Austin Bikes

Locus of Phenotypic Effect - a mind on a bike in the 512
In Austin, the young people retire to ride bikes. Austin by bike shows the locus of imagination that is Austin. Not only this particular ensemble of zip codes and neighborhoods. Austin is a fractal, cosmic chaos, and Austin has many rabbit holes. I see rabbits by bike and explore the Cupboard to Narnia. Arrays of the Magic Labyrinth trail heads, each constructs or artifacts of a specious present in Austin. That's what I learned growing up here. I am the Cosmic Cedar Chopper's intentional stance.

I am of Scot's Irish decent and have chopped cedar for wages. Existential. Chopper of Cedar am I. Her is the Cosmic Cedar Chopper's Argument, a bicycle rider's intentional stance. Guesses and conjectures from a natural world by a brain in a vat - my mind exposed to a bike ride through Austin, the locus of weird intent.

Father of Thermoregulation

That is important to understand because I have just described a locus of effect - an intentional agent in the natural world. In this case I define the Milieu Interior as the agent [cit.Claude Benard] or agonist and the Cosmic Environment [cit. Thermoregulation] as the antagonist. That is, the thermoregulation of the agonist both opposes and submits [cit. dukkha] to the antagonist for the purpose of free life homeostasis. I respect the cedar as I chop the cedar. My meat suit or M3aT comprises the biochemical processes from which mind emerges. This is not Cartesian Dualism at all - this is the intentional stance of a Selfish Phenotype as an ensemble of behaviors emerging from Selfish Genes.

Conjecture
The locus of phenotypic effect, an ensemble of behaviors, exists in the mind set of a fit agent equipped with the engines of conceptual semantics from DNA. Be all you can be. Uncover your communal bonds to kin and the monkeysphere, the authority ranking of organizations or institutions and the market exchange at global level. You stand on the shoulders of this ensemble of dispositions; the inside-ness and outside-ness of pre-cellular proto-life, the cell wall division, the emergence of RNA with suffering, the emergence of DNA with imagination, the meat, the self, B3aST, Gaia, The Solar System, The Milky Way. This emergent progression through layers of abstraction or holons presents the universe with increasing cognitive complexity.

The global cluster of dispositions, our Universe, embodies the response policy of an agonist that I define as Rough Beast. The foundations of Rough Beast or universal agency emerges from a vibrating string, imagination encoded in a simple dissipative structure held aloft by gravity selfishly behaving against Time selfishly behaving, What does space-time want from us? What does gravity expect from us? As a metaphor or poetic construction, space-time and gravity are construed as an agent or agonist pried apart from an antagonist separated by a line of demarcation between Compassion and Authority. a pocket of negative entropy encrypted or modulated by the imagination laser.

The imagination laser carries a proposition encrypted upon it. At meat conditions, the imagination laser comprised the left and right hemisphere as the reflective cavities boundary with the right brain as the fully reflecting boundary and the left as the semi-reflected boundary. The gain medium comprises an ensemble of Bayesian Inference Engines connected in an admixture of memestrates with the Corpus Collosum applying the encrypted message for the hologram bearing the message from the locus of phenotypic effect imprinted on the black hole of our present white hole existence. Existential uplift from thermoregulation. Cosmic Homeostasis.

The locus of Cosmic Cedar Chopper intent presents the Cosmic Environment a Response Policy [cit. Self comes to Mind]. The Response Policy conforms to prosaic notions of belief or motive but precisely invokes observed behaviors of the agonist that push against or actively respond to the Cosmic Environment or antagonist. The Response Policy comprises the ensemble of dispositions embodied in DNA and memes.

Preparation for Enlightenment
That's my theory of everything. I am going to ride my bike now. I'm going down today's rabbit hole. I prepared myself yesterday with the first two of the tri; 1/2 in BSP and 5K on the HBT. Now it's 20K in the 512.

The BSP in the 512

I'm back after the 30K to BSP and back. Stacy G. saw me on Lamar and gave me a shout out. I saw a recumbent dude with a peace sign at the main  branch and threw him a peace sign. I found the path on 2nd to the pedestrian bridge. I saw the philosophers rock and I came back faster than I went so I was happy with my somatic response.

Somatic response policy runs on M3aT, the mass of DNA sentience. Id without Ego. This is an intentional stance from the ensemble of sinew, bone and gut. The bald phenotype.

All of the above builds upon the posts in this blog - my integration of an ensemble of dispositions over time.

Telic Baseline: An Argument from the Engineering Stance

Of the causes of real and imagined things, the fourth cause is telos. The telos of a thing is the ends, purposes and the reason for the thing in itself - that locus of intent or center of effect that all other parts yearn for. Each right intention; the intention to deliver on time, the intention to do the right job, the intention to draw all other parts toward an end and deliver the best solution with fewer than the fewest resources imaginable.

