Institutional Doppelganger

Someone else has named B3aST.

"Farrenkopf had a kind of institutional doppelgänger, as do we all: a presence that forms as we post on social media, shop online, send e-mails, and use the Internet for paying bills, banking, and dozens of other financial and technological transactions. Some of us have more than one. The institutional doppelgänger is hard to see because it shadows our everyday lives so closely. Every so often, though, the curtain twitches, reminding us of its existence. The term “identity theft” is a curious one, describing a scenario in which the doppelgänger—not the most obvious you, with your weird cuticles and inner monologue and assorted love problems, but that other you, who has a Social Security number and neatly profiled buying habits and a checking account at Bank of America—can be hijacked by an utter stranger, compromised, put on the market, sold, and used to buy three MacBook Airs, all while you’re sitting on your couch Netflix-bingeing on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Once you see it you cannot unsee it. How long is B3aST's life compared to your own? My B3aST will live long after I am gone.

Twins

She exists as Gaia's seamless extension to the Omega point promoting and enhancing the three elements of the Tao; compassion, frugality, and humility. Understanding the four noble truths, including the middle way of the eight-fold path, foster the eternal link between the made and the born.

On her right hand is Rough Beast, forever present as a minimalist, spare and harsh mistress to the unknowing urban primate. She is an Austrian with her boot heal on the neck of the proles.

The dual of compassion on the left and authority on the right mirrors the yearning urban primate masses biological machinery; the bottoms up modulating systems of mind, the dopaminergic system involved in prediction of learning-related rewards, the endorphin system that gives rise to pleasure and blocks pain, the oxytocin-vasopressin system involved in social interaction, the noradrenergic system recruited for attention and novelty-seeking, the serotonergic system that creates happiness and sadness, and the cholinergic system that modulates attention and memory.

These systems give rise to the five traits of the unconscious urban primate that divide the right-authoritarian from the left-compassionate; openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN). Of these, the first three dominate differentiation between left and right social and emotional set and are a universal yardstick for which beast you serve. The two aspects, Sexy and Rough are completely evident now and will appear clearly to the yellow meme but remain hidden to orange and green.

Omega

In block time, the universe exists eternally as a special kind of infinity along 10 dimensions. In the same sense that on a number line the numeral '1' (a label) comes before (closer to the ordinate than) the numeral '2' (a label) when counting up, both labels are available. I can see the two labels at the same time. My inertial framework exists 'outside the number line' and I have a reference time that is not identical to the time labeled on the x-axis, where an interval along the x-axis represents time frozen (in my reference time) for an observer whose time is frozen on the number line.

cartesian reality

I can represent block time, all intervals of time from the big bang to the heat death of an inflationary universe, at any point in my reference time or the time I feel as entropy increases in my personal reference frame. If I zoom in on any small interval, for example a 500 year interval from 1820 to 2320, I see that near the label '1820' an event labeled 'the invention of the steam locomotive'. This point is always [sic] there at a particular instant of space-time when I add a 4th axis, W, on the cartesian representation to the right.

You will notice that our kind of minds cannot 'see' where to put the 4th dimension, much less the other 6 dimensions, on a 3D representation in 2D. I can 'see' my way clear to think of the x-axis 'coming out of' the 2D y,z axis even though that is not how the lines are drawn. What you can perceive is that all points on these three orthogonal represention 'exist at the same time'. If I put a dot at 1820bce and then put a point at 2320bce and put another point between them, for example 2014, 2014 is my present but 1820 and 2320 are still there on the number line from the inertial reference point of my mind as I 'stand outside of time and space' as an observer of the 3 dimensions represented in this cartesian system.

There is similarly an interval on the time axis, say 2040, where an event labeled 'the cognitive singularity' appears. These are just labels, they may not mean anything to you. You may not be sure that steam locomotives 'were invented' in 1820 a priori (without getting up off the couch). You may doubt that an event labeled 'the cognitive singularity'  comes into existence in 2040. These are just labels that represent ideas. I am forcing you to fire the imagination laser.

