I'm reaching for your light
my hand is an eclipse

Yesterday's Enterprise

Jean-Luc Picard: How can I ask them to sacrifice themselves based solely on your intuition?
Guinan: I don't know. But I do know that this is a mistake. Every fiber in my being says this is a mistake. I can't explain it to myself, so I can't explain it to you. I only know that I'm right.
Jean-Luc Picard: Who is to say that this history is any less proper than the other?
Guinan: I suppose I am.
Jean-Luc Picard: Not good enough, damn it, not good enough! I will not ask them to die!
Guinan: 40 billion people have already died. This war is not supposed to be happening. You've got to send those people back to correct this.
Jean-Luc Picard: And what is to guarantee that if they go back, they will succeed? Every instinct is telling me this is wrong, it is dangerous, it is futile!
Guinan: We've known each other a long time. You have never known me to impose myself on anyone, or take a stance based on trivial or whimsical perceptions. This timeline must not be allowed to continue. Now, I've told you what you must do. You have only your trust in me to help you decide to do it.

"Orienters" as part of the green-to-yellow meme transition

Green meme (postmodernism, relativisim) has a hard time figuring anything out, because everything is equal. Any perspective is just a perspective and can be stepped away from symmetrically. This is one of the key issues that Ken Wilber writes about. He calls it "flatland" or "Boomeritis". How can you make justified moral judgments if moral relativism is absolute? In fact, how can you do anything?

Yellow meme starts to answer this. It's true that there is no absolute, but that doesn't mean everything is symmetric. You can't prove anything, but that doesn't mean you can't think.

One thing that breaks the symmetry (from a subjective, epistomological point of view) is what I would call "orienters". For example, it's generally wrong to kill someone. The view that it's wrong to kill someone is "more correct" than the view that it's generally good to kill someone. It's not an absolute, because in some circumstances, killing someone could be the right thing to do. But it is a strong orienter.

Even stronger orienters are in the sensory realm. We can't be absolutely sure we're not hallucinating, but overall, "seeing the table" is a very good factor to use in decision making.

Statistics

How can we rigorously justify any predictions that we make about the world? There are at least four big problems: 1) the world is non-stationary (i.e. any patterns, even dynamical patterns, are constantly evolving in time), 2) we are always only sampling the world (never getting a complete distribution), 3) processes that seem to be random are usually just encoding information that we don't have, and 4) we never know the structure of the system.

For example, if you know that you have 100 people, and 20 of them are smokers, then it makes sense to say "if you choose one person at random, the probability of him being a smoker is 20%". But what if you are given a die, and you ask the probability that it will land on "6" on the next roll. Now the "universe" of possibilities is all the rolls that you could ever make with that die (an infinite set), and the probability is the fraction of those rolls that land on "6".

If you start with the assumption that it's a fair die (and this is what people usually do, not just with dice but also in science), then you can easily answer "the probability is 1/6th", because you are assuming (not measuring) the whole distribution.

If you don't make that assumption, then the best you can do is roll the die many times and count how many times it lands on "6". But while you're doing this, the die is changing. Molecules are rubbing off the surfaces, the molecular lattice of the material is changing, etc. Also, to really answer "what is the probability?", you have to specify which information you're allowed to use. The way the die is thrown has a huge impact on its final position. If you know the way the die is thrown, then the probability is probably close to either 0 or 1.

The final problem, "we never know the structure of the system", is the worst problem. What if the die lands on an edge rather than a side (maybe it's being rolled on carpet)? This does more than adjust the probability distribution over the known possibilities: it pulls us out of the entire space we thought we were in. Regardless of what system you define, there are always other factors unraveling the edges. Probabilities are only meaningful within a fictional formal system.

Dear Reality,

What the fuck.

msi

yo wicked gay but then today i think i'll be hardcore
if i forget to take my medicine then i'll be sick
i'm so hot to trot, i'm stealing all my beats from the blacks
and from all the young girls is where i steal my act

i'm not that cool
i'm just not that great
you suckers found out a little too late
you thought it'd be good
you thought it might rock
but your friends were right
i suck big cock

i've been denied all the best ultra sex
i tried to consume just like a super faggot
i got some dude
how can y'all bring a muthafucka something so good he couldn't say no
you nailed me hard
i love 'em when they don't give a motherfucking shit

Gödel number for consciousness

whatever you are thinking about can't be the thinker, right? so what is doing the thinking?

hmm

Here's something that makes sense to my cognitive self.

I will never be able to solve the deepest problem of my existence, because it is a problem of transcending my self, and my self is what I am. So I can't do it. I can "want to get enlightened", but that is totally tangential to the actual thing.

