Suchness

Here boy. Fetch

Tiny Dimensions

In this article, an experiment for detecting gravity in other dimensions is described. Basically, at small distances, gravity behaves differently.

Neurotypical Response Policy

A key distinction between autism disorder and neurotypical order is a working theory of mind. Folks with high Autism Spectrum Disorder are not responsive to human interaction because they see others beside themselves as agents without similar minds. Subjects low on the autism spectrum learn over time to emit a Neurotypical Response Policy which operates well between two agents with unlike minds -- heterogeneous response.

A most effective debug routine for NRP turns out to be Cognitive/Dialectic Behavioral Therapy. Continuous introspection of the stream of consciousness -- The Narrator -- reveals the variety of branch conditions caused by poor or misinterpreted rules of conduct.

Only a Theory

from Yahoo answers

"No. It is a theory, and always will be a theory. The word 'theory' does not mean it is 'disputed.'
The difference between theory and law is not one of "truth" or in how confident we are about it. It is not a difference in degree. Theories are not 'inferior facts.' Theories don't graduate to become "laws" by being "proven."
A law is a kind of fact ... an observation that appears to be universally true everywhere we look. A law is usually a single statement, and expressed in terms of an equation.
A theory is an explanation for facts. A theory can embody a large set of statements, which can grow as the theory expands to explain more observations, more facts. It explains facts. It cannot "become" a fact.
So what we call the 'germ theory of disease' started out as the explanation for many of the observed facts about diseases ... how they spread, what causes them to be worse, why hygiene can reduce their spread. But it has expanded to everything we know about bacteria and viruses, virulence, pathology, epidemiology, etc. etc. ... all of these subsets of what we still call 'germ theory'. It is, and always will be, called 'theory', not because anybody disputes whether microorganisms cause disease, but because all of it together is an EXPLANATION for facts.
Just remember that when people say 'the theory of X' ... that does not mean "the disputed fact of X" ... it means "what explains X, or is explained by X."
The theory of gravity is NOT the "dispute over whether gravity exists" (that is not in question) ... it means "what explains gravity, or what is explained by gravity."
The theory of evolution is NOT the "dispute over whether evolution exists" (that is not in question) ... it means "what explains evolution, or what is explained by evolution."
Ditto the photon theory of light. The atomic theory of matter. The plate tectonics theory of geology. The heliocentric theory of the solar system. And on and on.
A theory is NOT an unproven fact, or unproven law. A theory is an EXPLANATION for facts ... sometimes even an EXPLANATION for laws.

The Universe is an Imagination Laser

As everyone already knows, the three conditions for lasing are 1) a resonant chamber 2) a gain medium and 3) an improbable quantum state of a population. What is less well known is that the universe is an imagination laser. This is likely the case whenever I invent something up from whole cloth. Observe.

Is This All There Is?

A hot, dense existence radiates information across an interval of time. At the end of the interval, a reflector forms a resonant chamber. Space-time is the gain medium. Imagination is an improbable quantum state for a population of minds. The two ends of the resonant chamber are the hot, dense singularity and the restaurant at the end of the universe[3.1416].

The big bang erupted from the hot, dense softball sized singularity 13.72 BYA from our inertial frame on the third rock from the sun in 2012. At some point away from the present (in the direction of increasing entropy) the universe 'computes' a response. This response (from the kitchen in the restaurant at the end of the universe) sends information (the menu items, the price of each item, the availability of the catch of the day) in the direction of decreasing entropy 'back' to the singularity [6e8]. Viola. The imagination laser.

[3.1416] The Omega Machine is not a machine at all. According to Steven Wolfram, the entire universe is a simulation. The question begging -- what is the hardware and what is the software -- disturbs us and beguiles us but, per Wittgenstein, at some point explanations fail. Something that I respond to but cannot prove...

[6e8] Like Hawking Radiation... hand waving, miracle happens here, look! what's that behind you?

Duality of The Rough Beast

"Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly." Isaiah 6:2

For some time in these posts I have seen The Technium as two distinct parts; the products of DNA and the products of the products of DNA. The biosphere or Gaia being the direct output of genes comprising millions of DNA base pairs as one half of the whole, the artifacts of man as the other. I took this stance as far as it seemed useful but now I will return to Kevin Kline's original formulation which, not coincidentally, matches Dawkins Extended Phenotype and EO Wilson's Eusocial Human (even though Dawkins and Wilson are at each others throats). A thin layer of human frontal lobe brain matter networked over 7 billion mortal souls which in turn cleave to networked technology including the silicon extensions to human cognition.

