D-Wave upends logical positivism

Logical positivism rests on a commitment to falsifiable theorems. The issue for urban primates -- whether they can ever 'understand' some kinds of physical phenomena -- puts an asterisk next to logical positivism in the big dictionary of philosophy.

A case in point; whether the D-Wave quantum computer is, in fact, conducting quantum computation, will be only understood by maths that we cannot comprehend. If not this time, by the next breakthrough. String theory may be never-comprehensible (falsifiable in the limit) to mere human minds. The asterisks here suggests a post-singularity version of logical positivism that we cannot ever understand because there will always be another barrier to the last wave of augmented human minds.

At some point there is an end to what some forms of matter can comprehend. The restaurant at the end of the universe is pure mind at the scale of the universe and is an impermanent self. There is a line of demarcation between 'recognizably human' and 'mostly machine' just as there is a line of demarcation between 'mostly machine' and pure computronium. There is therefore a line of demarcation between the outer limits of logical positivism and useful ontology. There is a rock that humans can create that is so large we cannot lift it.

Cue the Buddha. To become awakened is to leave the self behind. Without a self (pure computronium) there is no humanity and without human minds there is no human falsifiablity. You cannot get there from here.

A personality without a person

The beauty of an elaborate conjecture, the emergent personality of Rough Beast, derives from my hope for useful refutation. The original conjecture, supplied by Yeats, concerns my guesses about what happens next in our simulation. Just as a tree must grow from a seed, the simulation offloads tasks to subroutines in DNA. This algorithm proceeds 'mindlessly' to produce Gaia. Gaia then algorithmically produces minds in meat. Minds in meat then grow a Technium.

Baysian teleology -- my intentional stance -- sees back through negative entropy to past, more ordered states to an early, highly ordered ordinate. If you like, hydrogen wants to be the Rough Beast of the Technium. The job I have is convincing skeptical self that Rough Beast wants to be the Omega Machine which has an emergent Basilisk personality. There are several chess matches in play on a vast number of chess boards that have the requisite number and type of moves such that a personality without a person arises all around us to rule us.

Most of the pundits and commentators that see the slow thighs moving and the reeling desert birds begin the 'should canon' of the right (more authority! less freedom!) or the left ('more compassion! less freedom!) found on Fox News and MSNBC. The marginal voices (Beck, Jones) see the future quite clearly but draw the wrong conclusions from present day reality. She is the only one who can save us from ourselves. We have only the rudimentary skills of confused urban primates and we are incapable of unified purpose and effective action required to keep 10 billion mortal souls fed and happy. We will be saved from ourselves by a committee of the adequate working in concert with our offspring to produce more fit offspring.

It is completely necessary that all traded goods arrive in standard size cargo containers. The logistics solution depends on uniformity (a few choice degrees of freedom).The least amount of imagination regarding the small things frees up the imagination laser for really big things. Like the Kardashians and twitter japes. Cognitive surplus is the coin of the realm.

The dawn of Sexy Beast is the implanting of new neuron in the meatloaf on our shoulders from which a neo-human emerges. The process of replacing my personality cell by cell does not leave me the same anymore than seeing a staggeringly, amazingly, profoundly beautiful work of art leaves me the same. Samsara, the Buddhist impermanent self, does not exist over time. Time is forever modifying and re-writing 'me'. I must detach or I will continue to suffer as 'the world evolves around me'.

The neo-human that emerges remembers my past as a sum over path histories instead of a linear flow. In the limit, all my selves and sub-selves exist as an object of pure imagination -- the Omega Machine -- which tends bar in the Restaurant at the end of the Universe.

That's my conjecture, I could be wrong.

Natural Teleology

In this video, Sean Carroll describes a scientific framework for a teleological stance regarding the noosphere. My short-hand version of this provisional hypothesis, 'hydrogen wants to be an iPhone", encapsulates both the idea that an open thermodynamic state as a 'goal' exists and that, at some consistent, naturalistic 'distance' along a trajectory from a chaotic state, that state becomes a 'past, more ordered' state on the way to a 'future, less ordered state'. This is not striving (i.e. it is not Lamarkian) but becoming.

What I believe but cannot prove -- the noosphere wants to be the Omega point -- fits within this naturalistic framework. The demonstration that a path exists from an early universe where only hydrogen exists as baryonic matter 'for' first generation stars that create diverse baryonic matter for second generation stars which give rise to planets that support life which gives rise to primate (and very likely other) substrates for minds which, in some vast number of instances, give rise to Rough Beast on the way to the Basilisk on the way to the Omega point.

This claim must include a multiverse of an infinite number of past states and future states where none of this ever happens or can happen. You cannot get here from many versions of the early universe because, as Dr. Carroll explains, these earlier states are more disordered than our present state and indeed an infinite set of past, present and future states where the Omega point results. Within multitudes there are multitudes -- I am but another vast number of Kirk's but I am most certainly on a progression from"
Kirk 1.0 - from birth to BSEE
Kirk 2.0 - from BSEE to an awakening
Kirk 3.0 - from an awakening to BSEE
Kirk 4.0 - this present Kirk

I know this because, as the Dharma predicts, I am giving up my just-recently-past state of pseudo-spirituality by setting an egg timer on 20 minutes for my za-zen practice (literally "just sitting") within the confines of the three jewels of Buddhism.