Telic Baseline Locus of Effect for Time=0

If I ask how long it will take and how much it's ends and purposes will require of the organization I must always have that answer in front of me so that I can inquire into the nature of the telic baseline; the organizations readiness to accept, the teams readiness to participate and to use this thing and, why this thing must be delivered. Time does not proceed uniformly and pervasively but the ends must be met - that is the telic baseline. That gets us into the closed errata list and the beta delivery slot.

Nothing else matters except an acceptable beta and a production ramp that causes as much suffering as we can bear. Development is hard. We all know this so say this under your breath to save us all time - assume we are thinking this thought when you are narrating your imaginary purpose for your imaginary thing.

A telic event is an event with an end; throwing the ball to the cut-off man, singing Happy Birthday, singing the first verse of Lolla and completing any project with a well defined intent. The telos of a project is a baseline or ensemble of dispositions. There is a well defined set of goals which define the transition from imagination to reality. This single event is the telos of design - the telos of design is the first part doing the first job for the first time. The telos of manufacturing is to make more that the imagined demand to the realized demand. In both cases we go from the imagined plan to the past history where imagined plans are weighed and tallied by the first part to exist in this world. After we design one we must make a million of them as fast as possible for the most return to the organization.

All real things exist on a fitness landscape. The market wants parts to appear at the right place in the right time with the right form, fit and function. Design can do its part but it controls only a single telic event. The path from market inquiry to market delivery traces out the fitness landscape (pictured above) of the telic baseline. This is a moving target because all things exist in a web of causation - nothing is caused by one event alone. The kind of event and the time at which the imagined finished event is completed must push the peak of the fitness landscape to match a similar heterogeneous landscape in the target system.

The emergent quality of imagined telic baselines across the mixed bag of design means or ensemble of functions must match the telic baseline of manufacturing and the superior telic baseline of the socket. In like manner up the food chain the imagined becomes real and least worse solutions emerge.

My So Called Life

In the 6th and 7th dimensions, all possible versions of my life branch and fold to produce every possible instance of me doing some of what I chose and some of what I rejected as viable choices. When I took my coffee black, the version of me that put cream and sugar in my cup appeared beside me in a nearby possible universe where this choice branched away and continued branching with subsequent branches. If this is true why does my present path seem the only path imaginable? Why does the only version of me - the actual present state of me comprising all my choices and all my contigent guesses about what happens next - seem like the only self that exists to make subsequent choices.

I don't know but here is a guess. The longest surviving version of me exists in a world of maximum duhka or suffering. The 7B mortal souls, of which I am one, collectively flow into my present life stream along a crease in super-symetric 11 dimensional reality that presents everyone about me with maximally poor but exquisitely reasonable choices. The opposite view is that my present self is on a sum of path histories that minimize cosmic suffering. Can this explain your intuition of free will with my conviction that free will is an illusion?

Supernatural Agency

I have no response to the supernatural. That is, my response policy toward things outside of nature includes the firm rule that I avoid a response from non-material agents. This empirical stance results from a life time which does not include the supernatural in any network of causation. The things that go bump in the night are same things which go bump in the daylight - only real things make real noise. A non-thing has no agency and if it had agency it ceases to be non-real.

The supernatural is known by revealed truth. The zoology of things mysterious that bump springs not from reasonable reactions to events but from folk intuitions about the kinds of things that affect the kinds of things like me. Before astronomy, astrology had interesting answers about the heavens. After Galileo the stars no longer carved the sky into houses or impelled nature to respond. Stars stayed put as the earth rotated and planets moved around the sun while moons revolved around planets.

Science diminishes religion and religion diminishes science. These two construals of the set of reasonable responses oppose each other. Religion - a revealed cosmology - cannot adjust to newer and better facts. A religion is by nature static and unchanging. There are no new editions of holy books updated with recent discoveries. There is no theory of gods which predict how, why or when a god will get up off her throne and act. Only material agents act. That is, only material agents have a response policy since only material agents possess the teleological imperative - only material agents have ends or purposes visible as behavior in the natural world. What motivates a god if a god can choose to respond out of dire predicaments. An eternal god is a lifeless god with no urgent need to love. The need to love is the need to help another and the only other to a god is another god which might upset homeostasis and therefore existence.

Only existential behavior affects homeostasis. A god has no need to maintain homeostasis and therefore no existential imperative to behave one way as opposed to another way.

TIL I am a Hologram on the Event Horizon of a Singularity AMA

Emergent Order for Nothing

The kind of universe we live in started with a fluctuation in nothingness - order from chaos. The prime singularity - a pinpoint of negative entropy within the bounds of nothingness or positive entropy. From this nothingness a type of order emerged. What exactly the structure - a very smooth ball of super heated plasma - emerged from is in some doubt. Hawking claims that a fluctuation in quantum gravity started the ball rolling. The rest of the story is amusing.

