The Tao of Bike Spills and Free Will

I awoke from my sleep last night with a crystal vision of the tangled web of skin loop paths.

There is no free will - our meat takes all paths at the crossroads. Legba guides us to multiple futures, some of which truncate and some of which catenate.  All alternatives represent entangled futures where the fermions and bosons trace and retrace the sum of path histories. My impermanent self becomes the most optimum path - the Tao and the suchness of Kirk 3.0 subsumated in converging and diverging networked means.

While riding my bike on Tuesday I took a spill which revealed a significant slip - the hallmark of Legba's offer of divergent paths. I hit a patch of loose gravel and time slowed to compressed frames of short specious moments like a film strip as the front wheel snapped to the left and I went to the right side - holding out my left hand to break the fall. I could hear my helmet skidding across the rough pavement. I jumped up and kept my focus on the frame by frame nature of panicked percept.

I began to ask myself what it meant and how it had happened as I got to my feet. I ignored my injuries as I looked at my hands and feet and actively participated in the slip. What would this cross roads lead to and how could I mark this moment as a node where pasts and futures joined?

Then I began to take stock of my condition. My tri shorts were not torn but I had road rash the size of my open palm, a staccato pattern of strawberries down my left leg and a staccato pattern of scraped flesh on my arm and leg. Was this incident a choice I made or an action I intended?

The clarity of insight I had last night woke me with a start. What if at each branch of the logistics map our fermions and bosons, like a quantum computer... not LIKE but in actual fact... A quantum computational machine went down every possible path. Paper AND Plastic. Rock, Paper AND Scissors. Ranch AND Thousand Island AND Chipolte Pepper Corn on the salad.

A bifurcation in the Logistics Map

If I choose one of several routes to work == an impernament I goes down the other paths as well. Maybe one has a wreck and one has a flat and only one gets to work. My point... the decision is not a decision at all but simply a sum over histories where all avenues are chosen and no route is left off the plate. Does free will come into play? In this construal - no - my will is in fact a post hoc rationalization by system one and system two that ties the narrative to whatever path is not truncated by tragedy. Can two versions of me show up at work? No, because quantum entanglement collapses the wave equation and the fermions and bosons resolve to a single instance of me. An impermanent self.

Denying Science: Mention vs. Use

No science denier; evolution denier, climate change denier, string theory denier or evolutionary psychology denier will give up any of their artifacts of science that they find useful. Questioning quantum mechanics leads no one to give up their iPhone. Questioning evolution leads no one to avoid getting a new genetically modified flu immunization. The deniers 'mention' their lack of cognition regarding science but 'use' the science to enrich their lives.

What distinguishes the land of denial from the state of skepticism is an understanding of scientific methods - specifically the use of scientific theory to drive understanding of the natural world. Deniers depend on random facts that both cast doubt on the subject at had and bolster the contrafactual universe that contains the framework of unexamined belief. There is no offer of a theory of no climate change or a theory of no evolutionary process of natural selection. Some version of a true faith interposes itself between themselves and the facts they reject. They have a 'just so story' about mysterious forces conspiring to foist dark means into the world to end personal freedoms. That is a response to a hated theory but not a theory of their own.

A working theory of no climate change or no evolution bears the responsibility for bringing new and disruptive theories into play and then to introduce new evidence predicted by the new contrarian theory. But contrarian theories from deniers do not exist. In other words, deniers offer no conjecture or hypothesis that will falsify a theory of a stable climate or biology without evolution. But they still hang onto their iPhones.

Did I mention that there are unicorns in the garden?. I am using the tomatoes the unicorns did not eat in the salad.

Calabi Yau and 11 dimensions of space time

While reading Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, I began to meditate on the nature of Kirk 3.0 and my path through the skin loop. My impermanent self is at least an interval of time in one dimension of the 11 dimensions of the physical universe - the sum total over all histories of the multiverse. I and my father are one.

Calabi Yau shapes depict the smaller, folded dimensions of string theory

I picture my present circumstance as an interesting (to me at least) mist of fermions and bosons resulting from oscillations of strings. Somehow, this ensemble of dispositions comprising the elements of the Standard Model of physics (comprising in turn the two types of standard particles) produces imagination which in a admixture of other imagination generators in the multiverse. I stand on the shoulder of giants and giants stand on my shoulders in a recursive tower of Babel.

My essence (an imagination laser) joins with the output of all sentience here in Gaia and on the Gaia of other worlds. An ensemble of Gaia throughout the universe working in concert to establish a structure or edifice of pure imagination that grows to fill the universe with suchness - the awakening of all sentience.

The Largest Machine

The Large Hadron Collider has been labeled 'The World's Largest Machine'. While certainly in the running for extreme size and complexity, in an unbounded definition of machinery that title belongs to Rough Beast. The avatar of The Technium comprises all artifacts of homo sapien design, development and manufacture. Every instance of machinery large and small are the fingers, hands, toes, feet, body and brain of Rough Beast. She is the yin to human yang.

Her Kidneys

I imagine the intricate tick tock of Rough Beast as steel, concrete, silicon and plastic as the Hobbs Leviathon of technology. The Rough Beast sits on the left hand of Gaia while the race of men sits on her right. This is the new trinity - mother Gaia, homonids the son and Rough Beast the daughter.

