is monopoloized by economics. A wake-up that I did not expect to find in my earlier years, and has been quite disparaging since.

I've heard the advice quite often before -- well, what are you going to do about it, are you just going to sit and complain, or "be the change you want to see in the world?" -- and it still doesn't resonate well with me. What such pieces seem to be missing is the economics of the world we live in -- where even the grades and GPA I've looked-for do not seem to hold much meaning. I feel my degree holds no real weight in the consumer world -- what am I going to do after graduation, design band-pass filters on breadboards? No. Likely if -- not when -- I get a job, all the things I need for that job will come from on-site training and self-education, not from what I've learned in my time here. I've begun to regret my choice of pursuing a degree... I would have been better-off, likely, in taking the last four years to learn a trade and to begin building the ideas I've had. Granted -- college has connected me with so many people, and STS has opened my eyes to a whole new world I never knew existed... But it does not seem that any of that is helping me to get a job. At the end of my time here, I'm scrambling to find something -- anything -- that will give me some work experience, from which I can start climbing the ladder up to a better future job. This is not the world I wanted as a high-scool grad; I had hoped my ideas and ambition would place me right into the bleeding-edge prototyping and design, building products "of the future" for "a world of yesterday." This notion has been proven false... My ambition, and my ideas, mean nothing when I have neither the "practicality" nor the "experience" to show for them. Even in the world of electrical engineering, my expertise is low -- too low, I feel, compared to my peers. I don't have much more than basic programming knowledge in a handful of languages... All of which stems, in my mind, from a lack of time and a lack of hands-on experience.

I keep feeling that if I had more time -- if I could just pause the rest of the world for two years -- I could become the man I seek to be. I could build up my own resume -- teach myself more programming (learn Assembly, even), buy some Arduinos and servos and begin actually building the Exoskeleton concept I began toying-with two years ago (Copyrighted 2012 Solley Industries), and do all the research into prosthetics&fusion&the Singularity -- there is so much knowledge out there that I have not had time to explore, and I feel I need to in order to actually GO somewhere with my ambitions. I don't feel like "after hours" in the working world provide enough time for me to actually "catch up" with inventors of today... Not when people ten years my elder have already been making prototypes *I* had ideas for when I was a freshman. There is so much I wanted to do, so much I still want to do and learn -- but I can't do it all. I used to think, two years ago, how nice it would be to become immortal -- to have ALL the time in the world, to learn EVERYTHING. Yet now that seems impossible (for more than just practical reasons); I've been trying to stay-abreast with the leading-edge developments in just cybernetics, and I con't seem to do it. I no longer know what the "status" of the industry is -- or any of the industries pursuing transhumanism, for that matter. Information is exploding at such a prodigious rate... And I do not seem to have the time. I never, ever, seem to have the time to follow my passions or to make my goals a reality. To the above adage, of "being the change I want to see in the world"... A nice idea, but I'm competing with people who have already developed the prototypes I envisioned years ago. I'm competing with folks who are already pushing the boundaries *I* saw *myself* contributing-to... And have not. There is now such a large gap between me and the people on thr "front lines"... A gap I now fear I will never be able to overcome -- or, not in my lifetime. I've begun recording my ideas -- something I started doing in high school, when it felt like I was waiting for "the right technology to become available" -- now, though, it seems pointless. My thoughts... are not as original as I would like. History only proves the "visionary" from the "lunatic," in which of the two end up being "correct" in time. As those who I have brought my ideas-to have told me... My thoughts are not based on fact. Most of my theories, even, are too whimsical -- they don't work in a "working model" of "our universe."

I've gotten the "but things don't actually work like that" comment now, several times. And then, just as now, I feel confused. Does a futurist view not require thinking "outisde the box," removing the limitations in one's mind of "what is impossible"? I once wanted to be shaping that field.... To challenge others to rethink their assumptions of "what is possible." Yet to be an authentic author, I'm working against men who have lived and died centuries before I was born. Their work, their ideas, took the apophenia of their minds and made connections between phenomena in their worlds -- somehting that I, too, have striven to do. Yet I'm just not... Brilliant enough, to re-derive their work on my own. I won't be re-discovering relativity, or swarm dynamics, or the Singularity, or transhumanism. I've been taking the ideas of sci-fi and trying to imagine how they would work in our world, in a world based on rules... That is, after all, what my website says. That is my motto; "Solley Industries; Turning the world of science-fiction into reality." Yet... most of these, unsurprisingly, require things that just do not exist -- or, at the very least, are "fringe science" at best and lunacy at the worst. So I've tried to work in the middle -- to describe what would be needed, in practical terms, to make some of these technologies possible. But it does not seem to mean anything -- the actual industry is decades away from having the materials or tech required to develop some of these. And those who do... Are keeping a tight lid on productions, and probably won't be looking at an idealist like me. How does one begin working on ideas that transcend our reality, against mega-corporations and military contractors who have the funding and backing of government pocketbooks?

