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.