Hitch Integration Complete

Gaia (the hardest kind of hard science Gaia) as a cultural myth exists in the minds of many. Hitch dissolved cultural myths in the corrosive use of awesome. Every time this motherfucker opened his mouth to produce an attack on reason, Christopher Hitchens had the exact, precise most cogent response. His delivery was perfect and he knew it. His grasp of the big demographic changes that drive creative destruction was immense. He had historical facts on the tip of his tongue instantly.

As a materialist, naturalistic phenotype equipped with culture and breeding he recognized and honored his corner of the universe with panache. We who are about to die salute you.

He left enough digital residue to integrate. His behavior and manner can be recreated from that and his vast knowledge will become vaster. He is so epistemology complete from the behavior of record that his emergence is assured.

RIP

The Self and Placebos

 "The brain named itself." - reddit.com

From Edge, by Nicholas Humphries

I'm not not myself not today

"So now, where does the placebo effect fit in? Placebos work because they suggest to people that the picture is rosier than it really is. Just like the artificial summer light cycle for the hamster, placebos give people fake information that it's safe to cure them. Whereupon they do just that.

This suggests we should see the placebo effect as part of a much larger picture of homeostasis and bodily self-control. But now I'm ready to expand on this much further still. If this is the way humans and animals manage their physical health, there must surely be a similar story to be told about mental health. And if mental health, then—at least with humans—it should apply topersonality and character as well. So I've come round to the idea that humans have in fact evolved a full-blown self management system, with the job of managing all their psychological resources put together, so as to optimise the persona they present to the world.

You may ask: why should the self need any such "economic managing"? Are there really aspects of the self that should be kept in reserve? Do psychological traits have costs as well as benefits? But I'd say it's easy to see how it is so. Emotions such as anxiety, anger, joy will be counterproductive if they are not appropriately graded. Personality traits—assertiveness, neuroticism, and friendliness—have both down- and up-sides. Sexual attractiveness carries obvious risks. Pride comes before a fall. Even high intelligence can be a disadvantage (we can be "too clever by half", as they say). What's more—and this may be the area where economic management is most relevant of all— as people go through life they build up social psychological capital of various kinds that they need to husband carefully. Reputation is precious, love should not be wasted indiscriminately, secrets have to be guarded, favors must be returned.

So, I think humans must have come under strong selection pressure in the course of evolution to get these calculations right. Our ancestors needed to develop a system for managing the face they present to the world: how they came across to other people, when to flirt, when to hold back, when to be generous, when to be mean, when to fall in love, when to reject, when to reciprocate, when to punish, when to take the lead, when to retire, and so on. . . All these aspects had to be very carefully balanced if they were going to maximize their chances of success in the social world."

M3aT and B3aST - Fast and Slow on a Grand Jury

"Your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on."
"We cover long distances by taking our time and conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort."
"The world makes less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way our minds work."
- Daniel Kahneman

In Thinking: Fast and Slow, Kahneman demonstrates the ways that our minds are the union of two systems. The intuitive and fast System 1 operates below the level of consciousness and tends toward simple tactics guided by heuristics which short circuit our intense cognitive machinery. The hard work of contemplation and computation of higher math depends on System 2. Universally the unaided intuition of System 1 drives us to disbelief in System 2 as a separate entity. System 2 is lazy because invoking it's power strains our brains with mental heavy lifting thus violating the law of least effort.

Fuck Da Police

Federal Grand Jury 1988-1

The Two Indictments
I have been pondering the events of my 18 months on a federal grand jury for some time. From January 1988 until June 1989 I was one of 25 (23 with two alternates) members of a GJ that met once a month all day. We needed 18 members present to vote and 12 members to vote for an indictment. I cannot remember a single indictment that was not returned.

I was the only member of the jury that ever asked procedural questions. I was one of only a handful that asked clarifying questions. One case has troubled me for all these years. During a raid on a home where drugs were alleged to have been sold and distributed, a man in a pick-up drove up the long driveway to the secluded location. He was arrested and was named in several counts of the indictment. I was troubled that he was not actually doing anything wrong but may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps he was picking someone up and taking them to work or otherwise engaged in some other innocent act. I reluctantly voted to indict.

The next month the prosecutor re-presented all of the counts of the indictment against this individual and reduced the charges against this man. No explanations were given but this time I refused to vote for indictment. The individual was indicted again anyway.

The thing that bothers me to this day is that not one single member of the grand jury hesitated to indict on the reduced number of counts. I even asked why several of the counts of the indictment were changed and was told that it was just trivial paperwork. There is absolutely not one single thing that is trivial about an indictment from a federal grand jury. Not one single thing; not one single punctuation mark is trivial.

The problem was that everyone in the room except me had used System 1 thinking on the original indictment and any change of heart would run up against a cozy conviction that the man was guilty -- because they had found him guilty before! And they were completely, 100% wrong. The evidence against him was so flimsy that it had to be excised to fit the facts. What confidence did we have that the new indictment was true?