I still don't have an amswer to that. And as I have been sitting here, working away at my thesis, I've begun finding more about the things that interest me... Small pieces, nowhere near enough to claim I know the "current state," but enough to tell me where I'm missing information. And so I've kept on, making notes, collating industry products and tech articles, making shallow analyses about the subejct materials. But I want more. I've wanted something "more" than this existence for years now -- this is why I've become a transhumanist. I want something more than what this universe has to offer me. This world of rules and conventions -- I feel that more should be, must be possible. There are those -- like my mother, or my father -- who listen to this claim, and say that I've been watching too much fiction, playing too many video games. They may be right -- but as there is a worldwide transhumanist group, I know I'm not alone in this feeling. I'm not the only futurist out there. But it does feel like I'm fighting alone against a distribution-gap and corporate hegemony -- trying to find a place among experts who got their degrees decades before me. I don't know how, if at all, I can contribute something meaningful to the world under these circumstances -- but I must. This drive of mine -- whereever it actually comes from (I've already spent many a Christmas Break trying to figure where, and why I should have it) -- is too strong to be ignored. Some way, some how, I have to make a difference -- to open other people's minds, just as The Greats did for me.

As far back as Middle School... I can point to where it came from, this futurist mentality. I first started with "3001: the Final Odyssey," "Childhood's End," "Hex," and "The Radioactive Boy Scout." I also read "The Dragonriders of Pern" during that time... But those novels -- those above -- they started me thinking. They showed me a world unconstrained by the rules our society seems to place on us -- the "hidden patterns," and "unspoken taboos," that I began commenting-on and sensing in high school. The biggest one for me was, of course, "Childhood's End" -- a book I read as a seventh-grader. I want to re-create that sense of wonder, of newfound world-view -- challenging the reader's assumptions of what is right or wrong, of what is possible -- to recreate that internal feeling of "mental expansion" and resonance that those books made for me. I want others to be inspired by the work that I do in my life... but the gap, still seems too large. And to close it... I'm fighting people who have had more years, and more money, to pursue these ideas than me. So I'll begin small, as always... Trying to find a place in the industry that gives me a foot in the door. And I will not forget what I seek to accomplish. I'll probably spend more hours than I can afford trying to close just the information-gap that I sense lies before me...

And now I've spent an hour writing this... Another thing to add to my memories. I've been collecting my ideas and my thoughts, as I mentioned... Some of them I hope to return to, when time and technology permits... Others... I have sought to keep a record of myself, something I started doing in high school, in a time when I felt I was unseen by many, and had (still have) no better way for people to "invisibly" learn more about who I am. In my early years in college it became a fail-safe -- as relatives died, I too began to fear death, to feel my own mortality (something I've been aware-of since a young age). For a long time... This awareness loomed, and I felt like my own death was near, to happen in the next five years. And I I sought to prepare -- to leave behind a legacy, some way for the world to see the man who I had been, that people had not had the chance to see. There has been so much of me -- of my selves, of the personalities I created to fit environments and tasks, the "lenses" and stereotypes I let myself become a part of.... Thoughts and ideas that were never shared. And now... My lenses have given me perspectives that I fear will never be seen by others -- for who else can see in as many ways I can? I've sought to try to capture these multi-varied views -- to capture MORE of the "me" that can't be seen... The words left unspoken, the internal debates and dialogues that happen "behind the scenes"... In the hopes that I will not be defined by just my actions. For those have been... Too rushed, and contradictory, for me to ever fully endorse. I feel like a partially sub-divided RIST entity some days... With a primary consciousness, and branching lenses beneath that. Not too long ago I had become so divided that it felt I was two main personalities, with a primary situational response and a secondary internal reflective-response. This, though, is part of what I've tried to capture -- a mindset that cannot be seen by action, or by spoken words alone. Ideas that I've had... Regrets I've felt.... Plans that were never made... A diary would have been useful, but I can't find time to write a diary (or maintain a blog). There's too much.... Too much information about me, that hasn't been shared, and otherwise won't be. I've made plans to have what I've captured kept -- but that, I feel, isn't enough. If the world never has the chance to recognize me for something worthwhile -- as someone who matters -- it won't matter what thoughts, or legacy, I've kept for the future. It will not matter the warnings I've made to keep others from my mistakes -- or to guide them on a better path. Back in high school I lived in a world where I did not matter -- and my contributions paled in comparison to those made by my peers. I wonder if I could have achieved more had I not been so isolated since moving to California...

Now I really must continue with my thesis. This has been helpful, in marking my thoughts and words left-unsaid... But it isn't enough. It isn't even a coherent start. But it's something.