We normally think of the universe as a balloon expanding to almost limitless extent. There is nothing inside of the balloon - it is not expanding as something fills it because nothing is inside and nothing is outside of the balloon skin. The skin of the balloon is all that exists. We also think of this balloon as expanding over time. I propose a slightly different way of looking at the situation. Imagine that time is an independent variable like space. This way of looking at space and time is known as phase space. In phase space all the chunks of time exists together with all other chunks of time. In this construal, the singularity broadcasts phase space instantly over 13.72 billion years (our point now on the arrow of time). The past, present and future all spring into existence at once. It is conceivable but not provable that there is an 11 dimension super string vibrating which is the root of all of this activity. Time (sic) will tell.

The substance that spreads over phase space is a hologram flattened onto the event horizon of the singularity at the core of the universe. We can discern the nature of the event horizon of our universe in the event horizon of black holes. Black holes form in phase space inside the universe in the time allotted for second generation stars - our slot in time now. In this framework, black holes come from super dense matter from the collapse of stars into a dense ball of basic particles that bend phase space back in on itself. No energy in the form of radiated electromagnetism (including visible light) can escape the gravitational pull of the singularity. This singularity is smaller than the primal singularity generating our universe over phase space because the black hole is part of the universe emitted by the primal singularity.

In four dimensions, a black hole is roughly a sphere with an vanishingly thin skin. The skin or the outer surface of the balloon is called the event horizon. Everything between the singularity and the event horizon falls back into the black hole. Including time.

The direction of time is reversed inside the event horizon of a black hole. At the interface between the event horizon and the outside universe on an vanishingly thin surface - all of the matter that falls into the black hole flattens by one dimension. In other words, if I am an astronaut falling into a black hole I become an vanishingly thin projection of the information content of myself - my fundamental particles are plastered across the surface in a film at the smallest dimension of space-time. The smallest unit of measure in our universe is a distance called the Plank length. The information content spread across the surface (in phase space) of the event horizon is a hologram.

This is the famous bet that Hawking made - he was betting against his intuition just to make trouble - he posited that information is not preserved across the event horizon. The question was "Is information preserved across the event horizon or for matter trapped within the black hole".  In other words, can I discern what is inside the event horizon? Remember that because time flows backward inside the event horizon, from the viewpoint of the singularity at the center, the event horizon is radiating energy inward toward the singularity. In other words all those photons that we think of as radiating outward from the singularity actually behave as if the photons that barely reach the event horizon seem to be (from our inertial framework where the arrow of time flows 'forward') emitted by the event horizon and moving forward in time toward the singularity.

Pwned by Holograms

The outward sign that all this is really happening is the presence of Hawking radiation. At the scale of fermions and bosons, the primal ingredients in the Standard Model of Physics, all empty space is not really empty. Pockets of negative entropy (extropy) spontaneously appear just like the event that caused the universe in the first place. In empty space, matter and antimatter particles are spontaneously generated and usually quickly recombine which produces bursts of energy in empty space. There is no such thing as 'empty' space since empty space can generate energy spontaneously.

When matter and antimatter emerge at or on the event horizon, one particle may be inside the event horizon and one particle might be outside the event horizon. The particle inside the event horizon then moves in the direction of time within the event horizon. The inside surface of the event horizon is radiating spontaneously generated particles from the matter/antimatter pair in the reverse direction of time seen from outside the event horizon. Outside the event horizon, the particles collide with other particles and release energy which radiates outward from the event horizon - time is flowing forward on the outside of the event horizon so that over the dimension of time, energy is spontaneously generated. This energy released is called Hawking Radiation and is the best way to locate a black hole. We detect the emission of Hawking Radiation because time is split in half at the event horizon.

The signature of the energy emitted contains all of the information flattened to vanishingly thin extent across the surface of the event horizon. This is a hologram of all of the matter and energy that has ever fallen into the black hole. It is also a way to reconstruct, over the dimension of time, all of the past and future history of the black hole. Think of the hologram as a movie projector that in standard time or time flowing forward has all of the individual images superimposed over each other.

Think of a stack of 216 frames of Star Wars: A New Hope on a table. At 72 frames per second this is a 3 second slice of standard movie time. 3 seconds of time is known as a 'specious present' or the size of the chuck of activity within working memory. When I shine a very bright light through the stack I can see everything in the 216 frames at the same time. My optical machinery cannot discern a conceptually complete image of 3 seconds of a movie. This is a cartoon schematic of what a hologram really is because holograms are made of pure energy or electromagnetic radiation and not 35mm squares of celluloid film. But the point is the same - holograms contain all the information in all regions of phase space.

Back to our astronaut falling into the black hole. To an observer left behind on the space ship just outside of the event horizon the poor chap seems to become compressed or stretched and can be assumed to stop living at some point along the path to the event horizon. Actually the information contained in the body is preserved as it is spread across the surface of the event horizon into a film of vanishing thinness. The information contained by the astronaut becomes a constituent element of the hologram.