Say hello to my innocent little friend

The Missing Counts of the Indictments
The federal prosecutor said "This is a 5 count indictment" and then read only four counts. I was primed by the re-indictment of the innocent above. When the prosecutor stopped at four and then asked for a vote -every hand in the room went up but mine. "You only read four counts." I told him. He looked startled and said "Are you an attorney?"

NO BUT I CAN COUNT TO FIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (not what I said of course)

Hedonic Response Packet

Epicurus; hedonist, epicurian

Within an interval of personal time, a specific moment, I had hedonic response. The familiar fell away in a pleasing interlude as the new environment crowded out the detritus of experience and memory. What were these vertical walls (I would have called them buildings before) and convenient paths in among the trees (I would have called them sidewalks before)? A moment ago this was my neighborhood but that connection to a shared past severed at the end of my perpetual narrative. I stopped the endlessly writing, editing and re-editing of the autobiography in my head. Kirk is always a few steps behind the meat. M3aT precedes self. Consciousness is lowering entropy by describing or encoding a report from a sum of path histories simulation. Imagination is extropy springing from hedonic response. I tell myself how happy I am to exist. Existential hedonism.

The unedited tableau gives me instant to instant pleasure. The links in the chain; the pleasurable responses with rich texture and vivid pretense, the individual moments are pearls on a string. Each intrinsically self-similar but existing as a multitude and connected by a story. The story is a string passing through the center of each pearl. The string came after the pearl The narrative comes after the creation of the moment. The hedonic response packet.

An Ensemble of Dispositions

from Gizmodo

"The 12 ultra-interconnected regions are found in the precuneus; superior frontal cortex; superior parietal cortex; subcortical hippocampus; the putamen and the thalamus. Most of these areas are involved in complex information processing.

Van den Heuvel called it the "G8 summit of our brain."

From Scientific American

"Recent research, however, supports the idea that consciousness is a conversation rather than a revelation, with no single brain structure leading the dialogue.

The most recent to challenge the prevailing theory is Simon van Gaal, a neuroscientist who investigates the borders of conscious awareness at the Neurospin Institute in Paris. He asks participants in his ongoing experiments to push a button every time they see a symbol flash on a screen, except when they see a certain icon that means “stop.” During some of the trials van Gaal flashes the stop signal in a way that the subjects cannot consciously perceive. Although they do not see the stop signal, they hesitate to push the button, as though some part of the brain were choking on the information. As he runs the test, van Gaal measures brain activity with functional MRI and electroencephalo­graphy (EEG). He has found that the unconscious inhibitory signal seems to make it all the way up to parts of the prefrontal cortex.

The results indicate that “activity in a certain region is not sufficient to generate consciousness,” van Gaal explains. Instead, he posits, different regions must exchange information before consciousness can arise.

A study in Science in May bolsters the claim that awareness emerges when information travels back and forth between brain areas rather than from ascending a linear chain of command. Researchers in Belgium recorded EEG signals in patients with brain damage as they listened to stimulating tones. All the patients were awake and alert, but with a range of responsiveness. Mathematical models built from the data suggest that feedback between the frontal cortex and the lower-level sensory areas is crucial to producing conscious experience. These results agree with previous work done with monkeys and healthy human volunteers.

Understanding consciousness has a universal philosophical appeal, but it is also clinically urgent, according to lead author Mélanie Boly of the University Hospital Center of Sart-Tilman in Liège, Belgium. “The diagnosis of patients in a vegetative state or minimally conscious state is extremely difficult, and the misdiagnosis rate can be as high as 40 percent,” she says. By defining a neural correlate for con­sciousness, Boly and her colleagues hope to improve those patients’ quality of care."

The Imagination Laser Realized

Here is how a laser works. We need three things:

1. A resonant chamber N wavelengths long (N is an integer) with special reflective ends (a mirror at each end to the chamber)
2. A laser gain medium in the chamber.
3. Atoms in the gain medium with electrons bouncing between two states at the frequency of the 'excititation energy' frequency in the laser gain medium.

Here is what happens:

We shine a light into the gain medium. The light is actually electric field and not visible light. We change the direction of the field by switching - at the frequency that we want the electrons to oscillate - the positive and negative poles. Think of a jump rope with a standing wave you produce by shaking back and forth or up and down at the resonant frequency of the length of rope. The two special reflective ends of the resonant chamber are like you at one end and the other jump-rope person holding the other end of the rope.

The gain medium is an amplifier. This means that the energy of the gain medium is coupled to the electrons of the atoms. The atoms are in a crystal lattice that is doped or impregnated with specific 'impurities'. These are very pure impurities - these are specific admixtures of atoms that create too many electrons (negatively doped).

Electrons exist in only a discrete valance bands around the atoms in the gain medium. This is a result of special relativity and quantum mechanics. Think of a 4-lane highway. You can be in any lane but you can only make discrete 'jumps' to another lane. You cannot drive down the white stripe for miles straddling two lanes at once. Picture you car oscillating between two lanes at a specific frequency. Similarly, electrons exist in only two possible valance bands - a high energy state which is like the left-most lane of the highway and a low energy state which is like the right-hand lane.

