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. :-)