Similarly, I am information spread across the surface of the event horizon of this universe. These holograms inherently preserve my information from moment of birth to death. In fact the entire history of the earth is a hologram on the surface of the event horizon. All Gaia (the sum of all DNA activity or DNA information over the span of life on earth) is a hologram on the universal event horizon.

For this reason, time is a tenseless quantity - all time exists all 'at once' across the universe. When I remember the past I am mapping a subjective version of an earlier hologram with a hologram inside my mind. When I remember the future I am doing the same thing. For the past, I leaf past intervening moments of past time all the way back to the time I am imagining. For the future I leaf forward. Note that my memory is an attempt to match, as much as possible, my interior hologram against the 'real' hologram which exists locally in a slice of time in the past or future. In this sense memory enables time travel. I can move in the direction of increasing entropy - the direction of the arrow of time for biology - or I can move in the direction of decreasing entropy - against the arrow of time. My objective self (my meat suit or interior milieau) must move forward in time (toward the direction of increasing entropy) to maintain homeostasis with a minimal expense of energy. Moving in reverse against the forward swoosh of time can only happen with imagination - an emergent quality of brains with minds.

These memories are tangible brain states or what is know as neural correlates of consciousness. I really, truly have a local hologram that sort of matches the universes hologram. The extent to which I can adequately model the past or the future increases my survivability chances. I can make a decent guess about what happens next and from my response policy I can travel forward to a hologram that I need so that I can maintain homeostasis. I have covered this in earlier posts.

Any questions?

Belief Doesn't Matter - Claude Benard

"Evolution doesn't care what you believe." Micah Holden

Does any natural process or material event record or memorialize my belief? Can my behavior - the outward and visible signs of my response policy towards my environment - come from some other place than my ensemble of beliefs. Or, can I simply tie my behavior to intelligent attempts to improve my homeostasis over time by cognitive machinery of the mind housed in my body which includes my brain. In short, what does belief really mean and how can opinions count without action? Can't we suppose that action happens and belief is a post hoc rationalization that stuffs the record of my just completed action into a shoebox labeled belief? My claim here is that my autobiography - the story I tell myself about my self (my objective and subjective self) bootstraps emergent cognitive sets - I end up feeling a different way and I then attribute my actions to something I delude myself into labeling a collection of beliefs. Beliefs no more drive my actions than the passengers on a bus drive the bus. The bus driver is my response policy of my interior milieu toward my cosmic environment. I (a subjective self) am modulated by my corpus (objective self or meat suit) which is modulated by a heterophenominological confluence of processes underpinning consciousness. This consciousness first emerged to make better and better guesses about what happens next.

Claude Bernard, a French physician of the 19th century used the term 'interior mileau' or interior environment to describe a necessary condition of all life and all living things. "The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life". This is still the underlying principle of homeostasis today. Homeostasis is the active process of maintaining bodily processes necessary for continued existence.

Does my belief in physical activity and exercise preceed my efforts at the gym -or- do these behaviors come from my will to health. Is my will tied to my belief or does my will spring from belief? What is a neural correlate of belief? Do beliefs exist?

I am asking specifically if brain states can be distinguished by some means or other and then correlated to outward manifestations of action, speech and the continuity of these processes over time. This is actually possible with MRI scans of people and monkeys fooling around while thinking thoughts. Across species of primates many, many activities produce many modes of cognition that are very similar. Moving a chess piece on a chess board (something only one type of primate can accomplish with mastery) looks very much the same in most primates who move chess pieces. Chess Masters and Chess Grandmasters have brain states that are different but most people with only a rudimentary conception of the game of chess look remarkably similar under an MRI. But do these people have 'beliefs' about chess that are visible as brain states? Not really. Chess is not ruled by beliefs - chess is described by strict rules that remain impervious to beliefs. I cannot say that I believe that a game ends when all my pawns are captured. This statement has no real meaning. I just don't understand the rules of chess. Chess wants me to invent strategies and tactics for better and better chess matches over time. Chess want to fill the design space of chess with novel content. But chess has no belief systems or distinct beliefs.

If I watch the big cats at the zoo I will avoid any temptation to get into the enclosure with them. Not because of my belief that lions and tigers are predators but because --- lions and tigers ARE predators and I can see this by the predatory looks on their faces and in their predator skeletal-muscle means. The testimony of my senses leads me to avoid direct contact with big, scary lions. The lion does not care what I believe. The lion can only respond to my behavior. I will taste the same with any belief I contain at supper time.

It is a fact that I maintain homeostasis - I maintain a healthy internal milieu - by behavior and not belief. The universe does not really care what I believe.

See the post on a Response Policy. I am programmed to respond with the interposition of cognition. Homeostasis does not care what I believe. The belief in belief - belief^2 - rests upon biases and heuristics. These support a response policy against the cosmic environment.