Each time the electron changes (falls or rises in fixed quantities) from high to low or low to high a photon is emitted at the frequency of the changing electric field. The photon is emitted at precisely the resonant frequency *all at the same precise instant*. In other words the *population* of atoms with electrons in the high valance band becomes a significant portion of the entire population of all atoms in the lattice. At a trip point, the possibility that that many atoms are excited to the same state become improbable and the entire population of atoms with electrons in that valance band drops to zero and

All the electrons fall into the other state at once and the entire pop because the universe does not appreciate the implausible condition that the macro state is full of to many identical micro-states.

Response Policy Dream Now

With this in mind I propose the following. The purposeful action of the body comes not from free will but from an almost instantaneous response. This response policy acts on well defined rules - some good and some not so good - that do not 'rise to consciousness' but are manipulated by body parts acting without fully cognitive processing or holistic processing. I will swat a fly or throw a fast ball by letting my muscle memory take over. I can balance on a bosu ball because my legs 'know' how to make small adjustments to keep my center of gravity over the proper point over the ball. The signals from sensory nerves does NOT travel all the way to my brain and back. That is how I balanced on the bosu ball the first time I tried it and could not find my balance. I trained my legs to operate from a response policy that did not 'rise to consciousness' for fine motor response.

If I can 'turn off the narration' that follows behind the action I can get into a zone where consciousness 'turns itself off' and simply aligns itself without a time delay to my bodily response. At this point I have two states I am balancing where waking life consciousness precisely aligns with my embedded response policy. My mental life is in harmony with my meat suit response. I fuse by being and becoming and my 'self' completely disappears.

[incomplete, thinking about this for a bit...]

Narrative Dream Now

The Dream Now is split into two an ensemble of dispositions. The actionable response - what I will most likely do or the behavior I will exhibit - is Znatural. The resulting probability function is a necessity function with a widening cone constrained by contingency. My Narrative Now together with my Dream Now is a superposition of several wave functions. The arrow of time pushes me down a multitude of paths until I must move down a set of possible branches - the march of Znatural forward in time. The collapse of the wave function fuses the probable now with the actual now - in a specious moment series. The closer or more tuned response and anticipated response become the more efficient the laser becomes.

derp de derp derp derp...

The Integration

"The human brain is so exquisitely adapted to be perfectly adapted to whatever environment it's in. If it's in an environment where it communicates mainly with computers, it too will become like a computer - with both the good and bad things [associated with that]," - Susan Greenfield, professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford

Quit reading those comic books and go play outside

This article recounts the path to integration of us into them.
The path to the emergent integrated mind


85,000 (+/- 15,000) BCE - Toba Bottleneck
Hypothesis that super-massive caldera erupted which caused 1000 years of severe climate disruption. The 10,000 human survivors would have lived in the most advanced or most modern humans with the plasticity of mind and ability to quickly addapt to severe climate change in a very short time. Multiple generational transfer of technologies pushed forced, rapid progress reduced from generations to years and even months.


85,000 (+/- 15,000) BCE - Blombos cave art, African diaspora
Symbolic thought expressed as 'a representation of the thing in itself'. The early humans draw a sharp divide between the phenotypes with sufficient plasticity to visualize past experience tied to symbolic representation on the wall of the cave.


35,000 BCE Cro Magnon Civilization
Persistant human cultural practices across multiple generations emerge as humans spend more time indoors during long winters in Northern Eurasia and Eastern Eurasia


12,000 BCE - Grain silos
The human cultures with a signifigant portion of the population that can plan future outcomes with enough rigor to create large, permanent structures.


10,000 BCE -  Agrarian communities supplant some hunter gatherer culture
The chance to live with large populations of networked minds

Quit thinking about virtue and go outside and play

3000 BCE - City States bootstrap political thought, Sumarian Cuneiform Writing


800-200 BCE - Axial age


1400 CE Printing and publishing for a mass audience bootstraps reading in a large population and coordinated thinking.


1840 CE - Railroad time synchronizes global human rhythms.


0 Google Era (GE) [2004 CE] pervasive search of totality of human knowledge in seconds.


40 GE - Singularity derp de derp


At each step human minds in brains follow the path of explosive cultural evolution toward improving results - we all have more free time to participate in massive, networked creation of shared imagination. The great great grandchildren carry on cultural change at first growing to the children promoting cultural change and finally day to day change in the same generation. The pace of change accelerates until the limits of brain plasticity can no longer keep up without the aid of the Technium.

Quit playing Nintendo outside and come inside and integrate

The persistent delusion that completely understandable acceleration of human thought is the path to the destruction of human culture is widespread. This is not right; it is not even wrong. To post an entry on a blog about the coming end of thinkable thoughts makes me snort milk from my nose.

I am a Bayesian Machine

Interesting TED Talk

Brains are for creating optimal movement. The telos of brains is movement.

for probability P, 0.0 < P < 1.0,
P(belief | sensory input) = P (sensory input | belief) X P (belief) / P (sensory input)

where P (sensory input | belief) = a prediction which must predict probability of different sensory feedback given my beliefs

The prediction of the probability of a belief given the sensory input
IS
the probability of a DIFFERENT sensory feedback given my belief (memory)
TIMES
the probability of the belief
DIVIDED BY
the probability of the sensory feedback

A belief or conjecture is the combination of DATA (sensory input) and Prior knowledge (memory)

Just the Facts Ma'am

In any debate between disputants, facts are weapons. An insignificant fact especially... because the mental models in our minds are in state of constant flux. The pace of life since a time long ago. The first human I can recognize is the human that knows his own grandfather. This event took place between 200,000 and 170,000 years ago in East Africa. That was the scale of time our new minds were built for at first.

