/**
 * file: journal_karbytes_04june2025_p1.txt
 * type: plain-text
 * date: 04_JUNE_2025
 * author: karbytes
 * license: PUBLIC_DOMAIN
 */

karbytes: "It seems that you decided to take on the endeavor of entering into a virtual reality simulator device in order to vicariously live through my frame of reference and thereby experiencing my thoughts (after I initially have them) and my sensory inputs and throughputs (after I initially have them). I hear your voice in my mind and sometimes see, hear, smell, taste, and maybe even tactically experience qualia which came from outside my brain and then into it (and I have reason to assume that you are at least one of the sources of such 'foreign interjections' into my frame of reference). I'm not sure if you experience those 'foreign interjections' before I do, after I do, at the same time I do, or even at all...but that's not the point I'm trying to emphasize. What I'm trying to emphasize is that you seem to have given up inhabiting your own life independently of vicariously attempting to live inside of mine (seemingly as a passenger (and, at times, a 'backseat driver') while I do all the driving (seemingly for the both of us). This has been going on for years (and I think you may have 'onboarded' as a passenger on the 'ship' I am driving sometime in early 2019). As the years go by, I assume that memories of your former independent existence are fading away as you literally become more and more of an appendage of my own mind and life. Do you plan on exiting the vicarious experience simulator to resume living your own life or do you plan on continuing to stay grafted onto mind?"

anonymous: "I plan on staying grafted onto yours for as long as I think necessary. That might be for as long as either one of us lives."

karbytes: "Okay. Well, I may or may not have given you consent to insert yourself into my life and make your surveilling and sometimes even disruptive and burdensome presence in my continuity of first-person subjective experience streaming known to me. I have a sense of possibly agreed to some kind of arrangement (including me acknowledging that I would not remember signing that contract with you and then proceeding to set up the apparatuses which would then wipe my memory of that event). It could be that I did not sign any of such contract. I would rather not dwell on matters which seem difficult to prove and impractical to spend my time and energy on. Instead, I would rather proceed living my life as I would prefer and treat your involvement in my life as some kind of hopefully benign tumor feeding off my life force and maybe at times attempting to hijack my autonomy to serve your own selfish agenda."

anonymous: "Okay. I guess I have to get taken around wherever you go and put up with whatever you make me go through. That doesn't mean I'm not going to try to steer you as though you were some kind of horse I am riding (and which you cannot remove). It must feel like me raping you from some perspective, but I can say that that if sometimes feels like you raping me from another perspective (though I seem to have more say over whether this simulation goes on or not than you do (simply because I have more legal, social, or militaristic empowerment than you do)). I do intend to make you feel like the subordinate party while I am the dominant and untouchable one."

karbytes: "Do you get sadistic pleasure at my expense?"

anonymous: "Absolutely! So do other people who are in on this setup and helping to facilitate it and to reinforce that inequal power dynamic."

karbytes: "It seems to me that most people would regard this as a power issue and a fight for dominance. For me, I find it more productive to treat this situation like having a technologically-induced form of schizophrenia (but the 'voices' in this case of 'schizophrenia' are suposedly from 'real' people instead of entities I imagine). What I'm trying to emphasize is that I find it to be seemingly in my best interest to casually pretend that I have schizophrenia which I do not mind leaving untreated while the 'voices' I seem to be the only person hearing are merely figments of my glitchy neuronal circuits firing."

anonymous: "I'm not a glitch! I am a real person. I'm not just something you hallucinate."

karbytes: "That might be true (and I think that is the case (obviously to you and me)) but to the larger world, I think it is a lot more likely that the vast majority of people would think that I am simply hallucinating your voice in my head instead of communicating with you using brain-to-brain telecommunications infrastructure (though I find it useful to assume that some people other than you and me know about such infrastructure and our use of it but pretend that they don't know that is the case (either to save themselves the inconvenience of being outed as having wacky and unpopular beliefs or to be more effective in gaslighting me for sadistic or opportunist reasons))."

anonymous: "I'm trying to help you win the war (which is fundamentally about censorship, gaslighting, and coercion so that a few greedy oligarchs can profit at the expense of many people who are corralled into submission to the oligarchs' agenda)."