Thermoregulation

I was excited to hear Claude Manard (SP?) who wrote the introduction to Thermoregulation cited in Self Comes to Mind. The hypothesis from the cosmic environment reveals a layered response policy for predicting homeostatic fitness in the next time slice.

A Response Policy

From "Self Comes to Mind"
For each open thermodynamic system intent on optimizing homeostatic processes there exists a response policy. The response follows an expectation elided from an experience with the cosmic environment [cit. Claude Benard]. The response policy depends upon means for homeostatic fitness or efficient and effective interactions with other open systems.

Aristotle Who?

Starting at the level of single cell animals (plants do not have neurons), the response policy dictates the moves in design space. That is, algorithmic unfolding of telos. Telos is greek for intended 'ends' or outcomes or results. This is one of the four causes of Aristotle for each mental 'thing in itself'. Teleology is the study of intended results.

The response policy of the lower layers (cells) supports the upper layers (multiple cells of multiple types with neurons) with an ensemble of dispositions from the various parts, each possessing a response policy acting alone or in concert. At the level of large mammals, brain function emerges from and is linked to the response policy in many layers beneath the objective self of the actor. Imagine a cheetah on the savannah. The cheetah definitely has an objective self - a lump of biomass with intentions to take down zebras for dinner.

The subjective cheetah self seems to exist to fully support 'cheetah-ness'. In which case the cheetah has a response policy - run like the wind and catch zebras for supper. This response maintains homeostatis by making good predictions about what happens next.

If a burst of speed is called for a burst of speed results. If a quick cut to match an evasive manuever is called for that may be the response. Whatever the case, the response policy at many layers works in concert to produce a cheetah-like response.




Motivated Experimentation - why I move through design space.

The Presentation of Time from Sean

This is near perfect treatment of the time problem. This is just the slideshow

The bottom line is that far from thermodynamic equilibrium complexity creates life which creates imagination as a dissapative structure far from thermodynamic equilibrium.

Human Lineage in Gene Expression Blog

Comment to this article in Discover.

I tend to think of these processes as moves in design space across a fitness landscape. If my offspring from my Neanderthal mate has only the immunity improvement gene expressed then the totality of effects in the phenotype (good and not so good) from that collection of genes plus epigenetic influence either moves me from a fit phenotype (and offspring) on the fitness landscape to a more or less equal or slightly improved spot on the fitness landscape. But this is a moving target as my sister is sleeping with another Neanderthal and my nieces and nephews may turn out better or worse on the fitness landscape. These initial moves in design space have to propagate into significant populations. Which means they cannot die in floods or wild fires or be eaten by wild beasts. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Reverse engineering moves in design space across fitness landscapes gives me 'what fitness landscapes want' or the selfish fitness landscape.

Inverted Ideation

Inverted ideation is my ability to see myself as another sees me. I monitor my behavior and I monitor the observed behaviors of the other - I have emotional intelligence and I study body language. I listen for mood in the timbre and tone of the others voice. I participate by active listening. If I am sufficiently aware of my dual self - my subjective self with its knowing self along with the subjective self and the knowing self of the other - I can assume the role of both minds. I can invert my view and intent by becoming the other's self. I use the theory of minds to become another's mind.

My abilitiy to attach an identity to my self is ideation. There are two types of self to consider and the first is the physical self also known as a material self. That kind of self is 'self as object' or the meatpuppet self. One to two hundred pounds of Kirk. The second kind of self is 'self as knower' or the subjective self.

Other people with minds like mine think thoughts like I do. I can take on the ideation of these others as they interact with me as I can look at myself in a mirror. I can become the self in the mirror. I can become both the objective self or the subjective self on that side of the mirror and on this side of the mirror. When I switch back and forth I am seeing my self as my other self sees me.

I can do this with other people as well. I can see myself in their eyes. Actually I can see myself in their faces. I can see searching eyes  and nervous anxiety in body language and I can invert ideation and become that other person looking back at me.

Rough Beast Time - minimum energy on maximum homeostasis

The Hollywood universe contains several versions of the Singularity, all of which are equally valid. That is, HAL, Skynet, The Matrix and Blade Runner can and will all happen with equal likelihood in possible worlds. The spectre of our future is also likely in our current present and near past. The Rough Beast treats time as a control variable for our social and cultural selves - all of our 7 billions of selves. At each specious present, a near future possibility opens before us to choose.

For the most part, future possibilities become this present moment in a usual and mundane manner. If I am sitting in a chair there is a great likelihood that I will remain sitting in my chair during the upcoming specious present and the specious moment just past. The ordering of time in the 'consistent and uniform' direction of increasing entropy logically follows from the dictates of biology. Organic life ages, dies and decays. Human brains age, die and decay. No so human minds.