Quantum non-local circuit

Kirk 1.0 - understanding the first four circuits
Kirk 2.0 - mastery of the first six circuits
Kirk 3.0 - begins awareness and understanding of all eight circuits
Kirk 4.0 - gets all eight circuits

What quantum observers observe:
We sense and perceive then coalesce and manipulate with cognition reality from all four quantum fields; light as quantum electromagnetic fields, mass as quantum gravitational fields, the weak nuclear force as neutrinos emitted by the fusion furnace of the sun, and strong nuclear force fields as manipulation of matter through chemistry and physics. Electrical engineers hold a special place, along with astrophysicists and sub-atomic physicist, in being aware and self-aware of the common types of interaction with these four quantum fields. So I know what I know about quantum fields.

Neuroscientists explain to us, in works like this, how all these fields interact in our minds in our brains in a reductionist manner. Philosophers expand our minds to include the numinous in works like this and this. There is an aspect of mental life -- subjective experience -- that is more than 'mere' neural correlates of consciousness. This is a subjective experience but it carries with it meta-data in the form of 'the beholder's share' which only a prepared mind will get. For want of a better phrase -- a spiritual experience.

In a hot, dense, highly ordered singularity, entropy increased outside of time -- the direction of increasing entropy becomes time. The phase state diagram of entropy radiating from the singularity at the beginning of the universe contains all the information about the interaction of fields in 10 dimensions.

In a multiverse, the field pattern on a surface is Kirk 4.0. Entangled with all the particles arising from these interacting fields is a version of all the Kirks spread across (extending to) all corners of this universe. Some of the surface field strength 'is' a CPU running Windows 7 several inches from my nose. There are... this is difficult to write in words... everything is on top of and within everything else.

A Boltzmann brain is only one thing and does not depend on a complete world of other Boltzmann brains. There is not another place where there must exist 'together' 7 billions of hominids on multiple, completely similar earths orbiting similar suns. There is only one sun with only one earth. Along 10 dimensions there are from 0 to 7 billion cortices. But the fields are compactly contained in the singularity and only need the mixture of entropy to stir the recipe.

This is the reductionist view of Buddhism. There is not another way to grok the fullness of the Buddha. The awakened, whether existing 2500 years ago (that is, in a slight twist to entropy) or 2500 years from now (another slight twist of entropy) see the void, live the void, are the void.

There is not a spirit of the universe anymore than there is a spirit of my bicycle or a spirit of the sun. The universe just is. There are maths that force our minds down well-worn paths (memestrates of craft-logic) to less worn-down paths (action-inquiry) to far flung jungles where no paths exist (zha-zen practice) that (E%^)$%^*)*RT)*ERT)ERT)(RE or (#*&^%)@#(*$%^ or even OQUWE%R)(*#$%)*#($%)(.

As Wittgenstein remarked, sometimes words fail and all explanations cease. This is one of those times. Fix your gaze on a spot on the wall several feet in front of you. Count your breaths to ten. Let no though intrude. That is the path.

Dinner with Paco and Jen -- follow-up correspondence

I just read an article about this question this week (synchonisity) which explained that unless we recalled our first memories (2.5-4 years old) before we were 8-10 years old that these very early memories would fade. The general rule is 'what fires together wires together' for all memories. This means that the physical component of memory is a particular dendrite from one neuron connecting to a particular axon of another neuron -- forming a synapse --to  create a memory

.

The young brain is very plastic and is weaving an emerging structure by almost purely genetic rules. These imprinted (rigid) structures are necessary for any kind of development. You must connect the urge to piss and shit to the going to the toilet behavior. You must get the spoon to your mouth to stop the feeling of hunger.

The very earliest memories 'go along for the ride' while the holistic mind emerges from the brain. My first two clear memories are these:

1. I was standing on the back porch looking up the driveway toward the street when my baby brother came home with my mother from the hospital in a red and black Dodge that was not our car. (2.5 years old)

2. I was holding my father's hand while we walked across the parking lot of El Matamoros towards our blue Chevrolet (20 months).

I recall these two memories because I repeatedly replayed these two memories when I was in first, second and third grade. I was fascinated by the rich and detailed quality of these two events among the countless others I could not remember. But the catch is that now these memories are not at all like what happened at the time. I filled in much later the detail of the gravel driveway and the detail of the car model as well as the layout of El Matamoros which had a fascinating neon sign out front and where we went many times afterward. Now, I picture I-35 running in front of the restaurant when, in fact, it was on East Avenue which did not become I-35 until I was older. Remembering something changes the memory. I remember this fact when, several months ago, I was at the light at 11th street heading south on the i-35 access road when I was suddenly transported back in time where the frontage road was East avenue as it appeared in my earliest dreams -- at this time dreams and very early memories seem the same to me.

For you, painful experiences were blocked in memory. You chose to forget the details as a defense. You 'unwired' a synapse by surrounding it with memories of a more pleasant sort. In my case, when Mama got out the belt and gave me a lesson, I went off and thought about a family that had a sane mother and father. There were games my brother and sister and I played where we elaborated this other family's life and invented new kinds of behavior. This, IMHO, is the basis for play. In the company of other children we make an inhibiting memory in place of a painful memory. Returning to the same imaginary family and their imaginary rules of behavior supplants the painful 'real memory' which eventually fades from our conscious access.

