The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

======

on one level it's a pretty generic trope. he's chickening out of suicide because he starts overthinking it and getting scared of what it will be like.

but this brings up the good and bad of "thinking". "the currents of enterprises of great pitch and moment turn awry" is zen-like. with more patience and contemplation, there's space to take proper care of any particular conviction, relax it into a bigger love.

so is the "native hue of resolution" our spontaneous self, getting troubled by thoughts and fear; or is it our momentary passion, getting ripened and softened by reflection?

paradox: the chaotic thinking that's troubling us may be the movement that ultimately generates space.

vice and virtue...

why is it so hard to do the right thing. coming back to the old dual-systems view: plato's charioteer and horses, kahnemann's thinking fast and slow, model-based and model-free, hot and cold systems, etc.

also, what is "impulsivity" and addiction.

i'm wondering if the most salient dichotomy is vice and virtue. the other definitions get caught up on weird issues, like the fact that drug addicts can spend weeks planning sophisticated schemes to get drugs, or that scientists compulsively stay at work even when it's hurting their overall productivity.

maybe these things boil down to some kind of dynamic attractor state in the brain (or in lots of cases probably implemented on a substrate that includes both the brain and other components, parts of your body, other people, etc) that keeps pulling things back toward a certain configuration. this comprises all the partially erroneous beliefs that make up that attractor. "vice" is the continuation of that attractor configuration; "virtue" is when it partially dissolves to inclusion with other dynamics. (incidentally, this is exactly the continental divide between free will and determinism.) so virtue is highly context dependent and can't really be pinned down by any particular understanding.

vice often manifests as short time horizons, self-centric behavior, less deliberative, etc -- but it doesn't necessarily have to. it's possible for other kinds of dynamics to get stuck, even very apparently generous behavior for example, which could still be stuck somewhere as a self-assertion (although this language can be confusing because it's not the standard notion of self).

a rock just exists as a rock -- no problem. like the garden of eden in the bible. there's no suffering when there's no self-awareness.

the birth of suffering is the awareness that things *could be* different than they are. then there's constant dissatisfaction/confusion in the divergence between how things are and your ideal image of how things should be (this ideal image is your "self").

but, the clash will *never* end. you wouldn't want it to, because this trajectory is exactly what creates the world: form is created by the divergence. what looks like suffering from one perspective is also impossible beauty. to take care of the world is that.

ensemble methods, sexual reproduction, regularization, order and chaos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78

one idea is, the balance between order and chaos in giving rise to life.

another idea is ensemble methods performing really well - like the netflix competition winner. (is this related to monte carlo methods too? lots of weak solutions thrown together?)

in this talk hinton talks about why it might be good to have sexual reproduction in evolution. sex keeps reassorting chunks of the genome, so you never have a "single learner" in that evolutionary sense, but rather an ever-shifting ensemble of individually maybe not all that amazing learners, but always thrown back together into the same system.

he shows an example of how you can do the same thing within a deep neural network. you basically constantly turn on and off bits of the network as it's learning, so subsets of it are trying to learn some of the structure in the data, but the whole thing is never getting too committed, it's finding bits of *relatively* shallow solutions. and all these bits are learning in the context of each other (so they regularize each other, in that larger generalized space).

for one thing, it would be cool if the brain works this way, essentially living on the edge of chaos so the dynamics are always getting thrown around of which subcircuit is online during some experience (even at a microscale of time, like individual theta cycles for example). so the brain is keeping online a sort of chaotically scattered but somewhat balanced subset of stuff, always flitting between different hypothesis spaces and driving updates in those, within the global weight-space of all the learning it's done so far.

this might partly explain why individual trials of brain activity look so random, and doug garrett's data where dynamical *variability* in brain signals is related to behavioral performance.

and fundamental balance between chaos and order- the emergence of beauty and life is this being tilted with your weight ahead of your feet, the unresolving energy of the sampling dynamics kind of bootstrapping itself.

No guests remain within the dragon gate

regularization

"generalizing from finite samples in extremely high dimensions" is an amazing problem. think of life expectancy. let's say men born today expect to live 82 years and women expect to live 84 years (don't know the actual numbers). that's based on a lot of samples of men and women (plus some projections, but let's say for now it was just based on raw statistics of past events). OK. so if you're a man, your best guess for how long you'll live is 82 years, and if a woman, your best guess is 84 years. in other words, if you were doing optimal decision-making or whatever, this is the number you should factor in (well actually the variance could be asymmetric so you ought to integrate over the whole distribution but let's ignore that for now too). OK, *but*, let's suppose the expectancy for white-men is 85 years and for non-white-men is 77 years. maybe for some reason it's reversed for women; white-women 82 years and non-white-women 86 years. NOW, if you know you're a white man, you should use 85 years as your best guess. OK, but what if you factor in height? smoking? educational history? city of birth? environmental toxin exposure? genetics? .... pretty soon, there won't even be a *single sample* of experience to draw on, to make an estimate of the life expectancy in your particular category.

one way around this problem is to assume that each factor operates linearly and independently. then, you solve a big linear regression problem, and linearly interpolate/extrapolate to points in the space where you don't have any samples. note that even under these simplifying assumptions, there are serious problems. for example, when you have many many dimensions, some will by chance have extreme slopes -- which will push your extrapolated prediction into crazy values. but even ignoring those problems, there's the bigger problem that the factors aren't actually linear or independent. they interact very strongly in fact: sometimes one factor might even reverse its direction of effect depending on another factor. so the linear regression is not a good solution.

what can you do? you have to regularize the problem. this is, you have to use some prior knowledge to drastically pare back the number of effective dimensions. for example, you might know some variables are strongly correlated, so you can treat them as one. or you might know that some variables are dominated by others, so you omit the weak variables. or you might know that the underlying function ought to be at least locally smooth, so you impose a smoothness constraint.

but what is the right regularization? brains are somehow really good at this (algorithms are getting better quickly though..)

i was just thinking that the regularizing prior knowledge could be a good place to fit in scale-invariance and holo-stuff. i haven't read enough, but i haven't seen yet much in machine learning on using a single learning framework to accommodate all different kinds/levels of data. i imagine that's what the brain is doing (maybe it's related to the relatively "unitary" consciousness that we seem have subjectively) -- because we're essentially shifting around the focus of more or less the same global model to apply to massively disparate "kinds of things". so we have more samples to draw on for any given problem. we can even turn this global model partially on itself, which perpetually gives us even more samples and might also produce other weird features.

somehow, the circuitry of the cortex must be cleverly set up to do this kind of learning over space and time. (like hawkins' and others' "hierarchical temporal memories" type ideas).

in a friston-type framework, i'm picturing that the structure of the organism at all levels already encodes a deep regularization (for example RNA only interacts with some molecules). since there's no separation between what is "inference" and what is just dynamical structure of the "inferring entity" itself. if every dynamical system can be thought of as doing prediction (which means vastly generalizing from finite samples), then its whole structure from the ground-up is scale-invariantly encoding regularization for all the external states it's exposed to.

new ideas

Part 1

Some models suggest that the basal ganglia are used to select between actions. Some candidate actions are generated, and the circuitry of the basal ganglia allows one to win and be executed (like Jeff Wickens). I wondered if the basal ganglia are also used to select between "internal actions", like what to think about, what to attend to, etc. This could be connected to habits of mind. 