Someone observed that spiritual teachers will sometimes take the approach of just pointing out things that are part of your awareness, so you recognize them. Recognizing them isn't intemporal realization, but it can help you to "realize" that everything in your awareness is already part of non-dual Everything.

honey, i'm home

just what i thought, another fragile buddha

mix of Cohen and Wainwright lyrics

There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken hallelujah

Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah

There was a time you'd let me know
What's real and going on below
But now you never show it to me do you?
Remember when I moved in you?
The holy dark was moving too
And every breath we drew was hallelujah

And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah

practices

There are a lot of practices that I've either read about or come to on my own. I never really know what to do at any given time, because there's not one practice to fit all situations. Sometimes the impetus for a particular approach seems to come from outside myself, and that seems to be the best, although sometimes "forcing" a practice seems to help, too.

Praying
-Talking to God as an other (usually asking for help with something)
-Talking to God as a way of being honest with myself
Meditating
-Focusing on mind-states as they come and go
-Focusing on nothing
-Breathing
Mindfulness
-Recognizing when I am dishonest with myself
-Recognizing when I am judging people
-Actively accepting things that bother me
-Noticing things that bother me
Relaxation
-Concentrating on body areas
-Relaxing socially
-Focusing on breathing

qualia are phenomenal

green meme on social/emotional line

It's been another big transition in the last couple days for me. Bree lucidly pointed out that I constantly judge people to be "good" or "bad". This is related to the working theory of social hierarchy that I held so strongly in my senior year at ISU. It was very natural for me to put people into categories based on whether they needed me more than I needed them. Now I'm starting to catch myself doing it. The orange meme process of categorizing and ranking is eventually exhausted (this is something I'd like to read more about -- Wilber says that development happens when the individual exhausts the limits of their current system, but how does that work?), and it gives way to a flat system where everyone is equally valued as a human.

This is one of the developmental areas that lags behind for me.

good, bad, Principle, ...?

I don't really have a clear question or idea here, but I'm wondering about different approaches to spirituality. Stuart Davis, for example, is very positive. You get the feeling that everything is ok, and even though you're being challenged, you are still loved and someone will hug and comfort you along the way. Bernadette Roberts, on the other hand, makes the journey sound like constant pain and emptiness, and lack of comfort. Even Stuart Davis points out that a lot of our life serves as anesthesia, but he phrases It as "Love has no opposite".

supreme doctrine

A few days ago, I read part of a chapter where Benoit is talking about affectivity. His use of language (originally French, but I think the translator did an awesome job) is very specialized, and I can't really explain exactly what he means by affectivity. But basically, he says that if you look for your own affectivity, you won't find it. It's not the absolute Principle, nor is it a relative (formal) phenomenon. You will find images of happiness or sadness, but no actual fundamental good or bad affectivity. So I tried looking, and it was very strange. It seems so basic that affectivity is real; it's what I work for constantly. And there are clearly lots of "images" about it. But if I try to direct my attention to the thing itself, it doesn't exist where I thought it would be.

What the hell.

I really want people to like me.

reality is awareness

I suddenly had this thought as I was on the bus, and it seems to explain a LOT. My old question was, how does phenomenology connect to ontology? For example, why do human brains (a particular configuration of molecules) have "consciousness" and other configurations of molecules don't?

There are the classic explanations for how mind and matter relate. A) Dualism says mind and matter are two fundamentally separate things that can influence one another. My spirit could make a decision and push around some molecules in my brain; and sensory events impinging on my brain could influence my spirit. B) Materialism or Idealism says that matter or mind (respectively) is the only real thing and the other is an illusion. C) Epiphenomenalism, like dualism, says that mind and matter both exist, but mind has no causal power. Sensory events in the brain can influence my spirit, but my spirit is a passive reflection of reality and can't influence anything.

Here's the new answer: matter is mind. This is so simple. Of course a rock is aware as a rock -- that's what it is! A rock doesn't have self-awareness in the sense of a reflexive arc like humans do; a process that feebly tries to represent some aspects of the entity of which is it a part. It's just a rock.

This is why humans are aware (or, in another sense, have the illusion of being aware) of a lot of reality. When the brain instantiates a pattern that mimics a pattern in reality (i.e. when the brain has any representation), that pattern IS aware as itself, so we have the awareness of what seems to be the thing we are representing. Of course, our representation is not the thing itself, so we're not really aware OF the thing itself. Brains happen to be highly concentrated areas of representation.

