The Last Thursday Problem

Last Thursday problem goes like this. What if the universe and everything in it including me and you came into existence at 8:30am Central Daylight time last Thursday. This meme got spread by atheist bloggers snarking christianists but it has been around the block. Either Mark Twain or Aristotle told it first. This presents what Dan Dennett calls a 'sky-hook' or a 'just so story' where the real work of building up from lower levels of substructure (built on it's own levels of sub-substructure) with 'cranes'. Sky-hooks were 'invented' by Navy Top Guns to indicate they were running out of fuel and had to take the next landing slot or they would fall into the ocean.

My impulse as well behaved thinker who bothers to ponder such problems was brought up short. I had an emotional attachment to 'no fucking way' as my original answer. The root of this was attachment to my impermanent self, I think this is called samsara but I do not remember. Why would this particular moment in my life be any less rich and distinguished and amusing as this present moment that I write this post. Would knowing that pan spermia made me and not blue green algae change my dinner reservation or put gas in my car?

I cannot prove or disprove the Last Thursday problem and I am not sure this conforms to Popper's 'demarcation problem' - what is the exact point at which a problem ceases to be a scientific question. In Popper's version, no one really cares about the problems not available to science for a solution. Name a problem that a reasonable person would spend money on. The tithe does not count. The only guarentee of the tithe is the you will surely NOT get the tithe back. Cast off from that delusion. This is a loaf upon the waters.

But if something BIG happened to me last Thursday I could go back to that time with my present knowledge. I could literally travel in time. Something did happen on Thursday - Jim got out of his bed and walked out of the hospital. The same thing happened many many Thursdays ago. When Jim was 14 months old (Aug. 1992) he got an infection on the other eye that had the same exact treatment. Three days in the hospital with a strong anti-biotic IV. That is the MRSA loop. It will always be there because it is a strong path well trodden.

Imma write you a blog entry but here is the bare bones. When I remember an incident in the past I am traveling in time back to that time. Literally the neuron assigned to remembering this scene is a trigger for a huge surge in brain activity. You really, really, really exist - exist as the present you - in a period of a skin loop with many harmonics and sub-loops. It's turtles all the way down. I just restarted the Niece loop. Good times.

To travel back in time I send a transmission to my prior self to download the current me. That's not bursting that is merely slipping and we do it all the time. The past is operated on by the present and transformed into something new every time the earth rotates on its axis and the moon orbits the earth and the earth orbits the sun and the sun around the galaxy, etc. These cycles are WHAT build the dissipative structures in space-time.

In the same way the 'full download' in a burst of enough relevant information to 'start the clock in future time' beginning at the place I remember on the loop. The loops exist all over but the ones I create I call lines of demarcation or  LoD's. I placed many of these during my life and I have gone back and collected most of them.

I blasted back and looked at the whole situation. I did a detailed simulation on the Bayesian Machine I had at the time. I gave repeated inputs over time as I remembered more.

But there is never more than a single 'me' or that collection of fermions and bosons that supports the layers of 'me'. I return the favor be my existence as a self aware quantum observer.

To recap plainly - the energy is conserved (almost) when I write my code back into my brain at the past time. Nothing but information is required. Information is free - it's what the universe is made of. I gave myself my current information and placed myself back in the 1962 version of me. The slightest perturbation in background energy took place. I achieved maximum homeostasis with a very large move in time. I stabbed my foot with a glass shard so that my mother would not commit suicide. That's what is back there. All the answers.

kirk 'please do not adjust your set' holden

My Candidate for HP

Please send your vita and cover letter to me via enclosure. The rules for nomination and selection 'prune' the choice via Bayesian Inference. The resulting candidate must still conform to the existing avatar of powerfulness, my current HP.
The Pruning Rules: from 'How to See God of $5 a Day'

1. Is my candidate for HP virtuous?
2. Does my candidate have impeccable manners?
3. Will the candidate accept my fealty and worship?
4. When I demote my HP back to demi-god status will I incur the wrath of a spurned lover?
5. Can the candidate pinch hit if my current HP is unable to fulfill his/her tenure in office?

Yesterday for example I handed off HP status from my old boss Tom G. to Paco. This move was forced by my visit to Tom when I did not want or need the formality that comes from face to face contact with a HP that, well, just might not understand they they are in charge of my spiritual growth in the program at this time. The bad news for Paco is that almost immediately after my dinner with Tom, Charles Shultz's lovable Peanuts character Linus Van Pelt became my new HP.

I will discuss this more in my blog.
Here is the current roster of HP's that served full terms in office

Charles Darwin (more like a meta-HP, subtends all others)
Steven J Gould (1987-1996)
Richard Dawkins (1997-1998), (2003-2006)
Daniel Dennett (1999-2002)
Nicholas Nasim Taleb (2003-2007)
Zyprexa (2008-2009)
Karl Popper (2010-2011)

Situational HP's called into power by selection of subject matter expertise.