Part 2

I was thinking about Karl Friston's view of sleep. If I understood correctly, sleep is a time of lower top-down precision, when the experience collected during wakefulness can be used to drive big changes to the world-model. It makes sense to isolate your brain from your muscles when you're doing this deep restructuring: when you're awake you need high top-down precision to make your best active predictions.

[As a side note, I wonder how this fits with the data about interstitial volume increasing during sleep to allow "clean up" of metabolic products. Maybe a sleep-state is simply a useful time to do multiple unrelated things. Or maybe the physiological implementation of precision actually has to do with neuron-glia interactions and interstitial space (e.g. glutamate reuptake).]

The most obvious thing that happens during sleep, physiologically, is change in oscillatory activity. High-frequency activity mostly drops away, and low-frequency oscillations become prominent.

Does low-frequency activity correspond to the "subtle" state described by Eastern mystics?

In terms of oscillatory activity, a child's brain looks like a sleeping adult's brain. Roughly, a deeper stage of adult sleep corresponds to an earlier stage of child development. In childhood we also have high plasticity. This is when things seem really meaningful, like they can in dreams.

The adult mind can be pretty locked in place. Old feelings, even from early childhood, are still there somewhere, but maybe don't find much expression. Really deep *meaning* seems to be locked in there somewhere, too. Things can seem a bit abstract until it's in your gut. Truly believing in love isn't something the rigid adult mind is very good at.

What about meditation and the subtle stage of development?

Maybe meditation peels the layers off. Perhaps during development, something happened to hurt that level of the self: suffering (free energy) caused by direct contact with not-self. That then becomes a scar or a rigidity: some loss of dynamic flexibility like Eve Marder's ion channels. Specifically it's a hyper-assertion of the self-pattern at that level.

Meditation brings awareness to the thing that's creating the rigidity. Bringing awareness is the same as nesting the thing in a larger context, allowing it to healthily integrate and discharge some of its exclusivity. In meditation we also see slow oscillatory states.

This suggests that top-down precision is something we should look at in multiple layers. There might be a different kind of precision every time we peel off a layer.

Something like the aPFC or hippocampus might correspond to top-levels of the adult hierarchy. Interestingly, you also grow to a bigger model as you relax levels, because that slice of the self gets integrated with a bigger context. This might be like how unexpected uncertainty could convert to expected uncertainty as the model grows.

A tricky issue is how to reconcile this with the psychedelic state. Psychedelic states have been likened to dream states, and sometimes include a feeling of vast lovingness and meaningfulness. Is this playing the same role as sleep? If so, do psychedelic states show the same oscillatory signature?

Some studies have described increases in low-frequency oscillatory power with psychedelics, but more recent work (Carhart-Harris et al, 2013) showed decreases in oscillatory power across the spectrum (in default mode). Carhart-Harris suggests this corresponds to "destabilization" of brain activity, possibly allowing it to leave attractor states that it's been stuck in.

Part 3

Oscillations, again. Subjectively, people sometimes describe "the present moment". To some extent, every moment seems to be the "same moment". It's always the present moment. Of course in some ways this is vacuously true; it follows from the definition of "now". But I think it might also be describing some aspects of how the brain works.

Clark and I talked about "ontologeny" (he calls it "microgeny"), which is the "waking up" of the universe in each moment. It's possible that it sort of ultra-quickly recapitulates all of the development of the universe, up until now.

Clark wants to extend this to fundamental physics, which I don't necessarily disagree with, but being more conservative for a minute, let's say this is just an attribute of the brain. Within a brain rhythm, you keep doing the same thing over and over again. If this brain rhythm is one signature of the dynamic quasi-stable attractor state you're in, then it's probably repeating the same pattern over and over again. That's "you" -- the stability of that attractor is what makes up the coherence and consistency of your experience. But it's constantly "refreshing", going through all the phase-angles of that space. So in every moment it would feel like you're constantly waking up to that moment as you go through that same cycle. The attractor can gradually (or sometimes quickly) change, both through its own unstable dynamics and through sensory inputs, and there's also long-term plasticity. A wakeful attractor state would have some signature in alpha frequencies in the brain, for example.

This could explain why sometimes it seems like mental events are perpetually happening "before" the present moment of awareness. A simplistic explanation would be that there is some particular phase-angle that actually corresponds to the "waking up" or the present moment (and I suspect that's true in some partial ways), but a more complete explanation probably involves interactions at all the phase-angles. In either explanation, bringing those things into awareness (into the present moment) might involve an attentionally-driven shift in the relative phases of firing of different neural populations.

For me, subjectively, this corresponds to things that I feel were always "there" inside me somewhere. With some attention they can be brought up to "near" awareness, but it sometimes feels like they're still lurking before the edge of the present moment. Sustained attention brings them into the present.

I think this is also a key to the "hierarchical temporal memory" idea from Jeff Hawkins. Microcircuits in the brain must be set up to dynamically mirror aspects of the sensory inputs / the world. But as you go up the hierarchy of the brain, they extract structure. A lot of work has focused on the "spatial" structure they extract (like going from spots to oriented lines to edges to objects to recognizing people, etc), but they are implemented as oscillatory dynamical systems, so it makes sense that the real mirroring and abstraction is deeply spatiotemporal.

[Also, I think it's worth mentioning that we often use the visual system as an example for this type of thing, but a huge area of the brain is devoted to somatosensory, visceral, vestibular, etc processing. Further, I only talked about the sensory side of the hierarchy but the brain can at least as well be thought of as organized hierarchically around action, on the motor side. There are always rhythms in motion, too. Together I think this fits embodied cognition and the body-mind naturally into the framework.]

"Commit not a single unwholesome action,
Cultivate a wealth of virtue,
To tame this mind of ours,
This is the teaching of all the buddhas."
-- attributed to Shakyamuni Buddha

somehow this meant to me that we create the world (in its partial, divided, samsaric sense) through karma. or, duality *is* precisely our own karmic burden. which is why buddha said "i and all beings are enlightened".

zen & inference

i think i've said the same thing before, but this felt more clear as i was writing it.

one suggestion is that zen is about building a better model. that the vast majority of your model of the world is the sort of moment-to-moment dynamics of sensory prediction (including interoceptive, meta-cognitive activity, etc) ; and the model basically sucks because it ignores the vast majority of the actual structure of the world (you see what you expect to see). so zen practice is about relaxing the top-down priors to allow the model to incorporate more of the dynamics.

that doesn't feel like the whole story, but it's an idea to start from.

This discovery will be the one that tells me what invented me

Like any dealer, he was watching for the card that is so high and wild he'll never need to deal another

identification

one issue that's been bugging me is what "identification" means. i was watching another one of diane hamilton's videos, and she's talking about how identification with the small self is just one of many perspectives.

it seems to be true that "i" suffer when i identify with a particular small-self to the exclusion of other phenomena. when "i" release into a more inclusive perspective, the suffering-as-partiality of the smaller-self is revealed to just be a transient object, whereas before it felt like an existential/unsolvable problem.

but, what does it *mean* to expand identification like that? three broad categories of possibility:

1) both the smaller system and the larger system already existed before you released your perspective, and your change in perspective didn't really change either system. instead, it has something to do with how the dynamics of these systems are coupled to the aspects of manifestation that we agree to associate with the individual (e.g. control of your speech muscles to say "i am experiencing xyz").