An emulated mind whether in meat or silicon advances and retreats across time. That is slipping in a nutshell. All humans do NOT share the same past and many humans do not share a common fate or aggregated future state of uniform sameness. Our time streams cross in our minds; we remember a movie differently, we disagree on the agenda of President Reagan, we scorn the other parties reading of history, we refuse to admit defeat and we cling to the delusion that we are fair and open-minded. We are but discreet sheep, we wait to see how the drove is going and we follow the drove. But many droves co-exist and all droves have a bone of contention with all the other droves.

Each Dream Now is different. Everyone anticipates a unique future and recalls a unique past. Does the Rough Beast have a unified self with a common view. The Rough Beast is a layered affair and proposes many options at once.

I had a strong sense as I drove along under the 183 flyover that I was in a movie. My present was one of a sucession of predictable futures and easily viewable pasts. I - my knowing self - occupied all of the time slots of past moments, the specious moment and the future moments. A pointer or indicator shown on the particular 3-second window that would afford minimal energy expended on maximum homeostasis.

The Poverty of Experience: Awesome Joe Chang

One of my best friends, Joe Chang, speaks more clearly and factually than any other person I know except Tom Gunter. Tom is my current mentor for that reason. Like Tom, Joe cannot tell a lie. Joe is a consummate explainer of the unexplainable. I am too but for a different reason. I take people way past the last concept they could understand and then - while they are completely lost. Then I ask them a question. I learned this from Joe who learned it from IBM. Hal taught me how to speak.

But enough about me, let's get back to Joe and the point of this post. Joe and I went to his home town of Taipei and he showed me around. We went to the best street for street vendors and noodle stalls. The real taste of this wonderful place.
 '
Then we went on the electronics market where everything is "off the truck" prices. Then we dropped in on the  market under the expressway. Eight or Ten city blocks filled with half of Taipei's population; picking up vegtables, looking for an onyx gift, finding a purse for work and just hanging out at the mall.

Then we got down to the whole point of the trip. We were looking for an 802.11 radio that we could integrate into a router chip. We went to two different labs that were developing a drop-in module. Except that they didn't We visited the design teams trained to make ASICs good, cheap and fast. They perfected the cheapest, just good enough embedded microprocessors imaginable. And they were stumped.

My point and I do have one is that vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell and kinesteshia can all be called on when I was in the presence of Joe in business and pleasure. We will be able to do that over the internet. I just did it with some words on a page. This is only upholstered in an anecdote about my best friend.

Stand By Our Rational Mind of our President,
kirk holden

Next Joe and I went to Qing Dao in China, but that is a longer story.

The Quantified Self

The movement to capture and share all the sublime and mundane aspects of myself; to become the quantified self, naturally evolves from the emergence of B3aST. When I chart in detail my comings and goings I track my observable behaviors. Sleep patterns and calorie intake. Bike rides and movies watched. Weight and cardiovascular condition. All these things add up just like my opinions and musings in this blog.

The miracle of living life in public frees me from any effort to cover my tracks. I can be emulated by the Omega machine 'in the future' if I live my life in public 'in the past'.

Letter to Fallows: A Three Party Game

Political evolution does not care what we think. This is not a two sided chess match - this is a three sided game with the Establicrats, the Establipublicans and the Teapublicans. The Establicrats coalition together with the Establipublicans cohort want closure on their terms and the Teapublicans want to burn down the church to save the church. Sure, the budget has been passed and the result of that vote was that 'one side' won and 'one side' lost on the terms current in the dept ceiling debate. No one would look the other way if this was a criminal or civil trial and the defendant filed an appeal with a higher court. In this case, the Supreme Court on the matter of the 14th amendment which I believe is the actual end game. The Teapublicans desire nothing more than a 5-4 vote against the establishment's 14th.


Our position - the Establicrats and Establipublican position - is to treat the Budget already enacted as causation of a Dept Ceiling adjustment in a later vote. The party out of power, since the 80's has treated this Budget ceiling vote as causation of a Dept Ceiling adjustment coupled to a brief show stopper debate correlated with the Budget - Ethel Merman appears on stage and belts out a show tune as the first act causes the second act. The show stopper is a featured highlight on CNN in the past.

The Teapublicans are taking Hume's side - they are pointing out the naturalistic fallacy of the Establishment. In Hume's example two clocks in two adjacent towns peel the hour slightly out of synch. Firstville's clock peels the hour five minutes prior the Secondville's clock. The two events are correlated since the first bell does not cause the second bell to ring. Similarly, the Teapublicans treat the Budget and the Dept Ceiling as merely correlated.

Credit to your numerous well-thought out policy positions. But this is the province of game theory not policy. The dinosaurs of the establishment do not notice the appearance of the rodent-like Teapublicans. But the comet has already landed off the Yucatan peninsula. Play on.
stand by our establishment president
kirk holden
-----end ---
[This is a comment I wrote to Chris Mooney at the Intersection blog. .]