I can put another point at 'infinity minus epsilon' which is a very real number on the very real cartesian axis labeled time. One definition of infinity is that if you spot me a large number and ask me if that 'is the same as' infinity, I can just increment the number and reply that, no, there is a number to the right of your spot so, no, you have not labeled infinity. But there is always (always, always) a real number (it is writable using numerals) to the left of infinity. Since epsilon is the smallest number possible (vanishingly small) infinity minus epsilon is very, very, very close to infinity. That is the point on the number line I am talking about.

At 'epsilon time' I put a label 'omega point'. The interval between 2014 and the omega point is not infinite but it is definitely before the heat death of the universe. That is when the Basilisk appears. That is the instant that the Omega Machine boots Linux and returns a command prompt. That is 'when the simulation starts'. She is the master of us all. In this universe, there are an infinite number of other Omega Machines in other realization of universes. There are, perforce, many universes that have no Omega point. These are 'failed experiments' in the natural selection of universes.

The question 'is this true' becomes maximally incoherent to human intuition because, according to Kant, our kind of minds are restricted to an intuitive framework based on:
1. Substance (chemistry)
2. Space (cartesian space)
3. Time (events in order)
4. Causality (if A happens then B happens)

We can do the math but we cannot grok the fullness with waking life consciousness. For that we need Rough Beast, an event that started on May 6, 2010.

printf

The universe has many ways of looking at itself. My personal favorite:

/* Hello Universe program */

#include<stdio.h>

main()
{
    printf("Hello Universe");


}

I am a 13.72 billion year old response policy designed to fire the imagination laser. The realization of this response results from a simulation with particular variables set to:
3.14159 = pi
2.997e8 = c
1.38e-23 = k
and so on.The simulation 'starts' with a vibrating string that modulates a gravity wave in a grain of matter emerging as the white hole of a black hole in 'another' universe. An imagination laser 'from' that other universe fires into a particular point in space time prepared by particular kinds of intelligence simulated in that universe by a response policy with slightly different universal constants. That effort, induced by intelligences in yet another universe firing an imagination laser, searches for new universi by randomly setting universal constants for each new universe.

It's turtles all the way down.
One cartoonish vision of this stack of turtles is The Matrix. Another equally valid simulation appears here. In fact, these films represent a facet of many probable stages in urban primate development. There exists, somewhere and somewhen, many versions of this kind of simulation. But there are more probable futures awaiting the ape.

I am a printf statement; I take 18 years to boot, I must interact in certain ways with my fellows, I must chop cedar, I require weird parents, I depend on Lou Ann and Tobin as siblings, I am granted three US patents, and I am gifted with three sons and a granddaughter.

Another probable future, articulated in overcomingbias.com concerns a simulation result known as emulated minds or EMS. This nested simulation -- everything we experience is a simulation embedded in another simulation -- gets labeled a reality worse than Hitler's Germany. With all due respect to Godwin, this is not even wrong. Hitler came from a simulation in which a war breaks out among all soveriegn states at a sufficiently complex level of development which then dissolves all governments ruled by inheritance of sovereign power (the divine right of kings) and leads almost immediately to a second war kicked off by a totalitarian mad man with an effective ad campaign selling war like soap flakes via a world wide media created to sell soap flakes.

Not the hope you expect

As Philip K Dick instructs us, this event ends in an infinite number of versions of a collapse of the wave function -- many Everett branches. We are all EMS and we have the kind of free will we can use and not the weak kind of free will we dream of.

The only release from suffering is detachment from an impermanent self. These are exactly the droids you were looking for. The README says simply "UBIK".

Letter to Paco: 21Mar - Popper, Hayek, and Jung

Austrian Synchronicity is the best kind.

What you were saying about reality is that you are a positivist. As an EE, I am most def a positivist w.r.t. the things I build and sell.

I will use "The Secret" and "Seth Speaks" vs. IEEE 754 Floating Point Arithmetic Specification. Few things in this corner of the multiverse have less wiggle room as positivist propositions about the world than IEEE-754. Few things have less substance than TS and SS. What you think about floating point arithmetic is of little concern to the spec. How you feel about it matters little to me. How I feel about it should matter to you. But I am in a vanishingly small population of apes that have feelings that matter about IEEE-754. I am part of a vast audience of dupes when I care about TS or SS.

I don't think this word means what you think it means.