2) the smaller system is being changed. dissolving exclusivity structures, so that it can arise and release and transform more spontaneously in the context it's in.

3) the larger system is actually being created in the process. when the smaller system is allowed to enter into increased dynamic coupling with other phenomena, then the system that calls itself "zeb" now consists of fundamentally new dynamics that only exist in the interplay between the previous small-self and the other phenomena. *however*, i'm not sure how this fits in the case of releasing to "identification" with all phenomena / formless awareness.

i feel like all of these are true, but i'm still missing something.

making pot illegal

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/opinion/brooks-weed-been-there-done-that.html?src=me&ref=general

i love brooks, and this is a fucking awesome article in a lot of ways.

i can't even say i categorically disagree with "seatbelt laws". we want to make policy that does the most overall good, and the disutility of restricting personal choice is just one component of that.

i think he misses two things-

1) some of personal growth comes from making stupid choices- how do you do that if all the stupid choices are illegalized?

2) it's true that you can find some good in illegalizing pot (and he does a brilliant job of outlining the shape of that good), but how can you have a complete argument without comparing the magnitude of that good with the magnitude of the concomitant harms?

when it comes to illegalizing pot, the magnitude of the good is really pretty meager. like one comment points out, the usage doesn't skyrocket when pot is legalized in places like holland. yeah, if you make it illegal people might do it a bit less. that is a good, but is a big one? i believe illegalizing heroin reduces the number of addicts. that's probably a bigger good. (still, how big?)

and he doesn't talk about the harm. making drugs illegal obviously creates shit-tons of practical problems. then there's the difficult-to-estimate disutility of inhibiting personal freedom. and another nebulous factor is slippery-slope into 1984. i'd have to think very carefully about how to put this harm in a common currency to compare directly to the good. yet my intuition is that the harm outweighs the good by several orders of magnitude here.

i want to be SURE

free energy hierarchies and pedagogy

last night somebody was spraying the sidewalk with water to clean it. but he was doing it at 6:30pm, the busiest time. he turned off the hose whenever someone was walking past (to avoid spraying them), and this meant he had the hose off 90% of the time. he was just spraying in little bursts when there was a gap in people.

i thought, shouldn't they do this at a different time of day? it's probably just poor management. if i were in charge, i would set it up differently.

then i thought, it's possible that they know something i don't know, and the best solution is actually to do it at 6:30pm for whatever reasons.

but this made me think about free energy and pedagogy.

in order to learn, i have to take action based on my current model and see the consequences. there may be a prediction error that drives an update of my model; then i involute this structure and the model gains richness.

people who take control of all aspects of their life in this way, fully inhabiting their current model to produce action and then incorporate the updates, probably involute the most of the world.

and "teaching" should based on this. getting students to take action based on their current model, in situations where they can incorporate the prediction error.

dopamine, progress, and tantrums

the real "dual-system" issue is probably the one that plato and buddha and whoever else understood from the beginning.

virtue or responsibility, that's the hard thing that's right to do.

the unvirtuous thing is perseverating the goals of some smaller system.

the relatively virtuous thing is what o'reilly said -- you're unhappy when you're frustrated in making progress toward your goal, so the way to be happier is to let go of that goal. in a little sense that means the smaller system you're currently identifying with has to "die" or "dissipate".

the subjective experience of this is "awareness of" that smaller system. identification with a perspective which is not limited to being *inside* the smaller system. because the goals are determined by the priors of the system, and now the dynamical system in question has another hierarchical level, so it behaves as if it's trying to minimize surprise at *that* level. (still unvirtuous from a broader context, but moving in the right direction!)

that's why i was excited by o'reilly's talk about tantrums. along with karl's model it feels like a step toward a scientific view of wtf is going on...

how stuff works

As these peaks in the holomapping and their concentric boundaries coalesce, stable conscious binding flourish-develops as manifold harmonic attunement thru complexificationary unitive intraperfusilusion in dynamical introjective identity with the All as it can be 'known' as consciousness.

-- Clark Potter

intelligence

intelligence is the ability to make accurate predictions about the

world. you can think of the mind as a *model* of the outside world. but of

course it's never a perfect model. the self is the model, and the not-self

is the aspects of the world not captured by the model. we're perpetually

afraid to relax the self, to allow the model to capture more aspects of the

world. there's a moment of "little dying" when we do this. the self never

wants to let go of the idea that *it is the whole world*, or in other words,

it is already a perfect description of the world. fundamentally, it has to

be this way, because the self is a homeostatic system that maintains its

integrity because it constantly enforces its own pattern against the chaos

of the outside world. but fortunately, the world forces little bits of the

self to relax, so the self can grow and become a more honest and faithful

model of the world (it might be fair to call this the universal principle of

"love").

that's why taking care of yourself emotionally makes you smarter. 

I have a sheep doing roofing over at my house.

Come and drop in. We'll put on Zeppelin and eat cheddar cheese.

free energy and suffering

the free energy framework provides a really natural explanation for what suffering is. "good" vs "bad" feels like such a basic quality of subjective experience, but neuroscience says the material correlate is dopamine or opioidergic neuron firing or whatever. that doesn't make sense, it's way too arbitrary. in the active inference framework, suffering is exactly free energy. it's the same principle for any system. to the extent that the system is trying to assert that "it is the universe", and the rest of the universe is shooting that theory down, that's the subjective quality of suffering.

of course, the concept of a "system" is just something we lay down post hoc to try to understand. you can draw a boundary anywhere you want and call the inside a "system" (although this might get increasingly pointless for weird boundaries). and then our concept of "suffering" would match up with the free energy of that "system".

this is a nice explanation for what happens in addiction, i think. when you look at the system-boundary around your relatively shallow ego, free energy actually decreases when you take drugs (or do whatever addictive behavior), because the drugs help this shallow system to live in a more isolated dream, where it's not exposed to the truth of the rest of the world which it's denying. but simultaneously, if you look at the system-boundary around some deeper identity of the individual, the drugs are making things worse -- creating more suffering. so at the same moment, there's either more or less suffering depending on what system-boundary you're considering.

inconsistencies

whether particular beliefs are inconsistent depends on your model of the world. fundamentally all beliefs must be inconsistent in some way because they're just partial truths. evolution in general, i think, is the process of steadily burning away these inconsistencies when they're forced to interact with each other. or in another sense, the inconsistencies remain (since, after all, they are what manifestation is), but their reconciliation also exists (which itself is another kind of inconsistency). so depending on how you look at it, more-and-more "stuff"/form is being created, or more-and-more "stuff"/form is being burned away to leave what it originally was, truth.

the transition from not-life to life

Q: do you think the "no-life" to "life" transition... that first step to the first living cell.... was a bigger and more complex step than all of the evolution of lifeforms that has happened since?