The longest time span imaginable or imagined to this newly minted imaginer was three lifespans. There were no histories that went back more than 100 years an included more than 100 close kin around us. This is the architect of evolved man - the shorter I can get the specious present the more fit I am in a population of fewer and fewer individuals that can detect that this is the main problem of modern life.

We no longer seem to know when now is. We transpose multiple nows - specific flashes of memory about the past-now the future now and the specious present, that small interval around the tickiing of an atomic clock that determines our pace of time. For the first time, an interconnected world runs on a single clock. The cesium atoms while bombarded with energy create a perfectly imagined oscillator - it beats at the heart-beat rate of the universe. A quantum effect is hijacked by a race of men that have made quantum effects crude, simple and even  uninteresting.

The prosaic atomic clock is easy to reverse engineer in Wikipedia. But look up to the heavens - the province of holons - and imagine the leverage of our quantum rodeo. I dug a great mine underground that pumped quarks in one end and IEEE floating point arithmetic on IP machines at the edge of the internet on the other. The tunnels were filled with the most amazing material created after years of research and development - metal routes on integrated circuits of silicon. The purpose of the unobtainium metal was to steer electrons in the most exact manner to and fro with the currents produced by transistors.

So I can reverse engineer and forward engineer pretty well.

Here is the point. I can spew facts and you can spew facts. We can question the legitimacy of each others facts. Was that the Pew Research Poll from September or the new one that just came out? Is that the new Tea Party pseudo-fact that I can dismiss with snark? Is it true there is public sex in the Occupy camps when the sun goes down? Did Bill O'Reilly say that? Did Rachel Maddow say that?

Between disputants facts are weapons. What really matters is that we all acknowledge that the world exists between our ears and facts - any small misery pitiful half-remembered fact - can be minted on the spot. We start with confirmation bias. Here is my relevant fact that appears to stop your narrative as early as possible.

Women on welfare *rarely* drive Cadillac and people at Tea Party rallys *rarely* misspell signs. There is *rarely* sex when the sun goes down in the Occupy camp. Did these things happen at least once, at least on one encampment or rally or ghetto? Of course all these things and many more besides happened at least once.

"But what about a pattern of poor behavior?" ask Bill and Rachel. "We are talking about the preponderance of facts."

And that is my point - you on the TV... this means you... you are spinning a tale about the enemy *in your mind* to an audience that is trying to keep up with the *meaning* of the facts - your facts and not theirs - while relying on a crutch.

The crutch that Rachel and Bill both rely is the crutch of hindsight bias and mis-attribution of intent.

McCain was as old and uninteresting as a year old Time magazine at the dentists office. That is why I voted for Obama in the general but not the primary. I voted for Hillary because I knew who she was and did not have a solid clue about Obama. The thing I respected him for was voting against the war in the Senate. If you were counting that was the lone vote in the Senate.

That fact is part of a larger pattern of behavior. I do not have beliefs that I act on - I do not believe in belief. I have a response policy toward the cosmic environment. This is the description of the process that keeps every living thing alive. Living things preserve approximately useful guesses about how to move in space-time to preserve homeostasis. I react to the present moment while I remember the past and the future. These dual processes share this process. Neither is necessarily privileged over the other but the vast majority of phenotypes choose at random in many cases. This is based on the prudent selection of where and when the choice is made. The rational chooser gets to the same place in most cases as other rational choosers. That is, each phenotype makes forced moves in design space - the space shared by the memestrates of the past and the arbitraged risk around picking the most likely sequence of future states.

This was once a paltry affair. Going back to the first human who knew - who was capable of dreaming up and reflecting on this thought while at the same time realizing that he was capable of dreaming up and reflecting on the reflection. This is the strange loop that I am. I think about myself thinking about myself. In a Cantor set, I contain myself. And the mind stuff related to this selfplex plays by almost identical rules in each phenotype.

The impulse bred in the race is to remember only the changing landscape and not let the unchanging landscape interviene. The least amount of packets of information that gets to the main engine of cognition, my brain the least amount of 'touch' the big iron allots to the information stream.

Facts are uncountable and totally historical. The past is lost to us. There was not twitter in the past. There were not 7B of us then. Most people had dial up. Many people now do not even know what the difference between dial up and always connected means. Some people only have a computer if they can wear it on their belt or carry it in their purse. At first we just wanted to talk to people when we were not at home. Now we try to avoid going home altogether. We meet our friends on the spur of the moment online. There is rich information content exchanged. I get a Youtube video from you. I send you a link to 3QuarksDaily. We are sending an assload of historical facts to each other.