Yeats' Rough Beast seemed tied to the falcon but not the falconer -- the two seemed divergent. Part of this model comprehended the Singularity -- Sexy B3aST -- a pure technological emergence without human form and disjoint from biology. Now I will return to the original dyad; an emergent, combinatorial entity comprising DNA, XNA and ZNA. We have met the Singularity and he is us. The Rough Beast is people plus tools.

Entropy and Evolution

From the always seductively intelligent Sean Carrol at Discovery.com

"Okay, sticking to my desire to blog rather than just tweet (we’ll see how it goes): here’s a great post by John Baez with the forbidding title “Information Geometry, Part 11.” But if you can stomach a few equations, there’s a great idea being explicated, which connects evolutionary biology to entropy and information theory.
There are really two points. The first is a bit of technical background you can ignore if you like, and skip to the next paragraph. It’s the idea of “relative entropy” and its equivalent “information” formulation. Information can be thought of as “minus the entropy,” or even better “the maximum entropy possible minus the actual entropy.” If you know that a system is in a low-entropy state, it’s in one of just a few possible microstates, so you know a lot about it. If it’s high-entropy, there are many states that look that way, so you don’t have much information about it. (Aside to experts: I’m kind of shamelessly mixing Boltzmann entropy and Gibbs entropy, but in this case it’s okay, and if you’re an expert you understand this anyway.) John explains that the information (and therefore also the entropy) of some probability distribution is always relative to some other probability distribution, even if we often hide that fact by taking the fiducial probability to be uniform (… in some variable). The relative information between two distributions can be thought of as how much you don’t know about one distribution if you know the other one; the relative information between a distribution and itself is zero.
The second point has to do with the evolution of populations in biology (or in analogous fields where we study the evolution of populations), following some ideas of John Maynard Smith. Make the natural assumption that the rate of change of a population is proportional to the number of organisms in that population, where the “constant” of proportionality is a function of all the other populations. That is: imagine that every member of the population breeds at some rate that depends on circumstances. Then there is something called an evolutionarily stable state, one in which the relative populations (the fraction of the total number of organisms in each species) is constant. An equilibrium configuration, we might say.
Then the take-home synthesis is this: if you are not in an evolutionarily stable state, then as your population evolves, the relative information between the actual state and the stable one decreases with time. Since information is minus entropy, this is a Second-Law-like behavior. But the interpretation is that the population is “learning” more and more about the stable state, until it achieves that state and knows all there is to know!
Okay, you can see why tweeting is seductive. Without the 140-character limit, it’s hard to stop typing, even if I try to just link and give a very terse explanation. Hopefully I managed to get all the various increasing/decreasing pointing in the right direction…"

the cognitive web

Riff on Social Conquest of Earth...
I beheld a model where all domesticated animals are ponts of cognitive illumination in a web. H Sapiens, cattle, sheep, pigs, bees, and cockroaches spreading into every niche of the engineered earth, providing comprehensive sensations of temperature, humidity, nourishment, light and sound.
Indra's Net paints a model I am drawing on where all domestcated sentients merge cognitive machinery in an all nodes to all nodes linked network.

facebook and google: data plane and control plane

i covered this earlier in my google login - i need a persistant online existence. my public face in the matrix. facebookers cling to the delusion that they matter enough to need privacy. this is 80% of us; we are data channeled through the pipes not realizing we are only data and have no meaning until we are manipulated by control logic.

google is not good for finding hot singles in your town. google shows you whats moving in the pipes.

more...

Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame

Three munitions of cyber war infect and thereby control the industrial capacity of the central Asia. This is the mechanism PRC exploits to reign in the Nation of Dwarfs; sometimes or most of the time the missiles go off course and fall into the sea. Pity that. A thin layer of human imagination over the infrastructure of the network act to suppress an urge to slow modernity. Guns, Germs and Steel win. ZNA win.

DNA - 3.5 Billion Year Old replicator
XNA - One Year Old synthetic replicator, compatible with DNA. The interposer between DNA and ZNA.
ZNA - 10,000 Year Old replicator. The Rough Beast comprises Silicon and Steel.

Initial Conditions

Chaotic and Complex systems are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. That is, systems with non-linear feed-back loops occasionally enter a state or condition where very slight changes in a state variable can leverage vast movements in state space to another mode of existence. These variables are strange attractors.

Lorenze Butterfly - two worlds connected by a strange attractor

According to the Many Worlds model supposes conditions poised to bifurcate toward two plausible futures. Illustrating the simple case, I flip a coin to decide whether to drink my coffee black or with cream and sugar. This seemingly trivial decision creates two possible next states. In the current world of a many worlds tableau I flip a coin and two worlds appear; one with heads and the other with tails showing. Heads means no cream and sugar which shaves 120 seconds off my trip to work. Tails means I spend 120 seconds finding the cream and the sugar and adding them to my cup. The difference of 120 seconds puts my car in heavier traffic and this adds 1000 seconds to my commute for an elapsed time difference of 1120 seconds for my arrival time at work.