Steven Pinker (when ever I listen to Pinker on audio-books he rides shotgun as HP, that's how I roll)
Stuart Kaufman (it's not a date you would recognize, it's hipster obscure)
Ilya Prigogine (very complex set of dates that support dissipative structures far from thermodynamic equilibrium)
Stephen Hawking (Hawking radiation has captured a hologram of the universe in 10 dimensions so his tenure is tenseless)
Richard Feynmann (his dates are asymptotes to infinity, in the limit there are no dates or a sense of the passage of fine grained time)
Steven Weinberg (his guidance is best at the Plank length and in Plank time, 10^-43 seconds, the time a photon traverse the smallest physical 'distance' in space-time)
Beniot Mandelbrot (when running simulations on Alpha or Theta wavelengths with fractal geometry)
R. Buckminister Fuller (for geodesic geometry supporting engineering holons)
Tom G (when I think about computing machines)
Paco Ahlgren (if he serves me Ginger Ale and let's me derp de derp)
Linus Van Pelt (when I am sorta existential but not quite actually fully existential)

The Current Candidates
That woman I saw last night in the corner of my eye (it's personal)

Tomas Pynchon's character Pirate Prentice in Gravity's Rainbow (A screaming comes across the sky...)
Tomas Pynchon's character V. in the novel V. (she might have been the woman I saw last night in the corner of my eye)

Lord John Worfin

Yoyodyne System's CEO Lord John Worfin from the movie Buckaroo Bonzai (which stole Yoyodyne from Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49")
Janetta Baker, the sister of a friend of mine that is almost always happy
Captain Kirk (TV's William Shatner as James 'Tirebiter' Kirk)

kirk 'powerless without a monist HP' holden

Letters to Paco 1Jun2011

What us chimps have become

The universe is observing itself in a strange loop.

Cool article

. Just by looking at the Schrodinger box with the dead+alive cat will create duplicate copy of ALL observers in two pocket universes along with a live cat in one (plus the people that *saw* the live probalistic cat) and a dead cat in the other (along with derp de derp etc.) So every 'burst' (a probabilistic Schrodinger Siberian Tiger) or 'slip' (a Schrodinger's cute little kitteh)  produces at least two 'observers' one that stays in the normal flow (or in the same place or derp) and one that does the whole shenanigans-in-space-time action, adventure, intrigue, etc/etc/etc/etc.

Did you know that time flows backward inside the event horizon of a BH? To the singularity, the event horizon is 'creating' EM that flows TOWARD the singularity. Gravity cannot (derp?) flow 'backward' (or flow at all - it is an existential 'behavior' of space-time. So the EM photons are exchanging energy from the future (the singularity to which they are traveling) with entropy from the past (event hor. from which they are emitted).
People that have not read EP are:
1. losers
2. unable to carry on a decent discussion about inclusive fitness
3. complete fucktards for calling Dawkins a reductionist fiend.

But now for the grand finale. Hawking radiation at each event horizon across the universe IS the information content of the entire universe. THAT is how the Omega Machine 'tells me what time it is". A heterogeneous cloud of bosons and fermions (yours truly) have quantum entanglement with EVERY digit of information 'stored' in the signal from Hawking radiation. The information is encrypted and compressed and highly inter connected but it is always there if you run the clock backwards. Put a clock in a BH and it WILL run backwards. And it all fits in the trunk of my DeLorean.

ciao,

Kirk "that's not right. it's not even left" Holden

* I most likely created two 'sets' of policemen when I tried 'death by cop'. I am dead in one of the terminus universes and the officers are on indefinite leave or fired for killing me. I am the live Kirk 3.0 you know and love in this robust (from my subjective experience) universe. To Sgt. Brown of the APD I was a Schrodinger's Tazmanian Devil with probability distributions for being alive and being dead. Collapsing wave functions is not just a good idea - it's the law. THAT is the telos of the Omega Machine. One motherfucker of a quantum observer. The universe is observing itself in a strange loop.

BTW - Hayek is the Austrian Glenn Beck. The Road to Boredom.
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Second Volley
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Reading his Holiness, Sir Karl Popper's Open Society and its Enemies we have his summation of future histories - plan your nano-Utopian moves in design space for change by increments. Bayesian tableau win. Generate 'seed' hypothesis H0. Increment through each trial of 'current' hypothesis H1 with 'current' evidence E1 against 'past' hypothesis H0 with 'past' evidence E0. Contra Hayek who bootstraps 'We could change everything yellow into something blue' into a metaphysical swamp of risks and unintended consequences. I see the Chinese 5-year plan and the program of libertarian hegemony described by Hayek as indistinguishable 'closed' societies.

Here is my favorite imagined conversation:
KP "Did you finish writing your little book yet?"
FH "Just sent the galley proofs to the publisher. Want to read it and give me your reaction?"

