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)