An airplane on approach to the airport near my office crashes into my office and kills me if I don't loose the 1120 seconds while I arrive to see the flames rising if I chewed up the time on my commute. The cream and sugar is a strange attractor -- a very small change in an initial condition delivered vastly different outcomes. The coin flip created two disparate worlds; one where I died or ended up in the hospital and the other where I did not suffer a loss. I have become Schrodinger's cat -- I am both dead and alive because of the collapse of the wave equation.

What I believe but cannot prove is a connection between these many worlds. Reprogramming the quantum non-local circuit yields observability past the point of bifurcation -- I can perceive or experience both sides of a choice and 'back out' of the choice with the worse outcome.

Without

Without Google Login

There is polished ego for me when Blogger Kirk Holden doesn't scroll off the first page. I get different results between searches when I'm logged in than when I'm logged out of my Google account. The network knows me. I am integrated into the network.

Not in a spooky way -- just that when my access interface; facebook, G+, LinkedIn,..., Reddit and Brights.net and the rest has more salient information pertaining to me, specifically Kirk 3.1416, the easier my life is. Not my network life. My biological life is measurably and quantifiably better off if I am fully enmeshed in my two avatars in the other part of my life in the matrix. It's like the movie and also not like the movie.

Each form of animal life from amoeba to primate has a response policy toward the cosmic environment. Some sentient organisms have simple push-pull and in-out binary responses. Others emit complex behavior on fantastically superior minds in phenomenally fit bodies. Hominids, or the domesticated ape, behave as collective societies bound by culture, geography and other particular forces that deliver us from harm. Each of the layers of civilization narrows our options on how to behave by reinforcing cultural norms.

I have a response policy for most occasions you might encounter in the course of a life. I can look at my purpose in life from a narrow perspective to gauge the extent that this chosen perspective benefits my chosen self with the most gain for the least effort. I am specifically claiming that I can take a particular stance 'holding everything else equal' and debug and reverse engineer my behavior 'as if' my choices and decisions were enabled by a response emitted from a particular disposition of mind -- a richly intuitive engine of imagination.

I enjoy taking the engineering stance. I love the fatherly stance. I often stand in the triathlete stance. Each of these self-reflective points of view represent an ensemble of dispositions cooperating to help me guess what happens next.

When I am logged into my Google login I am taking the rjvg50 stance. I see the interior world of the network and the exterior world of the authentic, big, old universe. There are two versions of Kirk3.1416 a) M3aT and B3aST. M3aT is the living brain-body and the embedded mind. 200,000 years ago we were mostly M3aT with little B3aST except the crude stone axes and roughly sewn hide garments of the first generation of Homo Sapiens. If you have a Google login and a facebook page you are almost equal parts M3aT and B3aST. Or maybe we are not quite that far integrated into the matrix. But on a sliding scale we are very much farther toward B3aST every passing day. The rate of change has quickened considerably in the last 60 minutes.

Without invoking trans-humanism or The Singularity Hypothesis, there are vast amounts of off-loaded cognition in the matrix or The Technium. Life is sweet with a Google login.

It's About Time

post on Reddit

The four dimensions out of the 11 dimensions that we find interesting or that rise to consciousness are three dimensions of space and a dimension of time. We don't think "what is length made of" or "what is width made of" but we do ponder 'what is time made of'.

The fact is that we measure and sense INTERVALS of X,Y,Z and Time. The intervals of time, seconds, minutes, hours,..., life span are encountered by our cells at one second per second - that is the rate of time travel dictated by the arrow of time or the direction off increasing entropy. As the Buddha says "What higher being makes the grass green" (that would be me sensing the green-ness and the grass-ness). How fast does the past or the future happen in memory?

My intuition is that past and future time are 'tenseless'. But my present moment is also tenseless. The mind experiences time at one second per second because everyone around me is looking at the clock on the wall and we all concur that the second hand moves at a constant rate. That is by convention. Before the railroad set schedules for moderns, we have no motivation for imagining that everyone every where was on the same clock.

Oscillator

The el Nino/la Nina oscillator output, amplified by increased global temperature, may put us in a new regime of increasing amplitudes of cold and hot. Forever summer followed by forever winter. Critically under-damped response.

The Future is not evenly distributed

Amazing blog post here.