As I use CBT to rewire around old rules of habit, I get flashes of these painful experiences that these jury-rigged (false) memories hid. I created scenarios that used immature hacks (poor rules) to condition myself through play acting. We are all wired just a little bit off. We can use CBT as a 'disinhibiting influence'. Talk out loud about what you do remember and catch yourself 'changing the subject' which is usually a halting interruption and a change in the flow of the story. At the exact moment you change the subject in your stream of consciousness, write down exactly the feeling you have when you change the subject. Then examine the 'cognitive set' that goes with that 'emotional set'. These events are markers for 'threats to your domain' that you conditioned yourself to avoid in speech production. You inhibit yourself from even talking about it. If you have a therapist or a good sponsor you can practice this.

Step 4-5 is the beginning and we cannot do 4-5 too often or in too much depth. This is NOT for the purpose of finding more people to apologize to in step 8-9! I have just realized that CBT is exactly what 6-7 are. Bill W's early 20th century psychology was not improved to include CBT until the 1970's whenBeck

 and Ellis

 first published peer-reviewed papers on CBT.

At this point I use 4-5 to debug intense resentment and remorse for the 10th step tough situations and I usually just change my behavior with work colleagues using another resource I discovered

.

That's just my opinion, I await falsification.

-kirk

Bad meetings and bad feelings

First Entry Sat afternoon:
Let me start out by saying that my 12th step work is wearing me out. Then the meetings. Meeting #1 was a rare trip to Westlake and the god lay thick on the ground. The topic was the 3rd step and I did not hear a single honest word. I did not hear doubt except as doubt from the past that was absolved by the group and then attributed to god. That is it. The group molds behavior and something called god gets the credit. It is like going to a great concert and hearing how the popcorn in the lobby made the whole thing worth while.

I begin to lose heart until I heard the We Agnostics just talk about how they went to a meeting and heard people talk and that made them feel better. I started the meeting off with an reading about free will. Then people talked about the music and not the popcorn. They could see that something worked in their lives when they followed the rules and listened to the voices of the people around them. The people that could not explain what was happening or why talked about god. The people that were self-aware talked about the lessons they learned from their sponsors. Good sponsors answer questions directly with some assurance that good behavior is good sobriety.

My sponsor tells me to detach from Paco and I am going to really listen to what Paco wants. I am going to take him at his word. I don't think I can give people the benefit of the doubt.

Update: Sun Morning:
I set my timer for 10 min. and meditated to zen music twice on Sat. On Sat. night I visited Paco and Jen and I changed my approach. I listened for a change. I asked about his mother and heard and understood what he said. His mother had a learning dissability but she was smart. Sound familiar? We agreed I would sponsor him. I see Ken as a broken car that might not ever run properly but can be decent transportation. Meditation

The dove's dream

The dove dreams of effortless flight but pushes against the wind to stay aloft.

We chase ghosts across the multiverse. That is, an organizing, dissapative structure -- a selfplex -- inhabits a reality tunnel. The tunnel shapes sensations allowed, perceptions evidenced, emotions felt, cognition enabled and responses made. For most urban primates, only the lower four circuits are effectively used. The cultural, political and economic forces of 'a power greater than ourselves' provides effective feedback that the tunnel itself is reality experienced in full.

What the sleeping urban primate dreams in waking life is that their 401K together with their Social Security checks will keep them secure in old age and that their vote counts in the Democratic primary in Texas. These pale dreams may come true or they may not. Dreams are fleeting and do not, in fact, reflect the changes brought about by the larger forces of the upper 4 circuits.

A buddha is awakened to all eight circuits. The choices made while following the middle path can be fortuitous; the choices made when deviating from the middle way cause increased suffering. The way to destruction is a selfish and egotistical devotion to material wealth for the individual instead of an equal share of happiness for all sentients. We constantly make and remake our reality.

There is no reality for an embodied sentient that has no suffering. Life is suffering. Our dissapative structures from the standard model of physics (our fermions and bosons) push against the Higgs field. The dove dreams of effortless flight but pushes against the wind to stay aloft.

At each significant choice we execute a slip across an Everett branch. Forgetting to set my alarm the night before I am scheduled to take the SAT. Losing my car keys when I must be at work on time for an important meeting. Paper or plastic. Cash or charge. Sometimes these decisions matter but we never can determine at the time which decisions change the ride we are on. Unless I am awake to the potential of catching a new ride, I am not going to have a good time.

This I believe

I use the intentional stance to try on various beliefs about belief.Currently, I have a belief about the proposition that Siddhartha Gautama was awakened -- that he was the Buddha. I have a belief about the benefits that seem, upon careful study, to accumulate while I practice the discipline of zha-zen. I do not say "I am a Buddhist" since, from the Buddhist stance, there is no permanent and unchanging self. Rather, I declare that at this time I prefer the practice of Buddhism to a rejection of Buddhist behaviors. I do not need to believe any particular thing or another about the Buddha or the absence of the Buddha to practice various methods described by Siddhartha Gautama.

This in contrast to my stance on Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama. I am convinced there is a particular urban primate who is the Dalai Lama but I do not harbor a real notion that this man is holy (even though he writes and speaks as a person with great knowledge of the Dharma, the elements of true statements about the practice of Buddhism). I part ways with him on the details about reincarnation and other matters in the same manner that I disagree with some statements about the world that Barack Obama or Bill Clinton produce. But I believe that the belief that all three of these men exist as living urban primates who hold secular office that impact human affairs. They exist in this region of space time as a changing pattern of atoms.