The parking brake on my car was designed to stop my car from rolling down hill while it is parked. An adaptation – a change in my behavior – can change the utility of the parking brake into an emergency brake. If all the brake fluid leaks from my brake system I can change my policy about only using the parking brake for parking to a new behavior – using the parking brake as an emergency brake when not parking. Try it. You can adapt too.
What drives biological/cultural evolution? This is just inclusive fitness at work. See Hume for a better solution to your numerous objections about what ‘should’ or ‘ought’ to happen with politics and emergency brakes. I don’t like Darwin on my front porch either. But as my son the Biomedical Engineer says “Evolution doesn’t care what you think.”

Comment in The Intersection 27Jul2011

The Intersection 27Jul2011

kirk Says:
July 27th, 2011 at 11:24 am

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I have become officially neutral on the dept ceiling debate. There are three parties now. The Establicrats, the Establipublicans and the Teapublicans. The Establicrats coalition together with the Establipublicans cohort want closure on their terms and the Teapublicans want to burn down the church to save the church. Sure, the budget has been passed and the result of that vote was that one side won and one side lost on the terms current in the dept ceiling debate. No one would look the other way if this was a criminal or civil trial and the defendant filed an appeal with a higher court. In this case, the Supreme Court on the matter of the 14th amendment which I believe is the actual end game.

Our position - the Establicrats and Establipublican position - is to treat the Budget already enacted as causation of a Dept Ceiling adjustment in a later vote. The party out of power, since the 80's has treated this Budget ceiling vote as causation of a Dept Ceiling adjustment coupled to a brief show stopper debate coorelated with the Budget - Ethel Merman appears on stage and belts out a show tune as the first act causes the second act. The show stopper is a featured highlight on CNN. Over and over and over again.

The Teapublicans are taking Hume's side - they are pointing out the naturalistic fallacy of the Establishment. In Hume's example two clocks in two adjacent towns peel the hour slightly out of synch. Firstville's clock peels the hour five minutes prior the Secondville's clock. The two events are correlated since the first bell does not cause the second bell to ring. Similarly, the Teapublicans treat the Budget and the Dept Ceiling as merely correlated.

Credit to your numerous well-thought out policy positions. But this is the province of game theory not policy. The dinosaurs of the establishment do not notice the appearance of the rodent-like Teapublicans. But the comet has already landed off the Yucatan peninsula. Evolution does not care what you think.

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[This is a comment I wrote to Chris Mooney at the Intersection blog. .]

The parking brake on my car was designed to stop my car from rolling down hill while it is parked. An adaptation – a change in my behavior – can change the utility of the parking brake into an emergency brake. If all the brake fluid leaks from my brake system I can change my policy about only using the parking brake for parking to a new behavior – using the parking brake as an emergency brake when not parking. Try it. You can adapt too.

What drives biological/cultural evolution? This is just inclusive fitness at work. See Hume for a better solution to your numerous objections about what ‘should’ or ‘ought’ to happen with politics and emergency brakes.
I don’t like Darwin on my front porch either. But as my son the Biomedical Engineer says “Evolution doesn’t care what you think.”

Comment in The Intersection: 26Jul2011

The Intersection 26Jul2011

kirk Says

"Most if not all deniers I talk to have a random collection of facts rather than a coherent theory/hypothesis/conjecture about the relevant facts. They ‘know’ (can report a knowable fact) about Gettysburg from a tour of Gettysburg where they absorbed some facts while they ‘know’ (mere belief or revealed wisdom) that the South shall rise again.The default position of these folks is that ‘everything happens for a reason’ and they pray for revealed reasons not discoverable reasons. The motivation to tie everything up in a bundle drives them to further lunacy regarding causes and conditions. Their mental machinery is constantly associating the ‘right’ reason we can coherently compare apples and suitcases – not even the wrong association of apples and oranges."

Remembering My Future

"The core function of memory is to imagine the future. Memory is not designed to perfectly replay past events; it is to flexibly construct future scenarios." -- Tali Sharot, The Optimism Bias, Time, June 6, 2011

When I hold a spoon in my hand I do not usually expect that it will turn into a fork while I hold it before my eyes. I can surely imagine the case where this might happen - I just did by stringing together a useful string of letters from a set of 96 symbols rank ordered in the ASCII code for English type. That is  ['0','1','2', ... ,'9'] U ['a','b','c',...'z','A','B','C',...,'Z'] U ['period', 'comma', ... ,'bang'] or the union of the sets 26 lower-case letters, the 26 upper-case letters, the 31 punctuation marks and the 10 numerals.

We both participated in a multiplexing between minds a shared meaning for my statement about spoons turning into forks. According to Steven Pinker, we all share minds in evolved primate brains which depend on conceptual semantics as a model for human thought which he calls the stuff of thought. From this construal, minds share through spoken or written language the common ground for the shared experience of the cosmic environment. Conceptual semantics rides on top of an admixture of mechanisms evolved over time to improve our guesses about what happens next.