Sir Karl wants light starch, do you take plastic?

KP "No. Now please go pick up my dry cleaning and walk my dog."






Marx has the same flaw as Hayek:
1. ingenious problem statement. - capitalism has some weird results.
2. call for revolution and utopian contrivances 'for' this or that imagined Theory of Everything - Bourgeois rule with proletariat servitude or proletariat rule with bourgeois servitude.

Popper saw 'conjecture and refutation' continuously on all aspects of human culture (change, monitor, change, monitor...) - as the only engine of change toward un-utopia.
Znext = Zthis^2 _c (Benoit M.). Staying on the fractal boundaries proscribes only smaller and smaller and smaller incremental moves in space-time as 'rational moves in design space' (Dennett) by pruning rules.

From Wittgenstein we know that eventually all explanations, like the explanation we 'believe' through motivated reasoning, come to a stopping place. I prefer Jared Diamond. We are a vast, unruly platoon of chimps wandering around the surface of the earth looking for bananas and a cozy place to fuck. The stuff we do is rooted in operant conditioning of behaviors (by agents with operant conditioning to perform operant conditioning on subordinates performing operant conditioning). Domesticated monkey win.

k.

The Philosophy of Engineering

All designs from drawing board to working prototype require three experiments before delivery
1. Where the fuck is daylight, we tried to follow the specs
2. Triage, escape with only critical bugs fixed
3. Overreach - we could make this work like the spec and close those last few bugs.

Then, as experiment #3 rolls off the line we become unusually fond of our one night stand in triage. Proper use of the 80/20 rule emerges from panic and anguish. Just get us hardware boot and get rid of the hot spots across the surface. And for god sake make some improvements on ESD protection.

The last thing we fix are continuously available resources or 'logical' hotspots. It's always hotspots. The reason it is always hot spots that must not intrude is that the die is designed to utmost precision to evenly diffuse current flow and hence.

Every problem in geometry and engineering can be solved with three data points. Bet on the solution from the second data point.

Opposites are Complementary

Contraria sunt Complementa - Neils Bohr's knightly crest

My drunk self and my sober self are complementary. I have this label on Right Livelihood. [6.62606896(33)×10−34 J·s]

1. forming a complement; complete
2. complementing each other
3. complimentary color or style.

avocation complements occupation.
My avocation complements my occupation
These entangled operations produce a fractal surface of probability where information is created simultaneously across the multiverse.

Yesterday I said 'harder they come' aloud and it was the next song on the iPod shuffle. I slipped into a possible world where the only difference was Jimmy Cliff instead of Beyonce playing on an iPod in the exact relation to the cosmic environment. All the trains, planes and automobile were traveling the same velocity between each universe.

The complementary nature of the duality or ensemble of entangled dispositions, is called quantum behavior. The Shannon Entropy of the move is quite low. That means that it is hard to guess the next step given the last step of a string of bits, the preferred method of exchanging information. Claude Shannon did two things
1. defined information transfer at zero energy
2. showed the fractal nature of information.

But landing in the right spot takes practice. That is the Tao, a path which has no marked route. The path and not the path are complementary.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-%< =-=-=-=-=-=-
[6.62606896(33)×10−34 J·s] [1.054571628(53)×10−27 erg·s]I use physical constants for footnote index pointers. The order is completely arbitrary. This is also Planck's constant in Joules/sec. But the point - and I do have one - is that we are surrounded by the kind of order that convinces us that life is a pointless struggle.

[1.054571628(53)×10−27 erg·s] is both Planck's constant in erg*seconds AND a footnote to a foot note.

Science and Engineering H.P.

 

HeteroPhenomenology

Emergent, metaphysical contrivance supporting a substrate of physical consciousness built on many, many proto-conscious means including sensation, memory, cognitive meat-puppet phenotype -or- an ensemble of pre-conscious dispositions. Popper originally pronounced Darwin's Theory a metaphysical project to join many, many scientific disciplines because IMHO Darwin's achievement was distinctly Kuhnian. Popper later admitted that Darwin followed his Logic of Scientific Discovery with sufficient rigor and put it inside the line of demarcation between science and the absurd. The fact that this distanced one more discovery from Kuhn was a delicious side dish.

Full story here.

Becoming a Philosoph

 

"But eventually, through constant practice, you get to the point where, scientists believe, these processes get pushed down into the subconscious. They don’t need to be consciously worked out anymore. They become a subroutine. Suddenly you realize you’re saying things you haven’t heard or memorized. You’re able to free-associate. Your brain begins exerting control at a higher level, directing bigger chunks of information that can be expressed as whole ideas." Aaron Berkowitz

Read this out loud

RED

BLUE

RED

RED

BLUE

BLUE

In each case, my anterior cingulate cortex lights up as I attempt to suppress the confusion and pick the right word. This is a meat based Bayesian machine.

