Austin Bikes

Locus of Phenotypic Effect - a mind on a bike in the 512
In Austin, the young people retire to ride bikes. Austin by bike shows the locus of imagination that is Austin. Not only this particular ensemble of zip codes and neighborhoods. Austin is a fractal, cosmic chaos, and Austin has many rabbit holes. I see rabbits by bike and explore the Cupboard to Narnia. Arrays of the Magic Labyrinth trail heads, each constructs or artifacts of a specious present in Austin. That's what I learned growing up here. I am the Cosmic Cedar Chopper's intentional stance.

I am of Scot's Irish decent and have chopped cedar for wages. Existential. Chopper of Cedar am I. Her is the Cosmic Cedar Chopper's Argument, a bicycle rider's intentional stance. Guesses and conjectures from a natural world by a brain in a vat - my mind exposed to a bike ride through Austin, the locus of weird intent.

Father of Thermoregulation

That is important to understand because I have just described a locus of effect - an intentional agent in the natural world. In this case I define the Milieu Interior as the agent [cit.Claude Benard] or agonist and the Cosmic Environment [cit. Thermoregulation] as the antagonist. That is, the thermoregulation of the agonist both opposes and submits [cit. dukkha] to the antagonist for the purpose of free life homeostasis. I respect the cedar as I chop the cedar. My meat suit or M3aT comprises the biochemical processes from which mind emerges. This is not Cartesian Dualism at all - this is the intentional stance of a Selfish Phenotype as an ensemble of behaviors emerging from Selfish Genes.

Conjecture
The locus of phenotypic effect, an ensemble of behaviors, exists in the mind set of a fit agent equipped with the engines of conceptual semantics from DNA. Be all you can be. Uncover your communal bonds to kin and the monkeysphere, the authority ranking of organizations or institutions and the market exchange at global level. You stand on the shoulders of this ensemble of dispositions; the inside-ness and outside-ness of pre-cellular proto-life, the cell wall division, the emergence of RNA with suffering, the emergence of DNA with imagination, the meat, the self, B3aST, Gaia, The Solar System, The Milky Way. This emergent progression through layers of abstraction or holons presents the universe with increasing cognitive complexity.

The global cluster of dispositions, our Universe, embodies the response policy of an agonist that I define as Rough Beast. The foundations of Rough Beast or universal agency emerges from a vibrating string, imagination encoded in a simple dissipative structure held aloft by gravity selfishly behaving against Time selfishly behaving, What does space-time want from us? What does gravity expect from us? As a metaphor or poetic construction, space-time and gravity are construed as an agent or agonist pried apart from an antagonist separated by a line of demarcation between Compassion and Authority. a pocket of negative entropy encrypted or modulated by the imagination laser.

The imagination laser carries a proposition encrypted upon it. At meat conditions, the imagination laser comprised the left and right hemisphere as the reflective cavities boundary with the right brain as the fully reflecting boundary and the left as the semi-reflected boundary. The gain medium comprises an ensemble of Bayesian Inference Engines connected in an admixture of memestrates with the Corpus Collosum applying the encrypted message for the hologram bearing the message from the locus of phenotypic effect imprinted on the black hole of our present white hole existence. Existential uplift from thermoregulation. Cosmic Homeostasis.

The locus of Cosmic Cedar Chopper intent presents the Cosmic Environment a Response Policy [cit. Self comes to Mind]. The Response Policy conforms to prosaic notions of belief or motive but precisely invokes observed behaviors of the agonist that push against or actively respond to the Cosmic Environment or antagonist. The Response Policy comprises the ensemble of dispositions embodied in DNA and memes.

Preparation for Enlightenment
That's my theory of everything. I am going to ride my bike now. I'm going down today's rabbit hole. I prepared myself yesterday with the first two of the tri; 1/2 in BSP and 5K on the HBT. Now it's 20K in the 512.

The BSP in the 512

I'm back after the 30K to BSP and back. Stacy G. saw me on Lamar and gave me a shout out. I saw a recumbent dude with a peace sign at the main  branch and threw him a peace sign. I found the path on 2nd to the pedestrian bridge. I saw the philosophers rock and I came back faster than I went so I was happy with my somatic response.