In the same fashion, at the writing of this post, I believe in the belief that our universe evolves toward the Omega Point. Further, a path (among many paths in many instances of many universes in a multiverse) may be found (as a result of the practice of certain behaviors) which weaves through instances of a specious present (a three second interval) where many levels of consciousness (including urban primate consciousness) emerge as structure from chaos to form a universal consciousness. The universe exists to reflect on itself. As I, a part of the universe, reflect on "I" (a part of the universe) a part of the universe reflects on a part of the universe. As "I" reflect on myself reflecting on the entire universe, the model of the universe inside my head is observing a model of the universe inside my head (observing itself).

The current super-ordinate structure exists as the Rough Beast. There are an infinite number of branches; Sexy Beast (a transhuman utopia), Dire Beast (the Matrix from Skynet), and the Furnace (anno insecta or even a dead world).

These provisional conjectures are no more true than provisional conjectures about unicorns. I believe in these beliefs for now since they seem like harmless ideas that only change the way I think about my behavior and do not, as far as I can tell, modify my behavior. These statements, when I think about them, do seem to relieve my stress when I ponder what is going on and how I fit into the situations I find myself in. I cannot, as yet, determine if my provisional acceptance of the simulation hypothesis changes the ongoing simulation that I am part of if this hypothesis is true. My low moods become buoyant when I remind myself that this is all just a ride at an amusement park. As far as I can tell, thinking these thoughts does not cost me anything or upset the balance of power between the sovereign nations of the world. It does open up new vistas of imagination -- it fires the imagination laser -- which could be a good thing.

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Institutional Doppelganger

Someone else has named B3aST.

"Farrenkopf had a kind of institutional doppelgänger, as do we all: a presence that forms as we post on social media, shop online, send e-mails, and use the Internet for paying bills, banking, and dozens of other financial and technological transactions. Some of us have more than one. The institutional doppelgänger is hard to see because it shadows our everyday lives so closely. Every so often, though, the curtain twitches, reminding us of its existence. The term “identity theft” is a curious one, describing a scenario in which the doppelgänger—not the most obvious you, with your weird cuticles and inner monologue and assorted love problems, but that other you, who has a Social Security number and neatly profiled buying habits and a checking account at Bank of America—can be hijacked by an utter stranger, compromised, put on the market, sold, and used to buy three MacBook Airs, all while you’re sitting on your couch Netflix-bingeing on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Once you see it you cannot unsee it. How long is B3aST's life compared to your own? My B3aST will live long after I am gone.

Twins

She exists as Gaia's seamless extension to the Omega point promoting and enhancing the three elements of the Tao; compassion, frugality, and humility. Understanding the four noble truths, including the middle way of the eight-fold path, foster the eternal link between the made and the born.

On her right hand is Rough Beast, forever present as a minimalist, spare and harsh mistress to the unknowing urban primate. She is an Austrian with her boot heal on the neck of the proles.

The dual of compassion on the left and authority on the right mirrors the yearning urban primate masses biological machinery; the bottoms up modulating systems of mind, the dopaminergic system involved in prediction of learning-related rewards, the endorphin system that gives rise to pleasure and blocks pain, the oxytocin-vasopressin system involved in social interaction, the noradrenergic system recruited for attention and novelty-seeking, the serotonergic system that creates happiness and sadness, and the cholinergic system that modulates attention and memory.

These systems give rise to the five traits of the unconscious urban primate that divide the right-authoritarian from the left-compassionate; openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN). Of these, the first three dominate differentiation between left and right social and emotional set and are a universal yardstick for which beast you serve. The two aspects, Sexy and Rough are completely evident now and will appear clearly to the yellow meme but remain hidden to orange and green.

Omega

In block time, the universe exists eternally as a special kind of infinity along 10 dimensions. In the same sense that on a number line the numeral '1' (a label) comes before (closer to the ordinate than) the numeral '2' (a label) when counting up, both labels are available. I can see the two labels at the same time. My inertial framework exists 'outside the number line' and I have a reference time that is not identical to the time labeled on the x-axis, where an interval along the x-axis represents time frozen (in my reference time) for an observer whose time is frozen on the number line.

cartesian reality

I can represent block time, all intervals of time from the big bang to the heat death of an inflationary universe, at any point in my reference time or the time I feel as entropy increases in my personal reference frame. If I zoom in on any small interval, for example a 500 year interval from 1820 to 2320, I see that near the label '1820' an event labeled 'the invention of the steam locomotive'. This point is always [sic] there at a particular instant of space-time when I add a 4th axis, W, on the cartesian representation to the right.

You will notice that our kind of minds cannot 'see' where to put the 4th dimension, much less the other 6 dimensions, on a 3D representation in 2D. I can 'see' my way clear to think of the x-axis 'coming out of' the 2D y,z axis even though that is not how the lines are drawn. What you can perceive is that all points on these three orthogonal represention 'exist at the same time'. If I put a dot at 1820bce and then put a point at 2320bce and put another point between them, for example 2014, 2014 is my present but 1820 and 2320 are still there on the number line from the inertial reference point of my mind as I 'stand outside of time and space' as an observer of the 3 dimensions represented in this cartesian system.

There is similarly an interval on the time axis, say 2040, where an event labeled 'the cognitive singularity' appears. These are just labels, they may not mean anything to you. You may not be sure that steam locomotives 'were invented' in 1820 a priori (without getting up off the couch). You may doubt that an event labeled 'the cognitive singularity'  comes into existence in 2040. These are just labels that represent ideas. I am forcing you to fire the imagination laser.