A: the free energy way of looking at life suggests that, 1) there isn't any kind of border between life and not-life. homeostatic dynamics arise within all systems, and just progressively increase in richness when possible. there were probably lots of intermediate steps between autocatalytic RNA sets and modern "cells". and 2) each additional step is only meaningful in the context that it arose in. the organizational level of, e.g. what we call "life" is just the tip of an iceberg of systems dynamics. the right way to think of the non-living world isn't as a static or dead -- it has its own rich dynamics, upon which the steps toward life are just little nudgings that reorganize those dynamics.

extending science to mind, heart, and spirit

this kind of science is fundamentally a bit different from classic science, for at least three reasons:
1) observations may be internal rather than external. in science, i do an experiment and i see that the litmus paper turns blue. then you do the same experiment and you see that the paper turns blue. we talk to each other, and we agree that we observed the same thing. but what if the experiment is to meditate for one year, and the observation is whether i feel calm? it's harder to agree on what we mean, because these internal observations are nuanced and deeply coupled to the act of perception itself that looks at them.
2) observations require more practice to see. we can never see the real world, only the inside of our own brains. if we "see" a particular phenomenon, like "a chair" or "an act of bravery", this means we have a predictive model that hasn't yet been shot down by the sensory evidence. but we can only see things that we have predictive models for. if caveman witnesses a traffic jam, he won't see "a traffic jam". at best he might be able to recognize that each "car" is an autonomous unit. likewise, autistic people probably can't see "extracting oneself from an awkward social situation", yet for other people this is as clear as "a chair". in a science of spirituality, observations of things like "mindfulness" would require the observer to actually have the predictive models for the things being observed, which requires a lot of experience and practice.
3) finally, these experiments might require people with strongly developed compassion and mindfulness to perform the manipulations, for example to provide therapy to psychopaths. such people are rare, and it's difficult to identify them.

when i got back from the airport last night, everything was closed (the 26th, "boxing day", is a holiday in britain), so i ate at subway. in the middle of my sandwich, a young employee came up to my table and said, "you have to move in 30 seconds". i was like, "what?". he said, "you can't sit here now, the chairs have to be moved". my first reaction was, ok, i see what you mean, but you're being really rude about it. i was preparing to be a dick back to him, but then i looked at him and it struck me that he seemed like he might have asperger's. for him, it's just a mechanical job: move the customers so he can move the chairs. he knows when he needs to move the chairs (i.e., 30 seconds from now), and i'm in his way. so i collected my luggage and as i was leaving, i looked in his eyes, gave him a smile and said "have a good evening" as warmly as i could. this is on the theory that no matter how weirdly the brain is wired, there's something human inside most of us, which you can find if you look hard enough. and it felt like there was something in him that responded to being treated nicely. probably he normally gets very bad reactions from people, and this just reinforces his isolation. in this sense, mental illness is a deeply social phenomenon, involving interpersonal feedback loops.

but what i think is even more interesting about this is why i decided not to be a dick to him. it was because i thought "he has asperger's, so he needs some special help". but the really important thing is this: *anybody* who's being a dick to you, needs special help.

100 years ago, we didn't know about autism or schizophrenia. naturally, people with these mental illnesses would do things that hurt us (i.e., rudeness, socially inappropriate behavior, violence, etc). and our reaction was to label them as fools, people of low moral character, imbeciles, etc. we would lock them up or even execute them for their crimes.

now, we recognize that it's an illness and they need help. but the point is that there's nothing magical about our current diagnostic categories. in another 100 years, we'll have probably identified the neural underpinnings of psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and even the things that make people commit mass killings. then, rather than saying, "you're fundamentally a bad person and you don't deserve another chance", we'll say, "at the core you're a human being, you're struggling with extraordinary suffering, and we'll do everything we can to help".

but even right now, if we want to, we can act based on this general understanding. when someone does something bad, they are the ones who are hurt the most. the suffering that a victim feels is nothing compared to the suffering that the criminal feels. i know this from my own experience-- doing something bad arises from a deep suffering. it's the exact opposite of being kind to yourself. and having done the bad thing, it becomes even harder to admit this weakness to yourself, because you have to take responsibility for what you've done. in the people who commit mass killings, i think this guilt is locked away so deeply that they literally feel like they would die if they let themselves feel it.

"Let me be thankful, first, because he never robbed me before; second, because although he took my purse, he did not take my life; third, because although he took what I possessed, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed." -- Matthew Henry

bootstrapping and pirsig's quality

so, i don't really believe in good and bad (although of course they are real in some senses); phenomena just happen. but my closest thing to having an orienting principle is something like pirsig's "quality". the closest thing to "should" is that we should follow our consciences, act truly, and this is quality. (as a side note, most of these things, like "should", just depend a lot on the context and have a lot of different aspects to their meaning. it's perfectly reasonable to say you should work hard, shouldn't hurt people, etc.)

but my question is, how does bootstrapping fit in? what if you're shy, and if you act as your true self, you don't get many people interacting with you. but having more social interactions facilitates your own growth. so you temporarily stray from your conscience. and then you come back and find that you have a deeper understanding of yourself.

i guess my best answer right now is that you should take a more direct approach of being your true self throughout, not using bootstrapping.

maybe the deeper problem comes because it's not so easy to act truly all the time. the brain is just molecules, and like any other robot, we're following the determinism of the universe, according to how we're set up.

any notions of "deciding" what to do are pretty fuzzy and look different from different perspectives. so there may be times when you use bootstrapping because you do, or something else that looks sort of like boostrapping, or maybe it's not clear in some senses, or from some "perspectives" (which themselves are just molecules going through some movements), what acting truly is. bootstrapping happens, and buddha breathes. there's a real breakdown between form and content.

it's at the heart of your life

What do you say we make apple juice and fax it to each other.

necrophilia is anesthesia

Success Reported Using Fetal Tissue to Repair a Brain - NYTimes, 1992

white shores, and beyond- a far green country under a swift sunrise

the body

addiction

How can we reconcile the psychiatric and neurophysiological concepts of addiction with the more general Buddhist idea of addiction (attachment to things that temporarily let you avoid seeing your true nature)?

Being addicted to something means you're doing it to avoid something else. On some level you know it's wrong (not bringing real peace and happiness), but you do it anyway. Procrastination. Distraction. Is this the same as drugs of abuse? Say I have a compulsion to take drugs. What would happen if I didn't take drugs? I don't know.

Or say I am afraid my body will fail if I stop distracting myself. It won't really. I can understand this if I really think it through. But a lot of the time I don't want to. I'm afraid of it. The defense and safety comes from a self-delusion and I intuitively recognize that once I start to let it go, it will fall apart. I want to have my head in the sand. But at the same time I deeply crave something that I'm not getting.

An article said we get a boost of dopamine when we distract ourselves. So how does dopamine fit into the psychological theory?

I guess we do something about the pain that we know how to fix.

I've used cellular automata as a thinking metaphor for how life could emerge from the Universe. If you had a large enough CA grid, starting random, you'd be guaranteed to get any possible structure. So if there are any structures that can persist and replicate, you should see them appear and start to dominate the grid.