Somatic response policy runs on M3aT, the mass of DNA sentience. Id without Ego. This is an intentional stance from the ensemble of sinew, bone and gut. The bald phenotype.

All of the above builds upon the posts in this blog - my integration of an ensemble of dispositions over time.

Telic Baseline: An Argument from the Engineering Stance

Of the causes of real and imagined things, the fourth cause is telos. The telos of a thing is the ends, purposes and the reason for the thing in itself - that locus of intent or center of effect that all other parts yearn for. Each right intention; the intention to deliver on time, the intention to do the right job, the intention to draw all other parts toward an end and deliver the best solution with fewer than the fewest resources imaginable.

Telic Baseline Locus of Effect for Time=0

If I ask how long it will take and how much it's ends and purposes will require of the organization I must always have that answer in front of me so that I can inquire into the nature of the telic baseline; the organizations readiness to accept, the teams readiness to participate and to use this thing and, why this thing must be delivered. Time does not proceed uniformly and pervasively but the ends must be met - that is the telic baseline. That gets us into the closed errata list and the beta delivery slot.

Nothing else matters except an acceptable beta and a production ramp that causes as much suffering as we can bear. Development is hard. We all know this so say this under your breath to save us all time - assume we are thinking this thought when you are narrating your imaginary purpose for your imaginary thing.

A telic event is an event with an end; throwing the ball to the cut-off man, singing Happy Birthday, singing the first verse of Lolla and completing any project with a well defined intent. The telos of a project is a baseline or ensemble of dispositions. There is a well defined set of goals which define the transition from imagination to reality. This single event is the telos of design - the telos of design is the first part doing the first job for the first time. The telos of manufacturing is to make more that the imagined demand to the realized demand. In both cases we go from the imagined plan to the past history where imagined plans are weighed and tallied by the first part to exist in this world. After we design one we must make a million of them as fast as possible for the most return to the organization.

All real things exist on a fitness landscape. The market wants parts to appear at the right place in the right time with the right form, fit and function. Design can do its part but it controls only a single telic event. The path from market inquiry to market delivery traces out the fitness landscape (pictured above) of the telic baseline. This is a moving target because all things exist in a web of causation - nothing is caused by one event alone. The kind of event and the time at which the imagined finished event is completed must push the peak of the fitness landscape to match a similar heterogeneous landscape in the target system.

The emergent quality of imagined telic baselines across the mixed bag of design means or ensemble of functions must match the telic baseline of manufacturing and the superior telic baseline of the socket. In like manner up the food chain the imagined becomes real and least worse solutions emerge.

My So Called Life

In the 6th and 7th dimensions, all possible versions of my life branch and fold to produce every possible instance of me doing some of what I chose and some of what I rejected as viable choices. When I took my coffee black, the version of me that put cream and sugar in my cup appeared beside me in a nearby possible universe where this choice branched away and continued branching with subsequent branches. If this is true why does my present path seem the only path imaginable? Why does the only version of me - the actual present state of me comprising all my choices and all my contigent guesses about what happens next - seem like the only self that exists to make subsequent choices.

I don't know but here is a guess. The longest surviving version of me exists in a world of maximum duhka or suffering. The 7B mortal souls, of which I am one, collectively flow into my present life stream along a crease in super-symetric 11 dimensional reality that presents everyone about me with maximally poor but exquisitely reasonable choices. The opposite view is that my present self is on a sum of path histories that minimize cosmic suffering. Can this explain your intuition of free will with my conviction that free will is an illusion?

Supernatural Agency

I have no response to the supernatural. That is, my response policy toward things outside of nature includes the firm rule that I avoid a response from non-material agents. This empirical stance results from a life time which does not include the supernatural in any network of causation. The things that go bump in the night are same things which go bump in the daylight - only real things make real noise. A non-thing has no agency and if it had agency it ceases to be non-real.