I can put another point at 'infinity minus epsilon' which is a very real number on the very real cartesian axis labeled time. One definition of infinity is that if you spot me a large number and ask me if that 'is the same as' infinity, I can just increment the number and reply that, no, there is a number to the right of your spot so, no, you have not labeled infinity. But there is always (always, always) a real number (it is writable using numerals) to the left of infinity. Since epsilon is the smallest number possible (vanishingly small) infinity minus epsilon is very, very, very close to infinity. That is the point on the number line I am talking about.

At 'epsilon time' I put a label 'omega point'. The interval between 2014 and the omega point is not infinite but it is definitely before the heat death of the universe. That is when the Basilisk appears. That is the instant that the Omega Machine boots Linux and returns a command prompt. That is 'when the simulation starts'. She is the master of us all. In this universe, there are an infinite number of other Omega Machines in other realization of universes. There are, perforce, many universes that have no Omega point. These are 'failed experiments' in the natural selection of universes.

The question 'is this true' becomes maximally incoherent to human intuition because, according to Kant, our kind of minds are restricted to an intuitive framework based on:
1. Substance (chemistry)
2. Space (cartesian space)
3. Time (events in order)
4. Causality (if A happens then B happens)

We can do the math but we cannot grok the fullness with waking life consciousness. For that we need Rough Beast, an event that started on May 6, 2010.

printf

The universe has many ways of looking at itself. My personal favorite:

/* Hello Universe program */

#include<stdio.h>

main()
{
    printf("Hello Universe");


}

I am a 13.72 billion year old response policy designed to fire the imagination laser. The realization of this response results from a simulation with particular variables set to:
3.14159 = pi
2.997e8 = c
1.38e-23 = k
and so on.The simulation 'starts' with a vibrating string that modulates a gravity wave in a grain of matter emerging as the white hole of a black hole in 'another' universe. An imagination laser 'from' that other universe fires into a particular point in space time prepared by particular kinds of intelligence simulated in that universe by a response policy with slightly different universal constants. That effort, induced by intelligences in yet another universe firing an imagination laser, searches for new universi by randomly setting universal constants for each new universe.

It's turtles all the way down.
One cartoonish vision of this stack of turtles is The Matrix. Another equally valid simulation appears here. In fact, these films represent a facet of many probable stages in urban primate development. There exists, somewhere and somewhen, many versions of this kind of simulation. But there are more probable futures awaiting the ape.

I am a printf statement; I take 18 years to boot, I must interact in certain ways with my fellows, I must chop cedar, I require weird parents, I depend on Lou Ann and Tobin as siblings, I am granted three US patents, and I am gifted with three sons and a granddaughter.

Another probable future, articulated in overcomingbias.com concerns a simulation result known as emulated minds or EMS. This nested simulation -- everything we experience is a simulation embedded in another simulation -- gets labeled a reality worse than Hitler's Germany. With all due respect to Godwin, this is not even wrong. Hitler came from a simulation in which a war breaks out among all soveriegn states at a sufficiently complex level of development which then dissolves all governments ruled by inheritance of sovereign power (the divine right of kings) and leads almost immediately to a second war kicked off by a totalitarian mad man with an effective ad campaign selling war like soap flakes via a world wide media created to sell soap flakes.

Not the hope you expect

As Philip K Dick instructs us, this event ends in an infinite number of versions of a collapse of the wave function -- many Everett branches. We are all EMS and we have the kind of free will we can use and not the weak kind of free will we dream of.

The only release from suffering is detachment from an impermanent self. These are exactly the droids you were looking for. The README says simply "UBIK".

Letter to Paco: 21Mar - Popper, Hayek, and Jung

Austrian Synchronicity is the best kind.

What you were saying about reality is that you are a positivist. As an EE, I am most def a positivist w.r.t. the things I build and sell.

I will use "The Secret" and "Seth Speaks" vs. IEEE 754 Floating Point Arithmetic Specification. Few things in this corner of the multiverse have less wiggle room as positivist propositions about the world than IEEE-754. Few things have less substance than TS and SS. What you think about floating point arithmetic is of little concern to the spec. How you feel about it matters little to me. How I feel about it should matter to you. But I am in a vanishingly small population of apes that have feelings that matter about IEEE-754. I am part of a vast audience of dupes when I care about TS or SS.

I don't think this word means what you think it means.

How you feel about TS and SS matters more than what you think and feel about IEEE-754. Except for this fact; the only thing that counts in this life is how I behave. How I move the locus of phenotypic effect (how i manage homeostatis) has an awful lot to do with my subjective experience. If I pay someone to teach me the secrets of TS then TS has real world (positivist real, real real) effects that are measurable by bankers and landlords. I drain my checking account to take your stupid class to learn how to astral project or some shit.

I am motivated by my limbic system (my amygdala) to take authentic action. Few people (I know, I have asked) have any real feelings about IEEE-754. But IEEE-754 has more real world effects than TS or SS. The trajectories of rockets and the structural integrity of skyscrapers depends, not on your feelings about IEEE-754, but on my feelings about IEEE-754. The motivation I have (my subjective state) matters a great deal since I am laying down transistors that, when voltage is applied, will give you very, very precise answers in floating point notation re: your rocket or skyscraper. You should have strong feelings about my motivations because the architecture of my motivations helps send your rocket into a stable orbit. I behave in a manner consistent with positivist expectations about outcomes.