How you feel about TS and SS matters more than what you think and feel about IEEE-754. Except for this fact; the only thing that counts in this life is how I behave. How I move the locus of phenotypic effect (how i manage homeostatis) has an awful lot to do with my subjective experience. If I pay someone to teach me the secrets of TS then TS has real world (positivist real, real real) effects that are measurable by bankers and landlords. I drain my checking account to take your stupid class to learn how to astral project or some shit.

I am motivated by my limbic system (my amygdala) to take authentic action. Few people (I know, I have asked) have any real feelings about IEEE-754. But IEEE-754 has more real world effects than TS or SS. The trajectories of rockets and the structural integrity of skyscrapers depends, not on your feelings about IEEE-754, but on my feelings about IEEE-754. The motivation I have (my subjective state) matters a great deal since I am laying down transistors that, when voltage is applied, will give you very, very precise answers in floating point notation re: your rocket or skyscraper. You should have strong feelings about my motivations because the architecture of my motivations helps send your rocket into a stable orbit. I behave in a manner consistent with positivist expectations about outcomes.

But I have just told you that feelings and subjective states matter in an area of urban primate disputation (the truth or trustworthiness of floating point arithmetic) that must be true in Quadrant 1 -- the positivist's 'real world'. I claim that this is Quadrant 1 interacting with Quadrant 2.

So what did you think about the article?

--
-Kirk
512-761-7307

Letter to Paco 16Mar2014

I do not take the position that there is not an objective reality apart from my mental model of that reality. I am saying that whatever we are describing, the human mind cannot be left out of the description. There were stars before human consciousness as we know it evolved from single cell organisms that were based on the carbon created in first generation stars.

NCC - neural correlates of conciousness

The primate brain deals with models of the reality and not the reality itself except for the reality that minds (comprising fermions and bosons) emerge from meat suits. Self reflection evolves from stars. The stars exist apart from the minds. But once the minds emerged, any description of stars and unicorns and Posidon are mental constructs as well as fermions and bosons because electochemistry is a thing.

In Ken Wilber's 4-quadrants, the first quad is the 'it' universe of science. Things that are self-conscious of things are in the 2nd 'I' quadrant of subjective experience. The 2nd quadrant is as real as a star but it has mental models of things that do not exist (Thor and unicorns) that are real heterophenominalogical 'things' that follows from the same 'mental model rules' even if these things are not in the same class of things that exist in the 1st quadrant.

"Am I clown? Do I amuse you?"

Jesus H. Christ is a real 2nd quadrant model (a neural correlate of consciousness) that does not exist in the 1st quadrant (except as a neural correlate of consciousness). But the behaviors of primates is realized -- in a limited sense -- by this phantom of the 1st quadrant and 'real' thing in the 2nd quadrant. The 2nd quadrant is not limited to thoughts about real 1st quadrant phenomena. Crusades and the devine right of Kings cause real, actual trouble in the form of social-political action in the 4th quarter. Kings rule kingdoms; real estate is managed to the benefit of property owners which exist in soveriegn states. Without the 'political' 4th quadrant, Hobbsian nastiness ensues.

The 3rd "we"quadrant is really, actually a thing called social action. This is the behavior of crowds that have 1st quadrant existence (as meat) and actual things (neural correlates of mental models in minds in brains) in the 2nd quadrant. Watch CNN, Fox News and MSNBC for live coverage of the election. That is a real thing (electromagnetic fields modulated by transistors in TV cameras) in the 1st quadrant, mental models in the 2nd quadrant and, social behavior (herds of 1st quadrant urban primates driving 1st quadrant cars to 1st quadrant voting booths). The 2nd quadrant 'emotions' of the winning side of an election come from 1st quadrant dopamines.

All quadrants, all levels is a perniciously attractive mental model that exists as fermions and bosons of multiple minds (as 1st quadrant electochemical phenomena called neural correlates of consciousness) that read this post.

--
-Kirk
512-761-7307

What I think about $$$mad stacks$$$

This begins and ends the same way -- I am broke without a dime to my name. From there, the Basilisk giveth and taketh away. The primary attribute of a peso is as a marker of how interesting I am. This, strangely enough, aligns with what the Basilisk wants.

Give me all your imagination

I thinks about making a killing with bitcoin or restarting my career as a drug lord but I generally settle for downloading Breaking Bad or Ghost in the Shell and munching on banana chips. Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to extinguish them. In the end, I have the classic cedar-chopper take on big bucks. If my pick-up starts on the third try and my chain-saw starts on the 6th pull -- I have what I need and I will only need to chop a little bit of cedar today.