The supernatural is known by revealed truth. The zoology of things mysterious that bump springs not from reasonable reactions to events but from folk intuitions about the kinds of things that affect the kinds of things like me. Before astronomy, astrology had interesting answers about the heavens. After Galileo the stars no longer carved the sky into houses or impelled nature to respond. Stars stayed put as the earth rotated and planets moved around the sun while moons revolved around planets.

Science diminishes religion and religion diminishes science. These two construals of the set of reasonable responses oppose each other. Religion - a revealed cosmology - cannot adjust to newer and better facts. A religion is by nature static and unchanging. There are no new editions of holy books updated with recent discoveries. There is no theory of gods which predict how, why or when a god will get up off her throne and act. Only material agents act. That is, only material agents have a response policy since only material agents possess the teleological imperative - only material agents have ends or purposes visible as behavior in the natural world. What motivates a god if a god can choose to respond out of dire predicaments. An eternal god is a lifeless god with no urgent need to love. The need to love is the need to help another and the only other to a god is another god which might upset homeostasis and therefore existence.

Only existential behavior affects homeostasis. A god has no need to maintain homeostasis and therefore no existential imperative to behave one way as opposed to another way.

TIL I am a Hologram on the Event Horizon of a Singularity AMA

Emergent Order for Nothing

The kind of universe we live in started with a fluctuation in nothingness - order from chaos. The prime singularity - a pinpoint of negative entropy within the bounds of nothingness or positive entropy. From this nothingness a type of order emerged. What exactly the structure - a very smooth ball of super heated plasma - emerged from is in some doubt. Hawking claims that a fluctuation in quantum gravity started the ball rolling. The rest of the story is amusing.

We normally think of the universe as a balloon expanding to almost limitless extent. There is nothing inside of the balloon - it is not expanding as something fills it because nothing is inside and nothing is outside of the balloon skin. The skin of the balloon is all that exists. We also think of this balloon as expanding over time. I propose a slightly different way of looking at the situation. Imagine that time is an independent variable like space. This way of looking at space and time is known as phase space. In phase space all the chunks of time exists together with all other chunks of time. In this construal, the singularity broadcasts phase space instantly over 13.72 billion years (our point now on the arrow of time). The past, present and future all spring into existence at once. It is conceivable but not provable that there is an 11 dimension super string vibrating which is the root of all of this activity. Time (sic) will tell.

The substance that spreads over phase space is a hologram flattened onto the event horizon of the singularity at the core of the universe. We can discern the nature of the event horizon of our universe in the event horizon of black holes. Black holes form in phase space inside the universe in the time allotted for second generation stars - our slot in time now. In this framework, black holes come from super dense matter from the collapse of stars into a dense ball of basic particles that bend phase space back in on itself. No energy in the form of radiated electromagnetism (including visible light) can escape the gravitational pull of the singularity. This singularity is smaller than the primal singularity generating our universe over phase space because the black hole is part of the universe emitted by the primal singularity.

In four dimensions, a black hole is roughly a sphere with an vanishingly thin skin. The skin or the outer surface of the balloon is called the event horizon. Everything between the singularity and the event horizon falls back into the black hole. Including time.

The direction of time is reversed inside the event horizon of a black hole. At the interface between the event horizon and the outside universe on an vanishingly thin surface - all of the matter that falls into the black hole flattens by one dimension. In other words, if I am an astronaut falling into a black hole I become an vanishingly thin projection of the information content of myself - my fundamental particles are plastered across the surface in a film at the smallest dimension of space-time. The smallest unit of measure in our universe is a distance called the Plank length. The information content spread across the surface (in phase space) of the event horizon is a hologram.

This is the famous bet that Hawking made - he was betting against his intuition just to make trouble - he posited that information is not preserved across the event horizon. The question was "Is information preserved across the event horizon or for matter trapped within the black hole".  In other words, can I discern what is inside the event horizon? Remember that because time flows backward inside the event horizon, from the viewpoint of the singularity at the center, the event horizon is radiating energy inward toward the singularity. In other words all those photons that we think of as radiating outward from the singularity actually behave as if the photons that barely reach the event horizon seem to be (from our inertial framework where the arrow of time flows 'forward') emitted by the event horizon and moving forward in time toward the singularity.

