Complex Systems

Here is a picture of complex system attributes and categories.

We Got a Bad Ass Over Here

In discussing existentialism, I wanted to use this graphic but I could not find a way to work it in.

Now I have. Click on the picture.

Dr. Tyson, is there evidence for the absence of unicorns?
Dr. Tyson, is there evidence for the absence of Flying Spagetti Monsters?
Dr. Tyson, is there evidence for the absence of Thor?

Interleaving and Study/Wait/Study

In this article, my new method of reading several related texts has found favor with the psychologist Robert Bjork.

1. Interleave - Mix several related skills while learning

 “People tend to try to learn in blocks,” says Bjork, “mastering one thing before moving on to the next.” But instead he recommends interleaving, a strategy in which, for example, instead of spending an hour working on your tennis serve, you mix in a range of skills like backhands, volleys, overhead smashes, and footwork. “This creates a sense of difficulty,” says Bjork, “and people tend not to notice the immediate effects of learning.”

Instead of making an appreciable leap forward with your serving ability after a session of focused practice, interleaving forces you to make nearly imperceptible steps forward with many skills. But over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of the leaps you would have taken if you’d spent the same amount of time mastering each skill in its turn. Bjork explains that successful interleaving allows you to “seat” each skill among the others: “If information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory, learning is much more powerful,” he says. There’s one caveat: Make sure the mini skills you interleave are related in some higher-order way. If you’re trying to learn tennis, you’d want to interleave serves, backhands, volleys, smashes, and footwork — not serves, synchronized swimming, European capitals, and programming in Java.

2. Spacing - Study, wait a while, study, wait a while.

But here’s the cool part: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session. Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”


3. Location - Study in more than one location

4. Take notes AFTER the class is over or the chapter is finished.

The Physics Horserace

Physics is the horse to bet on. That is, in any matter under dispute, the player with the best hand from physics has the winning hand. Included in this argument from physics there exist details regarding all assumption - that is - basic statements about the facts of the matter. Time scales of 10^10 down to 10^-10; twenty orders of magnitude accuracy and precision. Our measurements of 'this physical specious present' have salient facts about all intervals of time (from the variations in duration over that interval) with sufficient precision to catch neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light with respect to stationary human observers. The conclusion of this dispute will be judged by the world wide networked resources of physics. No idea regarding the meaning of the data will be discarded in this man hunt for falsification.

The falsification of theories being the primary purpose of science; the biggest prize in the falsification of the General Theory of Relativity is going to a physicist. No prayers said over this matter will be of any use. The other point being that the entire theory will no be overturned. My bet is on quantum and not relativistic causes. I am betting for one of the many physicists at the black jack table of science.

One Planet - One Architecture

So here is my bet. The ARM ISA is the salient architectural ecosystem for greater performance with lower energy. The big ideas were all tried out on X86 and POWER for system level and application level computing. They threw power at it. The 25 to 100 Watt envelope fills with all the performance that can be squeezed in for bragging rights in Server War I, the ground war over available floor space and the power grid. The metcalfe score for the ensemble of dispositions; Oracle indexing data bases, Google-verse indexing the network, Amazon selling the cloud and Apple being Apple in the cloud reached a set point. This burst of increased imagination in 7 billion pre-frontal corteses crossed the threshold of 'energy per application' that demanded Moore's law re leaf from ARM CORTEX. The intellectual property DNA of the ARM-VERSE suddenly has the system architecture that cuts out all the fat.

The ARM ecosystem grew by self-replication with variations. Each generation only kept a small sliver more of the system energy. That is, on system architecture long cycle of innovation and incremental Moore's law on a short cycle, The various design teams replicated the original with multiple variations. Every avenue in system architecture and silicon feature size was exploited ten different ways and the losers all copied the winner from each contest where possible. This is an ecosystem that could never run inefficient tasks because of severe (from the perspective of big iron) thermal constraints.

The memory management hardware in any ARM is better than the most efficient X86 server configuration. More of the important work is completed with the least possible work. The result is less bad. Less bad is the golden egg for ARM.

Physics is the horse to bet on. We can fill the world with maximum silicon cognition per Joule until quantum computing grows up. And we then improve on the orders of magnitude over which we observe our universe.

Re: Boltzmann Brain Hypothesis, a random fluctuation - an evolved CPU system architecture - emerged at precisely the right time (actually over an interval of time) to push the next emergent random fluctuation at a certain point in time. All because that is what a PDP=11 wants.

Life: Three Words

Self-reproduction with variation. - Edward Trifonov
From this essay by Carl Zimmer.

