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.