Pwned by Holograms

The outward sign that all this is really happening is the presence of Hawking radiation. At the scale of fermions and bosons, the primal ingredients in the Standard Model of Physics, all empty space is not really empty. Pockets of negative entropy (extropy) spontaneously appear just like the event that caused the universe in the first place. In empty space, matter and antimatter particles are spontaneously generated and usually quickly recombine which produces bursts of energy in empty space. There is no such thing as 'empty' space since empty space can generate energy spontaneously.

When matter and antimatter emerge at or on the event horizon, one particle may be inside the event horizon and one particle might be outside the event horizon. The particle inside the event horizon then moves in the direction of time within the event horizon. The inside surface of the event horizon is radiating spontaneously generated particles from the matter/antimatter pair in the reverse direction of time seen from outside the event horizon. Outside the event horizon, the particles collide with other particles and release energy which radiates outward from the event horizon - time is flowing forward on the outside of the event horizon so that over the dimension of time, energy is spontaneously generated. This energy released is called Hawking Radiation and is the best way to locate a black hole. We detect the emission of Hawking Radiation because time is split in half at the event horizon.

The signature of the energy emitted contains all of the information flattened to vanishingly thin extent across the surface of the event horizon. This is a hologram of all of the matter and energy that has ever fallen into the black hole. It is also a way to reconstruct, over the dimension of time, all of the past and future history of the black hole. Think of the hologram as a movie projector that in standard time or time flowing forward has all of the individual images superimposed over each other.

Think of a stack of 216 frames of Star Wars: A New Hope on a table. At 72 frames per second this is a 3 second slice of standard movie time. 3 seconds of time is known as a 'specious present' or the size of the chuck of activity within working memory. When I shine a very bright light through the stack I can see everything in the 216 frames at the same time. My optical machinery cannot discern a conceptually complete image of 3 seconds of a movie. This is a cartoon schematic of what a hologram really is because holograms are made of pure energy or electromagnetic radiation and not 35mm squares of celluloid film. But the point is the same - holograms contain all the information in all regions of phase space.

Back to our astronaut falling into the black hole. To an observer left behind on the space ship just outside of the event horizon the poor chap seems to become compressed or stretched and can be assumed to stop living at some point along the path to the event horizon. Actually the information contained in the body is preserved as it is spread across the surface of the event horizon into a film of vanishing thinness. The information contained by the astronaut becomes a constituent element of the hologram.

Similarly, I am information spread across the surface of the event horizon of this universe. These holograms inherently preserve my information from moment of birth to death. In fact the entire history of the earth is a hologram on the surface of the event horizon. All Gaia (the sum of all DNA activity or DNA information over the span of life on earth) is a hologram on the universal event horizon.

For this reason, time is a tenseless quantity - all time exists all 'at once' across the universe. When I remember the past I am mapping a subjective version of an earlier hologram with a hologram inside my mind. When I remember the future I am doing the same thing. For the past, I leaf past intervening moments of past time all the way back to the time I am imagining. For the future I leaf forward. Note that my memory is an attempt to match, as much as possible, my interior hologram against the 'real' hologram which exists locally in a slice of time in the past or future. In this sense memory enables time travel. I can move in the direction of increasing entropy - the direction of the arrow of time for biology - or I can move in the direction of decreasing entropy - against the arrow of time. My objective self (my meat suit or interior milieau) must move forward in time (toward the direction of increasing entropy) to maintain homeostasis with a minimal expense of energy. Moving in reverse against the forward swoosh of time can only happen with imagination - an emergent quality of brains with minds.

These memories are tangible brain states or what is know as neural correlates of consciousness. I really, truly have a local hologram that sort of matches the universes hologram. The extent to which I can adequately model the past or the future increases my survivability chances. I can make a decent guess about what happens next and from my response policy I can travel forward to a hologram that I need so that I can maintain homeostasis. I have covered this in earlier posts.

Any questions?