So humans are not aware OF reality. The representation in the brain is aware as itself, and it shares characteristics with the thing in reality. Maybe you could even go so far as to say that nothing is aware OF anything.

So I wonder what non-dual awareness is. Or is it just that insomuch as things are not dual, they are aware as everything?

genpo roshi, ego, reality

http://in.integralinstitute.org/live/view_bigmind.aspx

Watching the first few of these videos did something to me. That, along with a video of Ken Wilber talking to some other guy. I started to really change my basic orientation to the self. Genpo Roshi pointed out that all of those aspects of the self that we try to pretend don't exist are actually serving valuable functions. Ken Wilber said that at the center there is always the contraction of self. I was like, holy shit. It also made me rethink what I said in my last post. I have been trying to dissect out where the "badness" is in the Universe. It was making me really confused, because the same essential contraction, or recursion, or duality seems to be in all manifestation -- not just the human ego. Does that make all of manifestation a pathology? But now I'm thinking: that's what manifestation is. Now my confusion is kicked back to this: what is the process of enlightenment, then? It's not causing the mind to stop manifesting, is it? Maybe it's very psychological. Maybe it's even specific to the detailed implementation of a human brain. Maybe it's embracing the lower-level contraction into a higher-level contraction. Any thing that happens in reality has to be that, right? Are there non-dual events? The non-dual creates another manifestation during enlightenment, I suppose. Maybe reality is constructed such that particular manifestations can be deeply embracing of all manifestation in a way that goes beyond our current understanding of state and information.

What is agitation in the brain?

I feel like it's starting to be the right time for me to ask the question: what processes in the brain are mental agitation (i.e. non-spontaneous, non-True, self-protecting thoughts; illusion or Samsara)? Here are a few possibilities:

1) It's not a feature of the physical brain. It's something spiritual that can't be reduced to mechanistic processes.

2) It's any neural activity at all. Any manifestation is inherently dual; the richer the manifestation, the more pronounced the duality. When the manifestation goes away, what's left is the Self.

3) It's neural activity that is out of sync with reality. I see a tree, but for some reason my representation of a fish is activated instead. (This example is a sensory-level misrepresentation; maybe what would correspond in Wilber's framework to psychosis. Most practical examples would be much more subtle, like lying to oneself about motivations.) Interestingly, this could help explain development. The lower levels of representation have to be in sync with reality before higher levels can form, because otherwise the conflict with reality agitates the lower-level representations to the point where the higher-level structures are unstable.

4) It's recursive neural activity. When the flow of information is somehow circular in a network or system of networks, the brain is no longer representing reality and instead representing "itself", which isn't really anything. The internal dynamics of that circular network are the self. Those dynamics are not really a representation of anything, although some other system could represent them. This is surprisingly similar to Benoit's analogy of a short-circuit. If you hooked the output of a thermostat up to its own input, it might go into an oscillation (if there were a time-constant), or an unbounded growth, which would be the internal dynamics of the recursive system. Strangely, if all manifestation arises from feedback processes, could all manifestation be a kind of agitation; self-creating unreality? But what does that mean for it to be unreality? We started with the idea that the recursive activity in the brain was unreality because it didn't represent the outside reality. But there's no outside reality to all of reality. What the hell?

crap-a-fuck mental processes

There is a central part of myself that I am scared to have other people find out about. This is related to two things: lying and mental agitation. I lie more than I should, especially to myself. It was hard to admit that. The lies are sometimes subtle, like trying to justify something by spinning it a certain way. When I really directly noticed that process of lie-generation, it seemed to be identical to the process that makes agitation. When I say agitation, I mean all the little self-recursive energy-discharging thoughts that go on endlessly. The first word that came to mind to describe these thoughts was crap-a-fuck. I'll try to think of a better word.

I think the lies exist to protect the part of myself that I want to keep hidden. If people see what I really am, they will loathe me. Is this my "self", as Bernadette Roberts calls it? Could this be why it's so connected to the agitation? The agitation is the processes constantly being spun to keep the self existing? I'm a little worried because I get excited with a kind of "I'm so great" feeling when I get the idea that I'm somehow close to understanding something so spiritual as my "self". That bothers me.

Here's another idea. Sometimes relationships are used as anesthesia, and sometimes they are genuinely contributing to awakening. The craziness that comes from opening to someone can really facilitate seeing things that would have been hard to see otherwise. Maybe just because it makes you so agitated that you have to do something about it now!! But I don't think that's the whole reason.

things i could do to really challenge myself

-throw parties
-ask girls out
-start a business
-take apart and put together an engine
-travel somewhere without preparation
-take LSD
-get into a fight