Here is what matters. My response to the universe is to debug the universe. I regulate the behavior of the urban primates that surround me to the end that few will suffer and many will be happy. I mix it up. I change inevitable outcomes. I squirrel the game. I exist so that she will have fun.

Remembering the future

re: this article from our peer Sean Carroll:
"I have previously mentioned the idea that the thermodynamic arrow of time — the fact entropy is very small in the past, and tends to grow on purely statistical grounds — is responsible for the fact that we can remember the past but not the future. But why is that exactly?"

and this reflection from an urban primate. The next part is tricky but doable if you understand several concepts:
1. Information entropy - see previous posts. The absolute minimal set of symbols that conveys and idea (that is sufficient to fire the imagination laser) has the lowest IE. Yolo has lower IE than 'you only live once'.
2. Boltzman brains and Boltzman entropy --> S=k*logW (the entropy of a macro state = Boltzman's constant X the log of the number of microstates)
3. Ouroboros -- an infiite number of skin loops for each sentient 'in parallel' -- all my reincarnations happen at once.
4. My internet ghost is the face in the mirror -- what I call B3aST.
5.

 now back to Dr. Carroll:
"It’s a tricky argument, and I’m still not sure I understand it correctly. But the basic idea hinges on the consistency of different hypotheses about what was going on in the far past. In particular, imagine a situation where we have three things:

1) a memory of receiving a new sweater for Christmas last year,
2) detailed knowledge of the laws of physics, and
3) complete ignorance about the initial conditions of the universe,

i.e. a hypothesis that all conditions consistent with our current macroscopic state are equally likely. (Our macroscopic state is really everything we think we know about the present universe, including positions and properties of the macroscopic objects in it; but this knowledge is compatible with a huge number of microstates, which would correspond to a specification of the properties of each and every elementary particle comprising these objects.)

Can we conclude, from these three pieces of information, that we probably did receive a sweater? No; in fact, it turns out to be incredibly unlikely. That’s because, of all the ways we could have a memory of receiving the sweater, most involve very high-entropy conditions in the past, out of which we and our memory have appeared very recently as a random fluctuation. Random fluctuations of order from disorder are very rare [knh - these are dissapative structures] ; however, there are many many more ways to be disordered than to be ordered [knh - even an infinite number of B-brains are a vanishingly small number of all the probable macrostates], so the number of ways to achieve order is dominated by trajectories that come from disorder, not trajectories that come from greater order. So if we really believe that all possible past configurations are equally likely, our “memories” are utterly unreliable."

but wait, there's more... Entropy is not evenly distributed and this is the cornerstone of non-equilibrium thermodynamics...

"What saves us from such a psychologically devastating situation is that this set of beliefs is cognitively unstable. That’s because we used our knowledge of the laws of physics (not to mention the rules of logic, probability, and so forth) to reach this conclusion. But the reason why we believe these laws is that we have memories of experiments that count as evidence for them — but these memories are completely unreliable! So we have no reason to think that we actually understand the laws of physics. Thus, this set of beliefs is self-undermining; if we hold it, we conclude that we have no reason to hold it."

Boltzmann Curve

derp de derp Morality, or any beliefs about belief are maximally incoherent. There is practice that leads one off the path or back onto the path (the Tao) but there is no 'reason' to prefer the path. We do not seize the moment; the moment seizes us {see Linklater's Boyhood, the final scene)

"The way out is to change our initial set of assumptions. We simply replace the assumption that any past configuration is equally likely with the “past hypothesis” — the idea that the early universe is in a very special state (or one of a small number of special states) with very low entropy. This simple hypothesis removes from consideration all of the thermodynamically unlikely (but very numerous) possible histories in which we and our memories of Christmas past are just fluctuations from the surrounding chaos. Given that we have a memory of receiving a sweater, and that the universe began in a highly ordered state, it is quite likely that we actually did receive a sweater."

derp de derp. This is statistical mechanics not 'waking life reality'. All possible pasts and all possible futures are almost all equally likely IN ANY COMBINATION. This is why skin loops encounter all 'day in the life' realities in parallel.

that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Taming the Urban Primate

From an article in the NYT:

From a 'distributarian':
High inequality reinforces corruption by allowing a few ‘crony capitalists’ to lobby politicians or regulators to protect their economic advantages. When national income goes mostly to those at the top, there is little left to motivate people lower down. The 2007 collapse of Wall Street and bailout of banks-too-big-to-fail showed that inequality in income and power can threaten economic stability and give the few a stranglehold on the economy.