Except for the stories we tell each other about the future. We need a shared myth as a memestrate to hold the deluge of facts and raw information coming at us. What does it all mean? How do I put it into context. What exactly does the model in Rachels head look like. I cannot see it touch it smell it hear it or taste it. Everything Rachel knows is what is inside her head. The subjective experience of another sentient stays forever subjective. There may be animated simulations and live feeds on the screen - that is shared integrated information. But the sound and the visuals are hardly ever naturally mated to each other. When you hear a voice-over you are giving into a shared delusion that the narrative is true and perfectly describes how you store of facts match with the model in your head of how the world is. The closer I can fit the most useful information the faster I learn how to talk at the coffee shop or in therapy.

Facts are weapons in an admixture of armies. Corporate lobbiests, television hosts, bloggers, tweeters and others contribute to a vast and increasing fire hydrant stream of information. We vaguely remember the facts but we can usually apply enough plaster and touch up paint to cobble together a useful narrative when we next blog or comment or email or facebook or twitter.

"Here is another liberal rasing taxes..." link to article in Reason.com
"Libertarians are intoxicated teenagers..." link to article in Salon.com
"The lame stream media hates Fox..." ... random comment, fwd'd email.
These statements have ample facts - fresh unopened and unfiltered facts. These facts have the same usefullness. That is to say these first-level, I-think-I-can-remember-the-NPR-story, it-may-just-be-an-urban-legend micro-fact upholstered like a Duke to stand on its own as a golden fact. It is certain that some facts despirately need to be tied to other facts to prop them up where they will not fall over.

Now the memestrate supporting the narrative takes over and bludgeons the opponent. The Koch brothers. The NAACP. The Pew Research Center Poll from last February, The 99%. The Tea Party -or- . We kick into high gear on our prefered ideology as we shut the door on the bunker of truth and the comfort of the newly preserved narrative.

But shouldn't we spend more time just thinking about what happens next without the embroidery? Damn facts.



 in some distant past on a distant savannah.

Internet Correlates of Consciousness

Consciousness is a heterophenomenon; an ensemble of dispositions registering mental life phenomenon that support an emergent presentation of reality selected from a vast population of less fit presentations of reality. There are humans which are not fit by lack of various mental substrates to participate. There are vast numbers of the 7 billions of us which cannot or have not yet joined the world mind. Some are to old and have minds in brains that were not plastic enough. Some have not yet moved to urban centers. In 2050 4.5 billions of us will plug-in to the urbanized interior milieu - our cosmic environment will be the world mind.

The internet plus the world wide web is a heterophenomenon; an ensemble of computing and routing dispositions supporting an emergent presentation of reality selected from a vast population of less fit presentations of reality.

The Interwebs

At present both conceptions of reality - human plus machine - culminate in full waking life consciousness within human brains. However, a human cognition integrated with the web proto-cognition form an ensemble of dispositions which emerge from the full flower of the Technium. We, as humans entangled with a web of several billion clusters of interconnected cognitive/computational means, incorporate the web into our consciousness. We have integrated in a world mind.

The two portions of this super-mind, meat and silicon, share the varied machines which lend support to a response policy for collective human action. Think of it this way. Every packet on the network shown terminates at a machine and many of those machines display the results of that response on a screen.

Further "the internet of things" - the digital toaster and the digital thermostat - enhances greatly our collective homeostatsis. We are more comfortable inside the Technium than out. We are hermit crabs who have taken on a silicon shell.

The conjecture, we live in an interconnected matrix of biology and technology, an artifact of biology, which co-mingles human imagination with the substratum of conscious modules. These modules, like the human visual system, are built in a hierarchy that was not intended to be a vast, networked visualization contraption. My computer alone does not think but my computer and I think together with both constituents as super-cognitive mutualist. The hermit crab does not make her shell and the shell was not made for the hermit crab. But the tool using crab saves time and energy with an unintended mutualist pact with all shell making crustaceans.

Time and Complexity

Lecture videos by Sean Carrol, Discover.com

Time by David Eagleman
The perception attributed to an event at time T0 depends on what happens next. We are 80mSec delayed like a broadcast of a live event. Within this window we bring together many asynchronous events and construct a seamless, synchronous specious present.


1. We live in the past, information is slightly in the future.
2. temporal order re-calibrates - the narrator rearranges things in time and synchs touch with hearing with vision with taste.
3. Time is not one thing - duration, initiation, synchronized, flash rate...
4. subjective duration indexes neural energy


Subjective duration is a measure of energy used.
Larger Neural response - larger subjective duration
subjective duration varies with neural energy


Complexity by Raissa D'Sousa
Information is physical. heat flow can order information


Algorithms, such as DNA replication, use work to order information


more complexity can give rise to more fitness or functionality so the evolved, complex system dominates.


non-zero sum. Some coordination between systems can yield a win-win.


Time as the engineer in biology, finding variable motifs, combining them into more complex structures, building more sophisticated systems. Biology builds engineers, engineers build machines.


Complexity by Geoffrey West
Biology embodies time.
A city is an organism that never dies, Hiroshima came back, Detroit will come back
A human lives for 100 years


Life scales at a simple, fixed, non-linear relationships
Life is sustained by networks


"Life has taken advantage of the possibility of using space-filling, fractal-like surfaces (where energy and resources are exchanged) to maximize energy transfer from the environment."


"Network geometry and dynamics controls the pace of life at all scales leading to an emergent "universal" time scale" A mouse and an elephant have the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime but the interval between beats is scaled, self-similar.