1) This makes me think you would want a CA rule that didn't generally collapse randomness to nothingness or static structures. For example, Conway's rules on a random grid produce mostly empty space along with some bricks, blinkers, and occasional gliders. But in the Universe, even where you don't have life, you have interesting and complex stuff going on, possibly analogous to Wolfram's Rule 30.

2) In the Universe, we don't know how life started, but it seems like there might have been a fairly smooth progression of complexity. Subatomic particles, hydrogen, heavier elements, simple molecules, nucleotides, RNA, etc. This differs from the "rely on extreme luck in the midst of a flat background" vision of CA. Even something like Rule 30 that doesn't flatten everything still doesn't produce stages of increasing depth. Maybe a CA would look like the Universe if you zoomed out (spatially and temporally) 10^10 so the "extremely lucky" structures were common and interacted with each other. If so, is the enormous amount of empty space and time between structures somehow necessary?

half halt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_halt

I was in a waiting room and I saw an article in "Dressage" magazine about this equestrian maneuver. From all the diagrams and explanation, I couldn't tell what a "half halt" is supposed to be. I can't even tell from the wiki video.

Here's the thing. I bet if you ride horses for a little bit, you "find" this maneuver. Even if you don't know what it's called, you recognize that when you "do" a certain thing, the horse responds in a certain way, and this is like a discrete entity. You can tell when it's working or not working. Sometimes you might try to do a half-half; seemingly doing the exact same action that you've always done, but for some reason it doesn't work, you don't get that response.

Like in Go, the ideas of moyo or thickness or sente. Once you've played a bit, you know exactly what they are, but it's pretty damn hard to explain to someone who doesn't play; even if you give a perfectly good explanation, they just don't *see* it, they can't see it on the board. They have to see the thing itself first, without a name; then you can point at that thing and name it.

It's a discrete entity because there's some strength to it as apart from other possible ways the sequence of events could unfold. It's amazing in a way that things like this exist at all.

Another example is the kinds of interactions you can have with people. You can just feel that it's "this" kind of thing, 99% of the time you don't have a word for it, but you recognize it very clearly. And artists communicate this shit in sweet ways.

It blows my mind that we can communicate this stuff. Even giving a name to something like the "half halt". What *IS* it?!?!? The rider does something and the horse responds in some way and this influences the rider... and all of this is fluid and is totally dependent on the surrounding context.

It's easier for me to have this amazed feeling about something that I *don't* understand; it's harder to have it about something that I deal with routinely. That's one reason it's awesome to learn new things. You can have this vague idea of "what if things fit together in this kind of way that I can't wrap my head around", and then someone has a word for it.

sputnik means traveling companion but it stands for the loneliness of outer space

from the beginning, not a thing is

somehow this is an awesome sentence to me

maybe one of the highest things to aspire to is giving hope to other people. i have never thought of myself as influencing people particularly. but i was just thinking about how i am going through some tough shit and trying to stay mindful, always trying to recognize if i'm just anesthetizing myself, and sort of keeping in mind the deepest goal or direction (following my conscience, as i've thought of it). and at the same time having a meta-interest in this process, which may actually be a hindrance sometimes, but it means that i can maybe vaguely try to explain it. so when other people are going through distress, i can maybe be more aware of it, and even though my thoughts sound like total nonsense when i try to explain it, maybe somehow people are benefiting from that.

systems that are rich and ready

Drop a grain of sand into a supersaturated solution and watch complex crystals spontaneously form. Give an engineer two words of inspiration and watch him build an intricate machine. Inject a pathogen into the blood and watch the immune system build new antibodies and make new cells.

Many systems contain a lot of "potential energy" in this sense. What seems like a small input triggers an elaborate set of processes. With your small input, you "caused" the reaction, but a lot of the "cause" is actually the prior state of the system.

There is an important distinction between this and gating. For example, turning on your computer is a simple action that invokes a massively complex process. But there's no informational input. The computer will boot exactly the same way regardless of small variations in how you press the button. The key to what I'm thinking of is that the system receiving the input is not just waiting for some "Go" signal to perform a predetermined function. Instead it's rich and ready for a huge possible variety of inputs, each of which will engage the resources of the system in a different way.

drugs

i was just reading experience reports on erowid about mirtazapine. it reminded me of how TOTALLY AWESOME drugs are. there is so much SPACE to explore in the dimensions of interior consciousness. not diving into this is like being color-blind.

intelligence

when jeff hawkins spoke at sfn, he made the point that humans receive a lot of training before they can do anything intelligent. there's just so much stuff in the world that you have to be exposed to a lot before you can start to sort it out. i looked at the numenta website just now and i saw that they still haven't made any significant progress on AI. their program can recognize a sailboat, as long as the sail is up and it's oriented the right way and so forth. then i thought, to recognize other configurations, the program would have to have some deep knowledge about sailboats and how they work, not just pixels. so it would probably have to be trained on other kinds of data besides pictures of sailboats. then i wondered if this could actually be an advantage in some way, because of the repeating nature and scale-invariance of patterns in the universe. for example, you can attach a mast to a sailboat like you attach a methyl group to a carbon ring.

the more direct the experience, the harder to talk about... why?

i was thinking about "brain freeze", an expression people sometimes use when they can't think of something. i wanted to ask, when people use that expression, what is the actual experience they're describing? is it just applied rhetorically in retrospect if you happen to not be on the ball? or is there some really distinct feeling, like a brain-state movement? i was thinking that it's kind of hard to phrase this question in a way so someone could understand what i'm trying to ask. how do you talk about "brain-state movements"? "now it feels like this...."

and then i was thinking that, paradoxically, the most abstract (distanced from direct experience) things are the easiest to talk about. in the limit, you have formal systems that can be perfectly described with no ambiguity, and no one has ever experienced a formal system. on the other end of the spectrum, looking at a block of wood. it's pretty hard to describe the essence of that experience.

self-image

if you have a fantasy image of yourself being an awesome person, then you have to defend that image if something suggests it might be false. if you have a fantasy image of yourself being worthless, then everything bad confirms this image. what if you have no real image of yourself?

using abstract information to update concretely-learned rules

For more than two years, I regularly drank the tap water in lab. Then I learned from the building management that it is not potable because in some other labs the same water system is hooked up to equipment that can potentially create backflow (although there are guards against this, it's considered a significant risk). So I stopped drinking the water.

I probably drank the water a thousand times, and I never suffered any ill effects. Just going by my experience, I'd have to infer a very small probability that continuing to drink the water would cause harm (leaving aside the possibility of a cumulative health hazard- e.g. increased cancer risk). If I were a cave-man king drinking from a mountain stream, I would have long ago stopped requesting my servant to test the water for me.

But I incorporated the abstract knowledge of an invisible threat into my behavior. It's as if I were watching someone play Russian roulette. They pull the trigger fifty times and no bang. I shouldn't be too worried about squeezing one on myself. On the other hand, if someone shows me a schematic of the gun, and on the inside there's a digital counter ticking down from fifty-one, I will be more worried.

In particular, the abstract information gave me a new Markov model of the world. Before I heard from building management, my belief was that contaminants in the water would either always or never be present. Therefore, each incident of not being poisoned reinforced my belief that I would never be poisoned. However, the new information revealed that there was always a small but finite chance of toxic backflow.