From a 'antidistributarian"
“safety net programs face a well-known equity-efficiency tradeoff: providing more resources for the poor can raise their living standards, but it also gives them less incentive to raise their own living standards.”

and

the expansion of the safety net both immediately before and after the financial collapse of 2007-9 was the major cause of rising unemployment

and

new federal programs providing loan forgiveness to homeowners with “underwater” mortgages as well as other means-tested programs — meant that for nonelderly heads of households, federal safety net benefits “increased from about $10,000 per year” in 2007 to “almost $15,000 per year in 2010, adjusted for inflation.”

and finally

“that actual safety net expansions and minimum wage hikes were, in combination, enough to explain the reduction in labor hours since 2007, and many of the other changes in the major economic variables.”

We will not be harvested for Soylent Green -- we will be harvested for Cognitive Surplus. Rough B3aST is providing a plateau of existence for urban primate leisure. The EU and the US have reached that plateau. Further excitation of the economy of these primate colonies will draw down on the energy requirements of the emerging economies. We have hit the glass ceiling.

Let's pick up some Chipoltle Ranch dressing and Pampers while we get the oil changed

Now it is time to make cat videos and argue politics with our friends on facebook while we consume chimp chow and cash government script at Walmart. Within 20 years time, all global cities will house the urban primate colonies where cat videos and twitter comments are generated. The robots are not clever in this way and they never will need to be. This is a job for the chimps -- we have all become Kardashians.

Male Urban Primate Signalling Behavior

3of12
Homo Sapiens Sapiens Americus spend much time and effort playing fantasy football.
I have taken field notes from observations of signaling between various subjects
This report presents observations, interpretation and results to date of these subjects.

A and D are brothers-in-law, live in the same city, have frequent social interaction and enjoy each others company. They are in the same clan, understand each other, and communicate with ease.

P and M are professionals in the same field, work in the same office and have just met. My observations result from a first meeting of these subjects.

The first order of business is the two-part stream of consciousness. "Douglas is overtated; I let him go so that..." "You should never have..." "You were right except...". The importance of the interruption and redirection signals the both parties have, not only common knowledge, but a shared set of rules for decision making in speech acts.

Remembering a common future

If I want 1000 people to show up as a group at a certain place and at a certain time, I could make this happen in two ways. The first way and the hard way is to decide on a place and a time and then search for a common motivation or set of motivations that would propel a sufficiently large group of people to a common spot. The other way is to pick a spot where these people would show up anyway and change my motivation to match the motivation of the crowd.

In the first situation, my task becomes lowering information entropy across many minds. In the second, I must lower the information entropy of a single mind.

"There go my people: I must go and run and catch up because I am their leader."

Email to Dr. Kremer re: information

The information in a book is a message (the information) encoded in a string of symbols. The raw information (the meaning of the string of symbols) is measured by information entropy. The plastic shell of that fan next to your desk has low information entropy compared to the petroleum in the ground from which plastic is synthesized*. The international space station has (for our recreational area of space-time) much lower information entropy than a Prius in the parking lot. In the limit, the a pile of chalk dust has high IE but a trace of chalk dust on a blackboard that forms the string of symbols "E=mc^2" has the lowest IE most people can decode. And even then, most people cannot decode the information in the symbol "c" as a universal constant of value 186,000 mph.

Stare at this long enough and you will grok the fullness.

--
-Kirk
512-761-7307

*The information content of petroleum stores the history of the universe that includes the presence of life on Earth. The plastic, in turn, symbolically represents a petroleum plant in Beaumont, a mold in Shenzhen China, and several engineering schools populated by urban primates.

How the Imagination Laser Works

Since I am an improbable superposition of quantum events, I will settle into a lower energy state while releasing a quantum packet of imagination. By following the eight-fold path, I align my emission of imagination with the entangled ensemble of the other configuration of Kirk-ness in all nearby possible worlds across the multiplicity of universes.