This describes my Dream Now trope better than I have myself. The author calls the the Manufactured Normalcy Field. The future never arrives, we live in a present that snuck up on us.

Knowing What You Own

"Does your dog bite?"
"No"
[pats dog, gets nipped]
"You Said Your Dog Doesn't Bite!"
"That's not my dog."

I was talking to a friend today about assets and liabilities of character. A year as a Scout Master is my greatest character assets. I own that. BSA owns the process but assigns the status to me. They own that.

I was talking to Tom Gunter the other day and he said to make sure they could afford me. I thought he meant that I should drive a hard bargain on the hourly rate. He meant that I needed to make clear what I was contributing to some one at the highest level. I would need to cultivate this relationship so that I got clear signs that my work was considered of little value. I could give away more of what I own. My time.

I made lunch plans with a friend of mine who was laid off at the same time I was. We worked close to one another and we both respected each others work. We each had a numerous medals of valor. We own that.

I don't own a house right now and frankly it feels about the same as owning a house. I have a nice bed, clean sheets and a flush toilet of my own. But I don't own that -- I just get to use it. A pension fund or an African despot owns the apartment complex. I doubt anyone knows all the people that own all the scattered parts of the title deed. I pay every month for the right to drive a car. If I stop paying, I lose my right to drive this car. I don't think I have ever owned a car. I own my bike.

Higgs Boson Cartoon

Fabulous Cartoon.

Standard Model Flowchart

From Discover.com

The Word and the Prophets

from Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete

This is you on math

" The delusion that cause => effect comes from the minds in our brains. Per Pinker's Stuff of Thought, my mind emerged from a brain that settled on the least worse responses to the the environment burning the least amount of brain function. For hunting and gathering, I inherited a mind hack that holds a provisionally useful strategy for passing on my genes. That is not reality - the menu is not the meal. I can model the million causes pressing against the million effect at the Newtonian 'middle world' of objects my primate self interacts with. But in the limit - I am an ensemble of entangled fermions and bosons without causes, purposes, intent..."

KNH comment on a believer-reality-tunnel cause=>effect trope...

Bayes Plays Canasta in Monte Carlo

In the mind in our brains, a special network of neurons constructs the present moment. The present moment is flashed on the wall of the Plato's Cave. These flashes of the stuff of thought are embodied in three seconds of working memory, a structure in the brain devoted to guessing in a least worse manner. What happens next depends on geography, architecture, city, state, nation and imagination. I step to the window and bet on a horse to win every three seconds. I am guessing that you do not read the next sentence and fly into a rage. The world is made of atoms. You would agree more or less and we could move on.

What Time is it?

On an interval of time, the mind mingles with the world outside which is awash in sensations. The domesticated primate, the domesticated cattle, sheep, pigs, llamas, water buffalo and goats along with potatoes, tulips and other crops made a challenge to each other to fuel an updraft of better guesses about what happens next by living together as an ensemble of phenotypes. Time was measured by the rising and setting of the sun; this is Near Time. Time was measured by the seasons; this is Far Time.

Herding brought permanent settlements and extended the Now to a more complex Far Now. We see Near and Far, Past and Future as a series of smooth durations of time. Our Far Past flows into our Near Past which butts up against Now which leads to the Near Future . The Near Future progresses toward a planned and expected Far Future. We grant all of these durations or spans of time equal participation with the Now.

But time, we suppose, marches on in a smooth ribbon or swoosh toward the future and away from the past. Further, we suppose that we have free will to decide what happens next and we would not send that job to some damn neurons. In fact time, as experienced by domesticated primates, subverts the reality of space-time by hijacking cognitive means evolved for older problems. I am my grandparents response to natural selection  on their milieau interior (inside their skin) residing in the cosmic environment (outside their skins).  3.5B years of selection pressure produced memory and cognition which 'builds time' by imagining a past and imagining a future which balance on the fulcrum of the specious present. These are the mind hacks that support my intuitions about how to advance my genome into my mental model of my future. The mental model I hold in my head is a reflection or representation of the universe. The universe -- the real and lasting authentic Universe -- contains an ensemble of fermions and bosons (me) that hold a representation of the universe. In turn, my model of the universe includes a module comprising a version of me in the model universe with a model of the Real Universe embedded. But how do I hold all that in my mind in my brain? Why didn't my grandfather have this model in his head?

Consider this fact. Were I not more than the sum of my genes, these words might not be written. What I write now will never go away because it resides in the --->

Plex

If anyone should read this or link to my blog my page-rank might explode (or not) and I would go viral (or not). Enter contingency, or Dame Fortuna's notice. My mental model of the universe matches the Real Universe more closely than my grandfather's inarticulate ruminations about reality. That is because I outsource cognition and memory to Steven Pinker, Brian Green, Richard Dawkins and all the rest to Wikipedia, facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit.