The most common model for minds since Aristotle subdivided the mind include experience, memory and computational means for cognition. As the quote above indicates, we use memory primarily to make improved guesses over time about what happens next. So where does the mind come together in our brains to bootstrap memory, experience and cognition (computation)?

We are not born with innate concepts like written language in the same way that we experience spoken language. Most mammals, birds (a type of dinosaur) and insects have innate communication means. Birds sing and ants produce pheromones to communicate. But what is going on in the minds of the multiple hearers and readers?

Letter to Fallows: Texas Lightbulbs Redux

Nothing comes from one particular place anymore. Everything comes from everywhere now. I can focus on the proximal location of what caused my light bulb to come to me but I am really just focused on the last robot or human that touched my light bulb. My light bulb came on a boat and a truck that came from everywhere. My light bulb is offered for sale in a Walmart that came from everywhere. I buy the light bulb with money that comes from everywhere. I light up my kitchen table that came from everywhere. Even if I made my own light bulb, the the chain of custody of the electrons from the generating fuel to the power lines - comes from everywhere. The world is everywhere.

sbo finacially sane p
kirk holden

from James Fallows jfallows@gmail.com to Kirk Holden date Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 11:06 PM subject Re: Airplanes and Lightbulbs

Yes indeed. Will follow up.

All the Gods are Belong to Us

Blue Berry Flavor is Best

I do not believe that I can eat an entire 747 jumbo jet no matter how small each bite is and how much Diet Coke I have to wash it down. By the testimony of evidence, I can change my mind immediately after I down the last bite. The last bite falsifies my provisional belief (Popper) or starting hypothesis (Bayes). I would like to believe that all my beliefs are similarly based on observed facts about the world and my interaction with the world.

This is all there is.

The world and the stuff in the world are all built from the elements manufactured by second generation stars. That is, the inward pull of gravity versus the outward pressure of electromagnetic radiation in first generation stars - the stars that formed first - after the big bang 13.72BYA. The gravity crushed H and He atoms into carbon, nitrogen and the other elements that make up the planets in our solar system. The 747 comprises these elements, primarily Al, as I do. We are both natural objects in the natural world. This describes my belief in the natural world that I have checked with experts in the sciences and have in turn continuously improved my hypotheses about the natural world.

Sam Harris states that the minute Jesus descends from the clouds (can Jesus appear on a cloudless day?), we can begin collecting evidence for a Theory of Jesus. My unmotivated belief that Yeshua ben Yoseph did not die  - or for that matter never lived - is not a belief that I can possibly falsify absent the newly emerging Science of Jesus.

If I say that John has learned that Dewey defeated Truman or discovered that the moon is made of green cheese I am strictly wrong. If I say I think there is a Jesus or I heard that there is a Jesus I am at least justified in holding a provisional belief that these may be true pending my usual skeptical inquiry. Knowing, learning and discovering are called factive verbs. These are bounded by observable and reproducible facts about the world. I do not accept bald or unconditional belief. I usually say that I have provisional beliefs about the things that I have little or no supporting evidence for. I use factive verbs about places, people and events with a chain of evidence demonstrating a determined effort to plow through a sea of established fact. Theories embracing most of the facts are falsifiable. Beliefs about the supernatural world are not falsifiable. Beliefs about the 10000000 gods are not falsifiable. In fact, most statements about the gods have been disprove. There is not any more evidence for Yahweh than for Zeus or Odin. Science did not discover or learn that Odin was completely discredited because of discoverable news about Yahweh.

My Double Bromance

I have a provisional belief that no supernatural beings of any sort have any effects in the real world. If an episode of the TV show Supernatural unfolds around me I will change my provisional belief that no supernatural happenings have ever occurred to a new Theory of the Supernatural. I have waited 54 years for the evidence to emerge and I am happy to wait patiently for another half a century. Further, other people - all the other people - that regale me with stories about 'things that go bump in the night' often mis-use the language. These folks tell me that they have discovered facts about Jehovah. The fact that all ancient texts make conflicting claims is completely demonstrable.

A Jesus sighting is a positive exception to my Theory of Nature. That is, none of my rules of fact production about Jesus predict any fact finding about Jesus. Jesus on Doppler radar would be a real or positive presentation of a new fact. The belief statements about Jesus are negative exceptions to the Jesus Myth. None of the predictions from this theory have ever been observed. There should be a body of evidence about a divine Jesus but there is not.

I claim that I am an atheist because I have as yet not seen evidence of theos. The spirit in my spirituality is Yeat's Spiritus Mundi or Hobbs mortal spirit of Leviathan. When I jump into Barton Springs I experience sublime ecstasy and spiritual uplift. Gaia does this by cooling the clear water to 68degF so that I can feel the natural world in all its forms before 9am when the swim is free.

That's how this atheist rolls.