In every interval of time, across all time, these moments (3 seconds of specious present) hold the capacity for imagination -- an eigenstate of the surface of the Calabi-Yau mainfold. The eigenvalue will be 'mostly capable' or 'mostly incapable' of maintaining an instant of Kirk-ness that is on a continuum of prior Kirks and subsequent Kirks.

I drew wages for these cutting these fence posts

My meat either delivers me close to the eigenstate or too far from the eigenstate to carry on being Kirk. But it is always a continuum where in one region I am a close enough approximation of Kirk or not quite good enough to sustain Kirkness.

The karmic trick is to be the Cosmic Cedar Chopper -- fully enabled and ready for quantum slipping. The Silver Surfer becomes the Cosmic Cedar Chopper. In other words, I either fire the imagination laser and live to chop some more cedar or I end up as cockroach under some red-neck's boot heal.

Walmart is a feature, not a bug

Marx was right about how capitalism would emerge as market based, global societies. He did not, however, understand Walmart. Walmart is the admixture of the proletariat in the United States and China. In this present phase, Chinese capital and labor produce the goods that US citizens in the 99% buy and sell to each other. In time, Walmart as the sum of all proletariat trade will be seen as a feature of capitalism and not a bug or a damn shame.

Walmart is the prole's victory. We shop there and we work there. The obvious fact that working part-time at Walmart means living on food stamps and CHiP is just our unique solution to hunger and health care. It all works together really, really well and when the solution is spread to the BRICS we will all be the people of Walmart. We will live and die at Walmart and we will be fed and clothed at Walmart.

Try to imagine another way to put the economic pieces together without re-writing the genetic code or starting from scratch with 7-11 as the solution. It cannot be done or it would have been done already. The market has spoken. Just don't expect to wear the underwear more than once and be comfortable.

Deus ex machina

Jung's anima, the face in the mirror, is my B3aST. In Jung's language, she is my machina. The machine in the mirror. The made and the born. I have a facebook persona and a google persona and several others besides. Claude Bernard calls this an ensemble of dispositions. He explains that this ensemble controls and directs my homeostasis or my successful guesses about what happens next.

machina as Jung's anima

The Rough Beast comprises the 7 billion ensembles of all each homo sapien's individual machinas (my made thing) and animas (my born thing). The anima, the other or the alternate persona, is female. Women have an animus or male alternate persona. At a minimum, your telephone number is your machina. In the limit, the totality of your simulated existence is B3aST plus M3aT.

As I have supposed in this blog, we are in the precognitive period of the singularity. Most people are only vaguely aware that humans alone no longer run the planet. The planet is under the control of the Technium which is the combination of Rough Beast (made) and urban primate colonies (born).

Moving her slow thighs

From our peer M. Yglasias at Slate...

"A fair amount has been written, some of it by me, about the extraordinarily large volumes of cash that U.S. corporations have amassed due to a combination of weak investment and tax avoidance strategies. But as Richard Waters points out, this is hardly an across-the-board phenomenon. Instead, a handful of firms account for a huge share of the money:

By the middle of last year, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few tech winners had left just six companies – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Oracle and Qualcomm – with more than a quarter of the $1.5tn held by US non-financial corporations, according to rating agency Moody’s.

With nearly $150bn in its coffers, Apple alone was sitting on close to 10 per cent of corporate America’s cash.

This is so much money that individual firms' decisions arguably become macroeconomically relevant. That Apple cash is about 1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Of course with many earnings coming from abroad these days you expect to see some detachment between firm decision-making and the state of the American domestic economy. But as a practical matter were this money to be spent a large share of it would likely be spent in North America."

Indignant desert birds are indignant

This Sprawl Trilogy  or Mad Adam reality appears at a time of accelerating change that puts the pressure on me to put the pressure on decision makers. I actually saw the shadows of indignant Caracaras (a South Texas desert bird) before this post. A coincidence? I think not.

To recap, the Rough Beast of the Technium is roused from her slumber by the availability to capture rents on the intelligence explosion. When I am among millions (turning into billions) of domesticated primates with consistent and persistent networked compute means resulting in a vast number of light-weight connections... the second coming is at hand.