This is my extended genome; the electric grid, the flat panel manufacturers, Intel and Microsoft. Instead of some damn neurons, it turns out that we operate from moment to moment on a substrate of carbon and silicon. The Techium, the admixture of biology and technology supports Kirk 3.0, an emergent imagination machine. But the job remains the same -- guessing what happens next.

The Guessing Robot

Bayesian causal networks support our minds in our brains. These structures, made from meat, exist for predicatively emitting behaviors that result in nothing much happening really. I live to fight another day if I go fishing or play Deus Ex on my XBox today. My least worst guesses maintain homeostasis, with lowest energy for making guesses, until I successfully pass my genes on to the next generation. This behavior gives us the fittest guesses about how to keep anything overly exciting happening for as long as possible. If successful we can continue to make the least worse guesses about the next three second interval -- the coming specious moment.. This behavior depends on the correct cognitive output from the Causal Bayes Network of neurons.

I suggest here a model of cognition with a three layer cache of memory and combinatorics sufficient to make good guesses. These guesses, produced from meat running Bayesian hypothesis trials, depend on a first layer, a second layer and a third layer. The first layer is working memory and, as stated, handles three second slices of sensation (raw input). A vast amount of this input is ignored in each time period so that the least amount of energy is expended in building the extra neurons needed for more complex rationalization of the present.

"what is, bifurcations in the logistic map?"

The second layer is short term memory with a half life of 24 hours. Garbage collection or dreaming filters this content before it is mapped to existing memestrates. That is, a review of the day during dreaming projects short term memory onto existing structures in long term memory. New memories are actively changing old memories -- cache coherence is preserved between these two layers.

DNA and XNA arrived at a similar solution for computing conceptual semantic representations of the past, the present and the future. Information passing is parsimonious; most input is filtered out.

Note that a vast amount of human behavior depends on much finer granularity of decision making that three second bursts. Like hitting a fast pitch, most reflex action is handled by cognitive machinery at the periphery -- muscle memory is required to shoot a hoop or touch type. This activity, once practiced to the point of autonomic response, does not rise to the level of consciousness. Thinkers avoids thinking too many thoughts by behaving in most cases without thought. Fingers and toes make their own guesses about what happens next without the mother ship.

"is tomorrow going to look like today?"

The stochastic decision making looks remarkably like a Monte Carlo simulation. The ensemble of Bayesian machines -- these robots -- perceive the initial condition (first hypothesis) of a scene in the present. We have a subjective experience of  breaking with the past and restarting the clock when we walk through doors (for example). This is akin to not seeing yourself blink (for example). Our first conjecture assesses the base rate of the state of the previous moment against all prior experience in memory. Mental time is inverted; the mental present results from an earlier present aka 'the past' or recently retired specious present.

If you enter an abandoned warehouse and discover a zombie infestation, the base rate for a survival hypothesis, measured from the energy of the change of state in the cosmic environment 'required' for making guesses about what happens next, against the energy required to conquer zombies or run from zombies. We most likely will require a jolt of adrenaline and endorphins flooding the brain with either the 'kill zombies' conjecture or the 'flee zombies' hypothesis. This situation, resulting from seeming maladaptive guesses about what happens next (entering a deserted warehouse) , requires expensive BTU's that could be spent in leisure given a decision to avoid the warehouse. The more fit behavior expends vanishingly small amounts of energy keeping up with what little is going on now that the kids have moved out.

oral fixation

In the next interval of the present, the probability of the new data given the old data is computed. What happens between each Bayesian guess is that the cosmos throws the dice and a new present arrives from the future. The state of the cosmic environment where life is possible stays mostly the same from moment to moment. For this reason, the vast majority of the background is filtered. This is analog of a variance of a Monte Carlo variable has very little effect on the final result. The many branches at the many decision points are not contributors to many changes in behavior. Only a small fraction of the perceptual faculties are providing interesting cognitive fodder for the mill of the mind.

Finally, the fact that we process only what has already happened in a previous interval, this conjecture corrodes most notions of free will. What we have is free won't -- the faculty to overturn a prior decision to emit a different behavior than our instincts. We deny ourselves cheese cake of our volition; we desire the cheesecake from our experience. Sometimes the veto is upheld and sometimes we eat the damn cheesecake. We are guessing that we will increase our gratitude by one fork of the branch or the other.

We are constantly guessing a prosperous future without lifting a pinky finger. Rinse and repeat.