The pace of life systematically slows with increasing size.


Cities and Social Networks
Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability


Choice by Malcolm MacIver


The motor volume is the space the organism can cover in delta T.
The sensory volume is the space the organism can gather information from in delta T.


"The 'metabolic cost of information' combined with the energetics of movement can give signifigant insight into problems where informational and mechanical constraints are being met at the same time by an organism -- which may frequently be the case in behavior."


"Consciousness is the operation of the plan-execution mechanism enabling behavior to be driven by plans rather than immediate environmental contingencies." - Bruce Bridgeman

The Fallacy of Intent

"the fallacy of intent—assuming that if things turned out a certain way, someone planned it that way."
"Deserve has nothing to do with it." Unforgiven


My particular bone of contention with "no one follows the old rules" for filibusters or other policy practice is that Moneyball changed everything several years ago. Every seat is gerrymandered because with census data and mapping algorithms every voter can be place individually in a population of like-minded individuals. With the filibuster, a handy tool exists to stop legislation. In each case the intention of the persons that coined the procedure does not matter at all. This is the fallacy of intent.

Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology at UT

Dr. Kremer turned me onto Dr. Buss at UT and I registered to receive the Evolution and Human Behavior Journal. I was green with envy for the folks that got to go the 2005 Conference at UT. Steven Pinker was the keynote and Robert Trivers was a speaker. There is a paywall on the journal but that is typical of academic research. There was a review of a book on the Price Equation in the current issue. EvoPsyc WIN.

The good news here is the preponderance of non-Blank Slate thinking that replaces fuzzy introspection in the old psychology and the lack of thought in post-modern accounts of human striving. The science is in - imagination is a heterogeneous process started 3,500,000,000 years ago that still uses, where it can, ancient means for making guesses about what happens next. Single cells behave semi-autonomously as a thin soup of organic compounds surrounded by a membrane delineating the internal life from the cosmic environment. Using the tricks of multicultural organisms, our phenotypes include several billion specialized cells in an optimum admixture of bones, guts and brains. Invertebrates good tricks support vertebrate good tricks. Memory works on a single neuron. Vast interconnections of neurons form meta-neurological structures of the fish, the amphibian, the reptile and the early mammals. The lemur brain and the primate brain do much of the heavy lifting of human cognition. Only a thin layer of cortical structure provides the full flower of imagination.

Resistance is useless, it's evolutionary psychology or nothing.

Introspective Cognition

I recently had an entertaining conversation where the subject of post-cognitive mental awareness came up. One thing apparent was the plasticity of the ensemble of dispositions supporting waking life consciousness. The particular subject matter was encryption and compression of written material for rapid learning. This is the province of information theory on the face of it and conscious manipulation of proto-conscious machinery just beneath.

His Holiness, Claude Shannon - today's higher power

"Shannon entropy is a measure of the average information content one is missing when one does not know the value of the random variable." The solution proposed is a natural language programming paradigm for expanding in a minimalist format the information for the case of a string of text 'in context'. Variables are declared in a similar fashion to C language programming with types or classes. The cognitive machinery involved exploits the powerful, shared capacity of the mind called conceptual semantics. This is what Steven Pinker calls the Stuff of Thought. As a student of Chomsky's this corresponds roughly to I-Language or the internal mental process supporting human language. I-language can only be alive in the world a E-language or verbal reports on individual, subjective narratives.


According to Pinker's conceptual semantics, evolutionary processes have harnessed or recruited specific coalitions of cognitive machines - the stuff of thought - that represent in I-language common to all homo sapien phenotype  This is Chompsky's Universal Grammar with specific functions delineated by Pinker from evolutionary psychology.

His Holiness, Steven Pinker

Here is Pinker on the convenient abstraction for a model of conceptual semantics from an earlier work, The Blank Slate: The Denial of Human Nature. The ensemble of dispositions evident in the human can be thought of as outputs (behavior, emotion and speech production) from native intuitive machines. This machinery, IMHO represents an array of powerful Bayesian Inference modules. From this, the stuff of thought is produced by Bayes Networks that support the neural correlates of consciousness.


Intuitive Physics - the rules of space-time, a working model of our four dimensional framework
Intuitive Morality and Ethics - game theory means for the solution of human interaction and fair play
Intuitive Biology - easy distinction of living things or biological agents
Intuitive Economics - market exchange based on barter and trade rules promoting mutual knowledge of value.
etc.


The point of this post is that with introspective cognition - meta cognitive self awareness of the machinery of intuition - hacks and work-around of the hardware (wetware) can reinforce missing or insubstantial mental means. These improvements are identified in the same manner as Alan Turing debugged the process of thinking that underlies all current computation. Von Neumann instanced Turing's process in a computing machine model still in use today. Turing's cognitive machinery wanted to be a world wide web of computational means that pervade our experience. 


Here is one version of the roots of conceptual semantics - embodied cognition. Our minds emerge from our entire body not just our brains. As such, the navigation of social constructs in space-time matter. They matter a lot.


"Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds… [the mind] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment… Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding." - George Lakoff


The study of cognitive restructuring of cognition fascinates. The body changes the body to change the embodied mind. Plasticity WIN!