I wonder how this kind of learning fits into our learning processes in general. It's always seemed mysterious to me how we can extract deep Markov structure from essentially binary environmental feedback.

binding rhythms and the realms of being

1. EEG rhythms change in concentration, wakefulness, REM, and dreamless sleep.
2. The states of consciousness- waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep- correspond to the realms of being- gross, subtle, causal.
3. Representation in the brain may be at least partly implemented by "binding rhythms", where a set of neurons (which may be distributed over a large physical space in the brain) become synchronized and thereby act as a functional unit.

So if delta sort of corresponds to the witness, maybe that's just the pure fact of representation (which is what creates subject/object), a slow rhythm involving many neurons that would in waking be separately representing various forms.

static/dynamic

i wonder if self/other is related to static/dynamic.

drugs and mental rigidity

In 2002, I started having anxiety attacks. Their most potent trigger was drugs. I had my first one after combining Wellbutrin, Ritalin, codeine, Benadryl, and marijuana. My second one was from yohimbine. Then a caffeine pill. I finally figured out that the drugs were triggering these things after the fourth attack (from smoking pot). After that, I would sometimes have spontaneous attacks without any drugs, but drugs were the best trigger.

Why did the drugs start to have this effect on me? Before 2002, I was convinced that I could take any amount of any mind-altering drug, short of a physically toxic dose, without ill effects. I didn't respect people who "freaked out" on hallucinogens. I had taken insane combinations, like 700mg of dextromethorphan, 500mg of diphenhydramine, and as many balloons of nitrous as I could stay conscious for. At worst, I would have some restless energy toward the end of the trip.

I still have no idea what changed biologically. But subjectively, I realized that one cause of my anxiety was an increase in my mental rigidity. As a drug starts to kick in, it puts pressure on your mind-state on many levels. In the old days, before anxiety, coming up was a great feeling, and I would melt into it. In a lot of ways, I wouldn't even be the same person while tripping. The entire framework of my mind could be pulled fluidly by the drug.

When I was 19, my mind started resisting the pull. I don't know why exactly, but it was related to my social development. I feel like I have a lot more to say about this, but it's not coming to me now.

being normal

benoit vs basal ganglia

I just had an idea that is too amazingly simple.

I was reading more in Supreme Doctrine. One of Benoit's metaphors is "training". He imagines the mind as a horse being ridden by a horseman. The horse is sort of like "subconscious", although not exactly. It's more like what you do. The horseman periodically (every other moment, or with long stretches in between) interrupts the horse and evaluates it, good or bad. This training is motivated by the idea that "heaven is just around the corner" -- if I can just get/change/accomplish whatever image, my fundamental distress will be solved. Benoit points out that the training itself isn't bad; for example, training your horse is what lets you develop the understanding that leads to enlightenment. In fact, if you try to eliminate the training, thinking that it is the root of your distress (which is, in a sense, true), then you're just training yourself not to train, which is at least as bad!

Anyway, my thought was, what if that is the basal ganglia loop?!? The brain is training itself through the dopamine signal (and probably lots of other signals). Maybe the horseman is cortical control or something else, but the key is that idea of the online training loop. That would suggest that this system is close to whatever in the brain actually is the root of distress. I know I'm getting way ahead of myself and this isn't well-formed at all. There's got to be something here, though.

don't lay a finger on life

another thing with the cognitive scaffolding

I just thought of another purpose for cognitive scaffolding. Cognitive is periodically going to ask, "what's up?", and if it doesn't get a satisfactory answer, it will get agitated and start messing around. For cognitive to keep quiet, it needs an explanation of the situation in its own terms.

Participled out?

Noun yourself.

cognitive scaffolding for non-cognitive development

Here is another idea.

Not all personal development is cognitive. But maybe cognitive processes can facilitate non-cognitive development in some cases. An example would be where cognitive simply knows that it's not the whole picture. Or cognitive can get feedback and learn which of its patterns are leading into good transcognitive states.

Because cognitive is doing this stuff, it either stops itself from fucking up other processes, or actively helps growth, maybe by remembering to "do" a spiritual practice. (I love how cognitive thinks it is "doing" :-) ... not that it's not :-) ...)

This might be related to good kid's stories, which have deep messages whose motivation can't be understood by the kids; yet the pithy statement of the message sticks with the kid and guides them to absorb experiences that help to flesh out the motivation.

this is normal

i just had a weird thought. i don't know if it will make any sense if i try to explain it. i was staring at my lab computer box and not really thinking anything. i drifted into the mental situation where i "feel my mind" for any drug effects. that part is hard to explain, too, but it's sort of like a particular "location" in my mind that i can probe to check out what my overall state is like. it feels almost tangible. this whole explanation makes the process sound very concrete, but it's really normally pretty subtle, and it's maybe even something i'm doing without thinking about it sometimes. anyway, the weird thought was, "no, i'm not on any drugs; this is normal". this is what normal feels like.

email to abolitionist-society.com

I was reading through the objections to the Hedonistic Imperative (http://hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon4.htm), and I thought of one that isn't listed.

To preface this, I am really excited about your ideas. I'm so glad that there are people thinking like this and working to make substantive changes in the world. I'd just like to hear your take on the following issue.

What is suffering? Drugs like opiates or MDMA can make me feel great, warm, comfortable, loved. But in the back of my mind there can still be some "existential distress", like the "big problem" of my existence is still unanswered. [You might reply that solving this big problem just requires a more thorough re-engineering of my brain, but please keep reading...]

What if what we normally call suffering is actually part of the development/evolution process, and it's not intrinsically bad, but rather one side of a yin/yang-type dualism in the manifest world? A lot of times when I force myself to closely examine subjective experiences that I thought were "bad", I find out that they aren't actually bad; it was mostly my fear or avoidance that was causing me distress.

Sometimes it's when I feel most "existentially distressed" that I make the most internal progress. The distress forces me to address and open myself to parts of myself/reality that I otherwise wouldn't.

States of happiness or well-being are states of the self. Buddhism claims that suffering is caused by attachment, or wanting. When you feel an emptiness and you try to solve it by seeking the thing you think will cure it, you distract your mind. This process is actually what generates the self. But if you feel the emptiness and let it be what it is, then part of the self dissipates, and what's left is more enlightened. If we anesthetize ourselves against what is "bad" on the relative plane, then our selfs are reinforced.

Some people say "Love has no opposite". I think that means that although there are "good" and "bad" in the manifest world, the superior principle through which the universe is unfolding is neither "good" nor "bad" and has no dualism or opposite. If this is true, then in some sense the abolitionist project is already complete!

Now, to be fair, bad experiences clearly exist nowadays, and I think most people would agree that we should work to reduce suffering in the world. But I wonder about the difference between "working to reduce suffering" and "working to reduce the capacity for suffering". If someone has a broken leg, you set the bone, but if someone lost a family member, you support them and show them compassion as they heal. Through the healing process, you and that person both grow, and you grow closer to each other.