ELF Neuron: dendrite agnostic

Elf means eleven in German according to Pete. Robert, Pete and I built a cognitive neuron's brain; the e500 CPU core for embedded applications. The dendrites were vast and confusing pandemonium of requests to become real. We wrote a spec that could be combined with other specs for other vaguely worded promises to deliver on time, underbudget and done completely right. Pick one at this point in the guessing game. You will not get any choice you make because not one single item on the list of parts is known. These physical implementations of the logic and state functions depends on the partitioning into know ensembles of as yet unrealized specification for a communication means that would change the game.

We all searched for this wonder of engineering imagination and found entrenched standards that had to change themselves completely each time they were upgraded. The switch from PCI to PCI Express was that of two manifestly unlike each other as the scandalous use of PCI in both labels. In short, we realised that everyone was trained to swich standards at a moments notice no matter what the label said. The universe was dendrite agnostic.

The substratum or the structures Dispophy, a set of dissapative structures far from thermodynamic equilibrium, which match sensorium to perception, the ability to remember a good move in design space. Operant conditioning for later instances that sufficiently match this current sensorium, the specious moment with attendant experience.

This was the prow of the ship I commanded. The best design team I had ever worked with and I held them together for unending experiments on our beast, the 603E. We loved this lady and treated her to unholy torture for the good of us all. The whole team together and by teams reaped the rewards of the inquisituon.

Why does the clock stop at 300Mhz? The design was rated originally to 100Mhz so the designer randomly choose 300Mhz as plenty fast enough. So we set it to 1000Mhz and set out to make it there. We shrank it, we ran it to the melting point of the chip. We shocked it with voltage spikes and we learned how to borrow time, deposit time, lend time, squeeze time, expand time, stop time, speed time up, stop at any particular time for quite a while, ignore time. What is time to a pig?

The secret was to build a monkey brain into the technoid brain. The limbic system was a string of latches that were not comprehended by the instruction set architecture. There are various kinds of un-architected state in a processor. The uninitialized cache memory which holds the near state information. A Cache Memory architecture comes alive in the mind as layers of remembered history and projected futures.

Even the codewriter does not go to the core. The core is owned by The Admin, usually clothed as The Kernal. But within the core are many know collections of parts. The state of the art imitations of the ideas we saw other people talk about at ISSCC. We all ran to ISSCC to spill our guts on every single fucking thing we had recently discovered about how to stop fucking things up with inverters. Or RAM arrays or physical checking and logic simulation and chip integration. The fine grained distribution of disciplines is the fundmental law of engineering, and is therefore the second law of engineering.

The first law of engineering is that we are in the business of telling you how many people we can hurt with given inputs and expected outputs.

The physician is employed because of the engineer and the lawyer who must sue him. He can choose to do no harm as his consciounce will allow but the engineer designed the bullet and the gun that caused the harm.

We built a fucking cognitive neuron called elf. My brainchildren are through the land helping Papa Legba and Papa Guysmo

DisPissFFE

Happiness - Know Limits

The Meets and Bounds of the happy life.
Moderation, the hallmark of the happy life, follows the dictates of reason. Aristotle's maxim that virtue leads to the happy life demands moderation and restraint along with caring and sharing.

The hanged man expresses the relation, in one of its aspects, between the Divine and the Universe. Nirvana; the mind like fire unbound.

His expression demonstrates the release of the self to a higher power. Of the three types of happiness, ecstasy must come by moderation in all things to prepare a path to altered states of consciousness.

The Happiness Myth - Jennifer Michael Hecht

Happiness - Know Thyself

Quite introspection, active study, focused effort.

Happiness - Carp Diem

Reach for this day, tomorrow is out of reach. Take what is yours, play the part, become the role and the role will take you.

My guidepost here is
BB - 10th, 11th and 12 steps
The Four Noble Truths - the metaphysical dimension of right action
The Eightfold Path - wisdom, ethics and study
Peanuts - Chas. Schultz speaks through Linus's compassion

Pack more into the stream of life. Experience is everything.

Happiness - Know Death

One must face death often for happiness in this life. Whether seen as an end or a change, I prepare for this certainty often. Our communality depends on more than superficial understanding of our ends.

Historically all people watched their loved ones die in bed -this is how death happened. Death was not a cause for celebration per se but the communality of relations and friends gathered together to memorialize the death of a kin offered a venue for catching up with relatives regarding their accomplishments and defeats.

My great grand John Holden died in the predictable circumstances - at home in bed. My maternal grandmother died in her bed at home of colon cancer under the care of a hospice nurse and her daughter Laura, an RN. My father died at home in his sleep with my brother there to watch over him.

I never held a death vigil - I should have helped my father pass but I did not. I missed my greatest experience and I have this regret still.