Windmills are the baby harp seals

My comment to this article in Atlantic.com

"Windmills are the baby harp seals of lowing our carbon footprint. To compare with photo-voltaics. Wind mills do not have a Moore's Law that matches the Moore's law of semiconductors. In fact, the small percentage potential for improvement in windmill technology represents the law of diminishing returns - we simply cannot improve air foils, frictionless bearing, the cost of more grid, etc. Every factor that leads to improved efficiency in windmills is saturated and flat over a very, very long period of time. In 12 years when today's windmills are replaced - the replacements will cost more and have very little improvement for the increased cost. Even the learning curve on windmills is worse. The learning curve is baked into Moore's law but this is anticipates the 'you didn't consider X in your calculations' -- see the confirmation bias at work in the reality deniers who have and will post objections. I did consider X, I just ran out of time and space.

Again. Photovoltaics = Carbon footprint WIN. Windmills = not so much

Nuclear is a much better option as well."

Conceptual Semantics

Steven Pinker in The Language of Thought defines a mental model used by human minds in human bodies as Conceptual Semantics. Ideas are expressed in the 'language of thought'; an ensemble of concepts recruited from the machinery of evolutionary mental processes that emerge as universal semantic rules that produce human speech acts. Pinker is Chomski's star pupil who expertly lays out a construal of Universal Grammar that provides a neutral - but not weak or sugar coated - formulation of many of Chomski's heavy handed conclusions. Universal Grammar 2.0.

Pinker describes three alternative versions of 'the language of thought' that share some few characteristics but more precisely offer distinct departures from his conceptual semantics. He defines a fine grained version of his own theory by showing specific examples of what he does not include in his own model.

Extreme Nativism - Jerry Fodor
There are 50,000 words in the vocabulary of most humans that coincide precisely and seamlessly with 50,000 innate instances of 'universal meaning'. Me, you, kill, run, dance, trombone and carburator are words without definition - they are not an emergent quality of yet lower level concepts - since they simply 'mean what they mean' in human minds. All that is required to understand 'trombone' is exposure to the kind of thing that our kinds of minds already know from our evolutionary past as a trombone.

Radical Pragmatics
derp

Linguistic Determinism - Benjamin Worfe
The language we learn from our parents, tribe and culture at large IS the language of thought. There are thoughts we cannot think outside of the language we happen to learn. Culture determines language and language determines the thoughts that a population speaking that language provides.

Read Your Future

This article

The Cooperative Principal

Paul Grice has outlined these rules which support all spoken exchanges:

Maxim of Quality

Be Truthful

• Do not say what you believe to be false.
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

[edit]Maxim of Quantity

Quantity of Information

• Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

[edit]Maxim of Relevance

• Be relevant.

[edit]Maxim of Manner

Be Clear

• Avoid obscurity of expression.
• Avoid ambiguity.
• Be brief
• Be orderly.

Stephen Pinker has improved these rules with the concept of the implacature - messages which implicate or suggest hidden messages. Implicature deliberately violate these maxims in the form of irony, sarcasm, humor and veiled bribes or threats. However, the art of clear speech dictates that only one maxim at a time can be breached. To do otherwise is to drone, to bloviate and to bore.

Example 1: The kidnappers in the movie Fargo offer a police officer an implicated bribe

"So I was thinking that the best thing would be to take care of this in Brainard" [while showing the cop his wallet with a $50 sticking out of it]. This violates the maxim of manner - the statement is deliberately ambiguous.

Example 2: The mobster extorts the restaurant owner

"This is a nice little place you have here, it would be a shame if there was a fire in the kitchen." This violates the maxim of quality - the store may be a dump or a palace i.e. the observation could be false.

The Tao of Bike Spills and Free Will

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bifurcation in the Logistics Map

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

Denying Science: Mention vs. Use

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

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

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

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

Calabi Yau and 11 dimensions of space time

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

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

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

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

The Largest Machine

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

Her Kidneys

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

Hitch Integration Complete

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

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

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

RIP

The Self and Placebos

 "The brain named itself." - reddit.com

From Edge, by Nicholas Humphries

I'm not not myself not today

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

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

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

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

M3aT and B3aST - Fast and Slow on a Grand Jury

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

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

Fuck Da Police

Federal Grand Jury 1988-1

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

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

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

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

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

Say hello to my innocent little friend

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

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

Hedonic Response Packet

Epicurus; hedonist, epicurian

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

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

An Ensemble of Dispositions

from Gizmodo

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

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

From Scientific American

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

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

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

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

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

The Imagination Laser Realized

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

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

Here is what happens:

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

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

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

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

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

Response Policy Dream Now

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

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

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

Narrative Dream Now

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

derp de derp derp derp...

The Integration

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

Quit reading those comic books and go play outside

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


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


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


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


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


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

Quit thinking about virtue and go outside and play

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


800-200 BCE - Axial age


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


1840 CE - Railroad time synchronizes global human rhythms.


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


40 GE - Singularity derp de derp


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

Quit playing Nintendo outside and come inside and integrate

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