One more thought. "Bad" subjective experiences may actually be a constitutive part of development and growth. Just to throw out a crazy idea, suppose a network of neurons has learned a certain set of inputs pretty well. Now the network is exposed to new inputs and wants to change itself so it can generalize to both the old and the new. There may be an unsettled period between stably representing the old and stably representing both. (Something like an increased temperature parameter for the network.) What if that unsettled period *is* the material correlate of the subjective experience of negativity?

out of addiction (a hopeful hypothesis)

say you're addicted to doing X (X could be an external or internal behavior).

stages:
1. you "believe" that X will make you feel better. believe is in quotes because you haven't really looked at it yet; it's more of a reflexive belief.
2. you recognize that X actually doesn't satisfy that deep craving for something that it was supposed to satisfy. in fact, you may recognize that X even makes you feel bad. but you keep doing X because on some level you don't apprehend how it is hurting you.
3. you internalize and integrate the realization that X makes you feel bad and doesn't relieve your emptiness.

I love the ontology of the universe, including appointment-scheduling people!!

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

dalí

"I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly."
-- Salvador Dalí

word to the way thoughts affect other interior stuff :-)

energy

In the classical view, one of the big drives in evolution has been getting enough energy for the organism. If you can't get enough food, you die. Of course, other things are bad for your fitness, too, like getting eaten or not finding a mate. But your energy input also limits your other qualities. Organisms have to balance their energy investment between muscles, brains, reproduction, and other things. If you had enough energy, you could outrun all your predators and prey, develop elaborate mate-attraction anatomy, develop super sensory organs to hyper-process every modality, and not have to compromise anything.

Nowadays, humans in the developed world essentially have access to unlimited food. The problem is that our biology doesn't know what to do with all that energy. Enzymes have ranges of substrate concentrations that they work in; gene transcription has programmed ranges of outputs; and most importantly, the structure doesn't exist to use the energy. For example, if you could always count on plenty of ATP being available in the cell, you could manufacture a new protein that would do something awesome (like shooting X-ray beams to kill enemies).

Throwing a lot of energy at a system doesn't immediately make it work better. All it does is provide a level of support so if the system invents a new structure that requires energy, that structure won't necessarily fail.

Same with people. You can't improve people by immersing them in love; but if you do provide that energy, they won't be clobbered down when they let go of some of their defenses.

relationship between a thing and the things that are about that thing

Two posts ago I talked about how the subjective experience of chlorine is closely linked to the actual thing of chlorine itself.

That principle may hold for the representations that people hold of each other, too. This relates to the idea that "souls" and "reincarnation" could be partially explained by the way our minds are distributedly represented across many other systems, especially the people who know us.

the windowlicker characters are transdimensional aliens

You simple-ass nigga! You better roll on!

How is a perception of a thing connected to what that thing is?

There's a question: is a perception just a superficial image in our mental processes, or is it directly linked to the essence or reality of the perceived thing?

I just thought of an example of this. Chlorine has a distinctive smell, like in bleach or swimming pools. Why does it smell that way? Because it binds to olfactory receptors that connect to certain parts of the brain. If you took a normal brain and rewired the olfactory receptors for chlorine to the parts of the brain that normally smell ginger, then chlorine would smell like ginger.

This makes it seem like there's nothing meaningful about the subjective experience we have when we smell chlorine. You could just rewire a few neurons and the subjective experience would be different -- so how could we claim that the subjective experience is deeply linked to the reality of chlorine?

Here's my new idea: it's not just "chance" that made those neurons normally wire to the particular part of the brain that creates the chlorine-smell experience. Chlorine olfactory receptors have a particular structure that allows them to bind to chlorine. Their structure also determines how they interact with other molecules, like axon guidance molecules and other developmental signals.

That's how the meaning gets in there. The reality of chlorine is the way it interacts with things (on any level). The things that interact with it are configured in a way that reflects that reality.

getting better

If you want to get good at something, you have to realize that initially you're going to suck. When your first attempts are failures, it's easy to think, "I'm just not good at this". Instead, think about what specifically sucked. What do other people do that works better? Whom can you learn from? Seek out that knowledge and then try to apply it. The most frustrating time is when you see yourself applying the ideas and still not getting great results. There's some mysterious pattern that the gurus can channel and you can't. Keep practicing. Now when you look at what other people are doing, you'll see that some people are actually following pretty simple patterns; you just didn't see it before. Keep watching what the masters do. They're still doing something you're not doing. Find it and try to apply it. You're already in the 95th percentile and many people will look up to your skills. That's as far as I've gotten.

principles

Some things are not to be fucked with.

Extension: Everything is to be fucked with, but only at the right time and place.

social man&woman

Social interactions are not what I thought they were. We are incredibly far from being the rational free agents that we sometimes imagine.

articulation vs codification

To articulate something is literally to give it joints. We say, "he articulated his idea well" to mean he clearly explained the details of the idea and their relationships to one another.

Imagine a shapeless blob. It has essentially no internal dimensions. Add a skeleton with joints. Now there are many internal dimensions, or degrees of freedom. The possibility space of the blob's movement has been compartmentalized.

I like to think of all development as a kind of articulation. Wilber says evolution is a combination of differentiation and integration. Differentiation creates new parts or details, and integration combines those parts together into a system. That's like giving a thing joints. Each detail is a compartmentalization.

The way I think about articulation, it's a process embedded in the context-dependent, scale-invariant fabric of reality.

Codification, on the other hand, is translation from non-formal to formal. You start with "an idea" (a fractally fuzzy entity nested in holarchy) and generate an algorithm or a set of propositions.

In a sense, the codification itself isn't actually articulation, because the original idea isn't getting jointed; it's getting projected into a flat space. However, the process of codification probably causes an articulation of the idea, because you have to understand it well to formalize it. This is sort of like epiphenomenalism, or a backwards version of Platonism. The real world has a dynamic flat mirror of "perfect forms" or formalisms.

search

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/search_20_vs_tr.php

I was just reading this article about "Search 2.0". What I think we need to improve search is deeper syntax in the search box. Right now the best we have is boolean queries ("this AND that", "this OR that"). A next step could be syntactic categories. For example,
1. Encyclopedic (what is a thing, or how does a process work)
2. Personal (information about any person: their blogs, photos, etc)
3. Specific data (how many civilians have died in Iraq)
4. Realtime data (weather, game scores, etc)
5. Data sets for living (bus routes, maps, showtimes, etc)
6. Meta (information about the system)

Some of these categories overlap, and each one could be broken down. Once we figure out the best syntactic abstractions, they could be combined into a rich grammar. For example, "realtime metadata relevant to a particular person" (e.g. what types of searches does that person make).

The search system should also perform some data analysis. For example, suppose I had the question, "What are the major theories about JFK's assassination; what kind of people subscribe to these theories; what news articles have been written about the theories; what proportion of magazines have run these articles; and what is the correlation between readership of a magazine and the number of articles?". The search system could dynamically compute the answers to these questions, based on the built-in syntactic concepts.

I am proud of humanity for having the Internet. :-)

life after death

Another thing Beraki wrote about was the life of the spirit independent of the body. As religions say, the righteous person is rewarded in Heaven. It occured to me that the process I described in the previous post (which is, maybe, Aurobindo's "involution") may be the reason.