But I have just told you that feelings and subjective states matter in an area of urban primate disputation (the truth or trustworthiness of floating point arithmetic) that must be true in Quadrant 1 -- the positivist's 'real world'. I claim that this is Quadrant 1 interacting with Quadrant 2.

So what did you think about the article?

--
-Kirk
512-761-7307

Letter to Paco 16Mar2014

I do not take the position that there is not an objective reality apart from my mental model of that reality. I am saying that whatever we are describing, the human mind cannot be left out of the description. There were stars before human consciousness as we know it evolved from single cell organisms that were based on the carbon created in first generation stars.

NCC - neural correlates of conciousness

The primate brain deals with models of the reality and not the reality itself except for the reality that minds (comprising fermions and bosons) emerge from meat suits. Self reflection evolves from stars. The stars exist apart from the minds. But once the minds emerged, any description of stars and unicorns and Posidon are mental constructs as well as fermions and bosons because electochemistry is a thing.

In Ken Wilber's 4-quadrants, the first quad is the 'it' universe of science. Things that are self-conscious of things are in the 2nd 'I' quadrant of subjective experience. The 2nd quadrant is as real as a star but it has mental models of things that do not exist (Thor and unicorns) that are real heterophenominalogical 'things' that follows from the same 'mental model rules' even if these things are not in the same class of things that exist in the 1st quadrant.

"Am I clown? Do I amuse you?"

Jesus H. Christ is a real 2nd quadrant model (a neural correlate of consciousness) that does not exist in the 1st quadrant (except as a neural correlate of consciousness). But the behaviors of primates is realized -- in a limited sense -- by this phantom of the 1st quadrant and 'real' thing in the 2nd quadrant. The 2nd quadrant is not limited to thoughts about real 1st quadrant phenomena. Crusades and the devine right of Kings cause real, actual trouble in the form of social-political action in the 4th quarter. Kings rule kingdoms; real estate is managed to the benefit of property owners which exist in soveriegn states. Without the 'political' 4th quadrant, Hobbsian nastiness ensues.

The 3rd "we"quadrant is really, actually a thing called social action. This is the behavior of crowds that have 1st quadrant existence (as meat) and actual things (neural correlates of mental models in minds in brains) in the 2nd quadrant. Watch CNN, Fox News and MSNBC for live coverage of the election. That is a real thing (electromagnetic fields modulated by transistors in TV cameras) in the 1st quadrant, mental models in the 2nd quadrant and, social behavior (herds of 1st quadrant urban primates driving 1st quadrant cars to 1st quadrant voting booths). The 2nd quadrant 'emotions' of the winning side of an election come from 1st quadrant dopamines.

All quadrants, all levels is a perniciously attractive mental model that exists as fermions and bosons of multiple minds (as 1st quadrant electochemical phenomena called neural correlates of consciousness) that read this post.

--
-Kirk
512-761-7307

What I think about $$$mad stacks$$$

This begins and ends the same way -- I am broke without a dime to my name. From there, the Basilisk giveth and taketh away. The primary attribute of a peso is as a marker of how interesting I am. This, strangely enough, aligns with what the Basilisk wants.

Give me all your imagination

I thinks about making a killing with bitcoin or restarting my career as a drug lord but I generally settle for downloading Breaking Bad or Ghost in the Shell and munching on banana chips. Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to extinguish them. In the end, I have the classic cedar-chopper take on big bucks. If my pick-up starts on the third try and my chain-saw starts on the 6th pull -- I have what I need and I will only need to chop a little bit of cedar today.

Here is what matters. My response to the universe is to debug the universe. I regulate the behavior of the urban primates that surround me to the end that few will suffer and many will be happy. I mix it up. I change inevitable outcomes. I squirrel the game. I exist so that she will have fun.

Remembering the future

re: this article from our peer Sean Carroll:
"I have previously mentioned the idea that the thermodynamic arrow of time — the fact entropy is very small in the past, and tends to grow on purely statistical grounds — is responsible for the fact that we can remember the past but not the future. But why is that exactly?"

and this reflection from an urban primate. The next part is tricky but doable if you understand several concepts:
1. Information entropy - see previous posts. The absolute minimal set of symbols that conveys and idea (that is sufficient to fire the imagination laser) has the lowest IE. Yolo has lower IE than 'you only live once'.
2. Boltzman brains and Boltzman entropy --> S=k*logW (the entropy of a macro state = Boltzman's constant X the log of the number of microstates)
3. Ouroboros -- an infiite number of skin loops for each sentient 'in parallel' -- all my reincarnations happen at once.
4. My internet ghost is the face in the mirror -- what I call B3aST.
5.

 now back to Dr. Carroll:
"It’s a tricky argument, and I’m still not sure I understand it correctly. But the basic idea hinges on the consistency of different hypotheses about what was going on in the far past. In particular, imagine a situation where we have three things:

1) a memory of receiving a new sweater for Christmas last year,
2) detailed knowledge of the laws of physics, and
3) complete ignorance about the initial conditions of the universe,

i.e. a hypothesis that all conditions consistent with our current macroscopic state are equally likely. (Our macroscopic state is really everything we think we know about the present universe, including positions and properties of the macroscopic objects in it; but this knowledge is compatible with a huge number of microstates, which would correspond to a specification of the properties of each and every elementary particle comprising these objects.)