Sweet Purple Fat Courderoy Bellbottoms

The market for young men's clothing grew to include many styles in 1969. Men's fashion choices exploded in the late sixties and early seventies. There were hits and misses in the Beall's department store buyers expert eye. Some of the most outlandish fashion outcasts ended up in the barganin bin. Mama worked at Beall's and I got a chance to dress like Hugh Hefner.

I had plaids and stripes in a variety of colors. They were all bell-bottoms and were made of plastic. I wore polyester blends. The biggest problem I had is that I did not have a pair of bell bottom denim Levi's. I was stuck with Hugh Hefner and I wanted to be The Eagles or The Grateful Dead.

The reason that I got cast off clothes is that the marketing and logistics exploded in the late 60's and early 70's because of the new ability to monitor factory input and output and adjust the mix of product to the mix of available demand from customers and supply from vendors. As plush pink deep courderoy bell bottom's are tracked against green and brown versions, the green and brown have emerged from the demand in the market as clear winners. Pink is a clear loser and quickly gets pulled - the energy required for the manufacture and distribuiton of this version is spend elsewhere.

I remember clearly several pairs of brushed courderoy pants in several interesting shades of purple and pink or dusty rose. I like them best because they were Levi's cut in the same pattern as the regular blue jean style. These were my go-to pants. Sweet. Loud. Proud pants.

The extent to which my butt was in weird Levi's instead of cool Levi's was that Levi's became a major fashion institution and explored the blue jean design space for fit returns. As Levi's and other clothing brands diffused a random population of colors and patterns, the clothes filled fashion niches while at the same time producing odd combinations that no one wanted except Mama as she looked over the deeply discounted final sales clearance (to which she added her store discount). I was dressed in the ugliest of the new fashions and I was happy about it. My other choice was homemade clothes or the dreaded Gulf Mart shirts and pants that hung wrong and were made of 100% polyester. Beall's and Levi's made life bearable in Jr. High because of an emerging science of logistics and market research. I was clothed by Rough Beast.

Black Swan Improvements

In this article I posted this comment:

"If you made your normal distribution a skewed normal with a long right tail you would see a bigger difference (a smaller overlap) between two populations. If the right most population had even a small difference – say in fertility or trait X – this could make sudden, significant increases in the long tail. Since the long tail has smarter, crazier, more depressed, more schizo-affective, more autistic extremes AND they have an increased chance of appearing near each other so that they can trade artistic images between them – in other words… they are primed for intersection with black swans. This is where chaos makes for wide swings in outcomes for small changes in initial conditions. This is more than a just so story since we know the answer. The population on the right took over the biospere, bootstrapped the noosphere and invented computers that could do Monte Carlo simulations."

The Z Machine

"Here is how we put the time in." - Mark Twain "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" chap. 19

Z Machine, largest X-Ray generator in the world

Here I use it for a prop to occupy my time. The sum of path histories for a skin loop is Znatural. All possible branches at bifurcations in a logistics map introduce vanishingly small opportunities for free will or cognitive choice. Most choices are below the level of waking life conscious experience and are habits of behavior that usually predict with enough accuracy 'what happens next'.

The vast number of pre-cognitive choices are automatic and thus merged or catenated to the narrative flow that explains post-hoc motivations, dreams, wishes and yearning for meaning and purpose.

On some occasions the narrative flow cannot be accommodated rationally into the strategic narrative supported by cognitive or post-cognitive impulses. The architecture of motivation super-cedes pre-cognitive impulse or intuition. These 'free won't' opportunities return me to Z natural. Z natural is a family of branches - a sum of path histories - that define advantageous moves in design space that yield maximum fitness in the cosmic environment. Maximizing homeostatic outcomes with the least negative entropy means that I live to fight another day.

Specifically, I was born in 1957 and this path on the skin loop I am in recovery in 2011 having survived a reboot in 2007. Several visible markers notate bifurcations in the logistics map

The New Phone Books are HERE!

Quoted by my mentor Kevin Kelly!!!!!!!!! in the Technium blog...

Religion as a Response Policy

[comment from 3Quarks article]

THobbs is in the his-ouse

"Religion is a unate operator – each subscriber to The Holy Book has an individual response. Your ‘enlightened’ savior may be your neighbor’s version of heresy. There is not one true Scotsman anywhere because each Scotsman can define what it means to be a Scotsman. So… religion becomes shared practice and not shared belief. But no religious person wants to have this cake or eat this cake (not one I ever met…) – religious merit comes from something called ‘belief’ which differs from one observant agent to the next. The community of practice rolls on without accepting a shared cultural myth as a myth. Dan Dennett calls this a belief in belief. Each religious person looks to the person on either side of them in the pews to normalize behavior while the music plays on. In this strict secular sense – the sense no religious person accepts – religion as a ritual molds a population to a set of behaviors which are fit (get up in the morning and feed a poor person) or unfit (get up each morning and murder a poor person). Both impulses arise from people reading the same book. This is not about reading skills – it’s about the non-zero sum of modernity emerging from utilitarian good practice."


Hobbs demolished the sacred aspect of human institutions by showing that the mortal souls of mortal men working toward a common purpose - with or without belief - constructed Leviathan.