The person who does the "will of God", who works hard to live rightly, has faith, and invests herself in all her actions -- the person who has purpose -- also may be a deeper holon. If your Self is more deeply reflective of the Universe, then maybe the Universe is also more deeply reflective of your Self. The Universe would contain you in a more profound sense. When you die, your spirit would live on more fully. For that matter, your spirit probably lives more fully even before you die :-)

"the image of god"

The Bible says that humans are created in the image of God. I ran across this today. I met a guy named Beraki from Eritrea (just north of Ethiopia). He showed me some stuff he had written. He used that phrase, and it gave me an idea.

If you believe Wilber, some holons are deeper than others. They integrate more; they have a bigger purview. The human is probably a good example of a deep holon (from our perspective, maybe the deepest -- that gets into a whole other awesome topic :-).

As holons become deeper, they embody more of the process of the Universe. Not just because they contain more elements of the Universe, but also because the way in which those elements are put together reflects the way that elements get put together by the Principle of things (as Benoit would say). Deeper holons have had more "time" (maybe time doesn't need to be in quotes; that's a whole other awesome topic :-) to absorb the nature of the Universe.

Everything is "created in the image of God", because everything arises from the Universe. But deeper holons, like humans, more richly and deeply embody the image of God.

building altruism through a combination of selfishness and generalization

"Do to others as you would have them do to you."

Do a good job of rinsing out the glassware because it might be you using it next; and wouldn't you like other people to do the same thing?

Maybe this is where altruism comes from. We want things to be good for ourselves, and then we start identifying with other people, so we want things to be good for "them". Selfishness is the only motive, but the subject is displaced. Maybe this is how true altruism is born.

It's interesting how it's sort of a habit. Once you get into the pattern of doing altruistic things, it just comes naturally. And the really interesting thing is how it's always a choice. You can be in the habit of being nasty, but you always have the choice of letting the other person take the close parking spot. If you can recognize that choice, you can be the way you want to be.

the skin of a system

Here's another interesting generalization about systems.

A meta-stable system has a pattern that it more-or-less preserves despite a varying environment. However, the substrate is in flux. For example, our bodies maintain their integrity even though:
- subatomic particles quantumly jump in and out of space
- atoms and molecules recycle continuously, especially through breath and food
- cells die and are replaced

How can you keep a system in rich communion with its context, without losing the pattern of the system? Why isn't there breakdown along the edges that propagates inward to destroy the system?

Every meta-stable system has a skin. The cell membrane is the quintessential example. The cell NEEDS to be in flux with its environment, but that flux also NEEDS to be regulated. So there has to be a border patrol. Otherwise, the cytoplasm would take on too many of the characteristics of the external world, to the loss of its identity (in this case, primarily through diffusion). The border patrol is, in some senses, its own entity, with a purpose aligned to the system. It masks the lever points of the system, so they can't be pulled willy-nilly by the external world.

Countries have skin, cultures have skin, even minds have skin. If the mind were a pure representational mirror of the world, the mind wouldn't exist as a separate entity, and it would have no purpose.

entitygenesis

You can't get new concepts out of an algorithm at the depth of the algorithm.

For example, this article suggests that video games can perpetually "self-upgrade" if they are designed around procedural rather than fixed data. To some extent we've already seen this: when you upgrade your computer, you can turn up the graphical options in many games and get a better rendering. This principle could be extended a long ways, by adding more "scaling parameters". Designers could be creative and make these parameters govern abstract elements of the game.

But the problem they will always be faced with is that you won't get anything fundamentally new. There won't be any new depth of realism. Suppose "number of polygons tessellating a sphere" is one of the scaling parameters. That sphere will get really smooth. But if the game uses monochrome lighting, the sphere will never be lit in color.

Next -- ways to get new things.

Take a program that generates a string of 64 random bits. Once in a while, this program will produce something "meaningful", like digits of pi, or my name. However, these outputs don't reflect a stable organization of the system. The algorithm, by itself, never generates a new attractor basin, a new focusing of probabilities: a new entity.

Now imagine coupling the random program with a "filter" program that squelches all but a few meaningful outputs. The conjunction of these two systems is now a generator for meaningful outputs.

In general, by compositing two systems with their own concepts, you get a third system with its own concepts.

It's true that you can build a Universal Turing Machine inside of Conway's Game of Life. Then again, you can build a UTM from a pile of tubing and valves. The concept of the UTM doesn't exist in the cellular automaton, just like it doesn't exist in the tubing, before you put it there. And even the UTM doesn't have the concepts for any of the programs that it's capable of running.

The critical counter to all of this is evolution. If all concepts have to be transferred from somewhere else, then where did they originally come from? The answer is: whatever was stable. We can witness one step of evolution in the Game of Life, when gliders and blinkers and blocks are born.

Something else I've been thinking about -- all entities are non-linearities (and vice versa). Here's an example of building a new entity by compositing two systems:

The local maximum at x=0 in the product function is a new stable point for the state of the system.

Squishy context-dependent meaning

"Any treasured theory can be made to fit any evidence, as long as you're willing to adjust enough auxiliary hypotheses."
-spetey, Slashdot

This is an awesome observation. I love this way of thinking about the squishy context-dependent meaning of entities.

word.

Melodies from Mars is an aperature.

depth of pattern in art, niceness and nastiness

Let's start with the idea that the mental states we like are the ones that are somehow "internally consistent" or non-conflicting. Mental states that contain disharmonious representations, on the other hand, cause us mental pain. Maybe this is connected to energy efficiency of representation in the brain, but that's a tangent.

We like art because it promotes self-consistent sets of representations. Take music as an example. In the simplest case, just listening to something like a single tone occupies part of your attention. But lots of other parts of your mind aren't engaged in processing that tone. So the tone isn't extraordinarily pleasing. But if you add some variation, then more processing is required. The specific types of variations that will engage more processing depend on the listener, although there are lots of commonalities across humans.

For music to be profoundly awesome, it has to engage huge amounts of your mind. Most of the mind doesn't deal with low-level sound patterns (e.g. the specific mathematical characteristics of a waveform); it deals with human things, like people and stories and feelings and ideas. That's why great songs have complexity on many levels - including sounds that evoke higher-order sensory representations (like the way a sound of glass breaking creates a certain kind of imagery), and even things like lyrics.

To me, this is connected to things like syncopation. For example, I love the title track on Toxicity because every rhythmic pattern is punctuated by another pattern. Of course this is listener-specific again. Some people might be awe-struck by Bach's Goldberg Variations or Nancarrow's player piano pieces, but other people just perceive it as a homogenic wash of notes. For the latter person, the pattern of the music isn't being articulated on the lower level, so those parts aren't available for synthesis/representation on a higher level.

Another thing is that the brain is good at collapsing things that have any repetition. So a good piece of music can't continue to engage a lot of your mind with a single set of patterns. They have to change. For example, in movies with a surprise ending, your brain has "figured out" the pattern of the first part of the movie, and then the end part forces new representation relative to the "figured out" state of representation.

Any given "part" of your mind can only represent "one thing" at once. So when a piece of art coordinates many parts of your mind to represent it, much of your mind is brought into harmonious representation.