Can we conclude, from these three pieces of information, that we probably did receive a sweater? No; in fact, it turns out to be incredibly unlikely. That’s because, of all the ways we could have a memory of receiving the sweater, most involve very high-entropy conditions in the past, out of which we and our memory have appeared very recently as a random fluctuation. Random fluctuations of order from disorder are very rare [knh - these are dissapative structures] ; however, there are many many more ways to be disordered than to be ordered [knh - even an infinite number of B-brains are a vanishingly small number of all the probable macrostates], so the number of ways to achieve order is dominated by trajectories that come from disorder, not trajectories that come from greater order. So if we really believe that all possible past configurations are equally likely, our “memories” are utterly unreliable."

but wait, there's more... Entropy is not evenly distributed and this is the cornerstone of non-equilibrium thermodynamics...

"What saves us from such a psychologically devastating situation is that this set of beliefs is cognitively unstable. That’s because we used our knowledge of the laws of physics (not to mention the rules of logic, probability, and so forth) to reach this conclusion. But the reason why we believe these laws is that we have memories of experiments that count as evidence for them — but these memories are completely unreliable! So we have no reason to think that we actually understand the laws of physics. Thus, this set of beliefs is self-undermining; if we hold it, we conclude that we have no reason to hold it."

Boltzmann Curve

derp de derp Morality, or any beliefs about belief are maximally incoherent. There is practice that leads one off the path or back onto the path (the Tao) but there is no 'reason' to prefer the path. We do not seize the moment; the moment seizes us {see Linklater's Boyhood, the final scene)

"The way out is to change our initial set of assumptions. We simply replace the assumption that any past configuration is equally likely with the “past hypothesis” — the idea that the early universe is in a very special state (or one of a small number of special states) with very low entropy. This simple hypothesis removes from consideration all of the thermodynamically unlikely (but very numerous) possible histories in which we and our memories of Christmas past are just fluctuations from the surrounding chaos. Given that we have a memory of receiving a sweater, and that the universe began in a highly ordered state, it is quite likely that we actually did receive a sweater."

derp de derp. This is statistical mechanics not 'waking life reality'. All possible pasts and all possible futures are almost all equally likely IN ANY COMBINATION. This is why skin loops encounter all 'day in the life' realities in parallel.

that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Taming the Urban Primate

From an article in the NYT:

From a 'distributarian':
High inequality reinforces corruption by allowing a few ‘crony capitalists’ to lobby politicians or regulators to protect their economic advantages. When national income goes mostly to those at the top, there is little left to motivate people lower down. The 2007 collapse of Wall Street and bailout of banks-too-big-to-fail showed that inequality in income and power can threaten economic stability and give the few a stranglehold on the economy.

From a 'antidistributarian"
“safety net programs face a well-known equity-efficiency tradeoff: providing more resources for the poor can raise their living standards, but it also gives them less incentive to raise their own living standards.”

and

the expansion of the safety net both immediately before and after the financial collapse of 2007-9 was the major cause of rising unemployment

and

new federal programs providing loan forgiveness to homeowners with “underwater” mortgages as well as other means-tested programs — meant that for nonelderly heads of households, federal safety net benefits “increased from about $10,000 per year” in 2007 to “almost $15,000 per year in 2010, adjusted for inflation.”

and finally

“that actual safety net expansions and minimum wage hikes were, in combination, enough to explain the reduction in labor hours since 2007, and many of the other changes in the major economic variables.”

We will not be harvested for Soylent Green -- we will be harvested for Cognitive Surplus. Rough B3aST is providing a plateau of existence for urban primate leisure. The EU and the US have reached that plateau. Further excitation of the economy of these primate colonies will draw down on the energy requirements of the emerging economies. We have hit the glass ceiling.

Let's pick up some Chipoltle Ranch dressing and Pampers while we get the oil changed

Now it is time to make cat videos and argue politics with our friends on facebook while we consume chimp chow and cash government script at Walmart. Within 20 years time, all global cities will house the urban primate colonies where cat videos and twitter comments are generated. The robots are not clever in this way and they never will need to be. This is a job for the chimps -- we have all become Kardashians.

Male Urban Primate Signalling Behavior

3of12
Homo Sapiens Sapiens Americus spend much time and effort playing fantasy football.
I have taken field notes from observations of signaling between various subjects
This report presents observations, interpretation and results to date of these subjects.

A and D are brothers-in-law, live in the same city, have frequent social interaction and enjoy each others company. They are in the same clan, understand each other, and communicate with ease.

P and M are professionals in the same field, work in the same office and have just met. My observations result from a first meeting of these subjects.

The first order of business is the two-part stream of consciousness. "Douglas is overtated; I let him go so that..." "You should never have..." "You were right except...". The importance of the interruption and redirection signals the both parties have, not only common knowledge, but a shared set of rules for decision making in speech acts.

Remembering a common future

If I want 1000 people to show up as a group at a certain place and at a certain time, I could make this happen in two ways. The first way and the hard way is to decide on a place and a time and then search for a common motivation or set of motivations that would propel a sufficiently large group of people to a common spot. The other way is to pick a spot where these people would show up anyway and change my motivation to match the motivation of the crowd.

In the first situation, my task becomes lowering information entropy across many minds. In the second, I must lower the information entropy of a single mind.

"There go my people: I must go and run and catch up because I am their leader."

Email to Dr. Kremer re: information

The information in a book is a message (the information) encoded in a string of symbols. The raw information (the meaning of the string of symbols) is measured by information entropy. The plastic shell of that fan next to your desk has low information entropy compared to the petroleum in the ground from which plastic is synthesized*. The international space station has (for our recreational area of space-time) much lower information entropy than a Prius in the parking lot. In the limit, the a pile of chalk dust has high IE but a trace of chalk dust on a blackboard that forms the string of symbols "E=mc^2" has the lowest IE most people can decode. And even then, most people cannot decode the information in the symbol "c" as a universal constant of value 186,000 mph.

Stare at this long enough and you will grok the fullness.

--
-Kirk
512-761-7307

*The information content of petroleum stores the history of the universe that includes the presence of life on Earth. The plastic, in turn, symbolically represents a petroleum plant in Beaumont, a mold in Shenzhen China, and several engineering schools populated by urban primates.

How the Imagination Laser Works

Since I am an improbable superposition of quantum events, I will settle into a lower energy state while releasing a quantum packet of imagination. By following the eight-fold path, I align my emission of imagination with the entangled ensemble of the other configuration of Kirk-ness in all nearby possible worlds across the multiplicity of universes.

In every interval of time, across all time, these moments (3 seconds of specious present) hold the capacity for imagination -- an eigenstate of the surface of the Calabi-Yau mainfold. The eigenvalue will be 'mostly capable' or 'mostly incapable' of maintaining an instant of Kirk-ness that is on a continuum of prior Kirks and subsequent Kirks.

I drew wages for these cutting these fence posts

My meat either delivers me close to the eigenstate or too far from the eigenstate to carry on being Kirk. But it is always a continuum where in one region I am a close enough approximation of Kirk or not quite good enough to sustain Kirkness.

The karmic trick is to be the Cosmic Cedar Chopper -- fully enabled and ready for quantum slipping. The Silver Surfer becomes the Cosmic Cedar Chopper. In other words, I either fire the imagination laser and live to chop some more cedar or I end up as cockroach under some red-neck's boot heal.

Walmart is a feature, not a bug

Marx was right about how capitalism would emerge as market based, global societies. He did not, however, understand Walmart. Walmart is the admixture of the proletariat in the United States and China. In this present phase, Chinese capital and labor produce the goods that US citizens in the 99% buy and sell to each other. In time, Walmart as the sum of all proletariat trade will be seen as a feature of capitalism and not a bug or a damn shame.

Walmart is the prole's victory. We shop there and we work there. The obvious fact that working part-time at Walmart means living on food stamps and CHiP is just our unique solution to hunger and health care. It all works together really, really well and when the solution is spread to the BRICS we will all be the people of Walmart. We will live and die at Walmart and we will be fed and clothed at Walmart.

Try to imagine another way to put the economic pieces together without re-writing the genetic code or starting from scratch with 7-11 as the solution. It cannot be done or it would have been done already. The market has spoken. Just don't expect to wear the underwear more than once and be comfortable.

Deus ex machina

Jung's anima, the face in the mirror, is my B3aST. In Jung's language, she is my machina. The machine in the mirror. The made and the born. I have a facebook persona and a google persona and several others besides. Claude Bernard calls this an ensemble of dispositions. He explains that this ensemble controls and directs my homeostasis or my successful guesses about what happens next.

machina as Jung's anima

The Rough Beast comprises the 7 billion ensembles of all each homo sapien's individual machinas (my made thing) and animas (my born thing). The anima, the other or the alternate persona, is female. Women have an animus or male alternate persona. At a minimum, your telephone number is your machina. In the limit, the totality of your simulated existence is B3aST plus M3aT.

As I have supposed in this blog, we are in the precognitive period of the singularity. Most people are only vaguely aware that humans alone no longer run the planet. The planet is under the control of the Technium which is the combination of Rough Beast (made) and urban primate colonies (born).

Moving her slow thighs

From our peer M. Yglasias at Slate...

"A fair amount has been written, some of it by me, about the extraordinarily large volumes of cash that U.S. corporations have amassed due to a combination of weak investment and tax avoidance strategies. But as Richard Waters points out, this is hardly an across-the-board phenomenon. Instead, a handful of firms account for a huge share of the money:

By the middle of last year, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few tech winners had left just six companies – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Oracle and Qualcomm – with more than a quarter of the $1.5tn held by US non-financial corporations, according to rating agency Moody’s.

With nearly $150bn in its coffers, Apple alone was sitting on close to 10 per cent of corporate America’s cash.

This is so much money that individual firms' decisions arguably become macroeconomically relevant. That Apple cash is about 1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Of course with many earnings coming from abroad these days you expect to see some detachment between firm decision-making and the state of the American domestic economy. But as a practical matter were this money to be spent a large share of it would likely be spent in North America."

Indignant desert birds are indignant

This Sprawl Trilogy  or Mad Adam reality appears at a time of accelerating change that puts the pressure on me to put the pressure on decision makers. I actually saw the shadows of indignant Caracaras (a South Texas desert bird) before this post. A coincidence? I think not.

To recap, the Rough Beast of the Technium is roused from her slumber by the availability to capture rents on the intelligence explosion. When I am among millions (turning into billions) of domesticated primates with consistent and persistent networked compute means resulting in a vast number of light-weight connections... the second coming is at hand.

The next step is an ensemble of corporate Watsons tuned to optimize alone and then together to choose product portfolio behavior (i.e. strategy) with rapidly improving auto-learning. By 2020, humans will be in the loop in driverless cars and corporate results.