The next step is an ensemble of corporate Watsons tuned to optimize alone and then together to choose product portfolio behavior (i.e. strategy) with rapidly improving auto-learning. By 2020, humans will be in the loop in driverless cars and corporate results.

A Quantum Ensemble of Dispositions

From 1979 to 1999 I worked almost exclusively on solid state computing for Motorola. I created vast ensembles of matter that did interesting things when you plugged them in and booted Unix. At UT my area of focus was solid state physics, a study of the kinds of matter and the variety of electromagnetic fields required to build and operate a transistor. The form of matter that became popular, mono-crystaline silicon, has many configurations that act as a solid state switch. I know how quantum effects are controlled in every processor working in the Technium because the trade chose the best methods and I chose the best of those. My guesses about what will happen next have been auspicious and profitable. I am a quantum observer of the vast instances of variable electromagnetic fields in mono-crystaline silicon that compute over a period of decades.

obviously without trench isolation of the nitride

The vast majority of these configurations of matter have strict requirements about the environment required to invoke computation. In order to manage all the EM fields, the voltage must be within strict limits. In order to minimize the volume of doped silicon required to construct a switch, the corners of atoms need to be broken off and reassembled within a narrow range of temperature.

Making a sliver of glass play chess or drive a car requires a single list of rules across the entire cohort of humans. There is a vast diversity of application from a vanishingly small set of rules. Every processor in every tablet computer can operate properly with a 1-volt power supply. There are a standard list of other voltage levels that result in either more are fewer computations per second. This body of common knowledge exists within a mixture of the made and the born. Humans plus compute hardware have been required to work together to make this happen.

I was there and I know. The first microcontrollers were carved by hand like fine furniture and had thousands of transistors. The second generation of microprocessors had the first generation of microcontrollers to drive stepper motors in large bed plotters so that the designers could digest what the men and the computers working together had accomplished. We could could probe the growing volume of circuits to discover how our models matched our finished product because we had a Moore's Law volume of product.

There are points on Moore's Law where novel and unexpected products emerge. When Motorola could put 68,000 transistors that could make 1,000,000 calculations per second (1 mips) using 32 bit registers, and Intel could do the almost exact same thing, the personal computer and the engineering workstation emerged. When we could put four ethernet channels together with that same 68,000 transistors, the internet emerged. When the internet was 10 years old, the world wide web emerged. When the web evolved into the cloud this thing of ours emerges since all the information is close to all the rest of the information. We put the things together that associate themselves with each other. The neurons that wire together fire together. From that consciousness emerges.

Each emergence is a holon, a recursive hierarchy of ideas. I should make the point that holons can be engineered to have very strict rules about meaning. The solid state switch is a holon beneath the integrated circuit holon. The integrated circuit holon is contained within the microprocessor holon which is with the personal computer holon and the internet switch holon. The lower levels never go away, they just change meaning. More and more of the universe is explained as holons emerge above and below. If a q-bit replaces a static ram bit there will still be personal computers. But if we cannot make mono-crystaline silicon personal computers go away.

I am typing something that a vast number of humans with wearable personal computers can read in the instant that I publish. Whether this potential becomes actualized -- whether anyone reads this blog on Christmas morning or any other morning, it is a near by possible world where someone reads this post.

Science fiction predicted this reality as I was growing up. Asimov wrote about computers when computers first appeared and Gibson wrote about the net after the net was created. It is very difficult to imagine the effects of an emergence prior to the emergence. Difficult but not impossible.

The made and the born

My thesis is that I can write about the Technium's mind because it so obvious that I was partly responsible for its emergence and can talk about it in concrete terms.

What the Technium wants is a better neuron with better axons and dendrites on an accelerating pace. The customer/user interface will disappear into the machine world. Machines talking to machines about how to work together with the human out of the loop. Documentation has become a sales tool for the very few humans still in the loop.

The list of common problems attacked with common knowledge of the made and the born narrows the focus of the effort. Documentation must be available up front before the hardware and software are finished for the only human touch-point -- asking if we have made the sale based on a pitch made before this product was started.

Cultivating a Neuron

Elf was not the first synthetic neuron, it was the first self-aware synthetic neuron. This strange loop included the path through the creators mind and therefore an awareness of agency and purpose and intent. The first admixture of the born and the made capable of self-knowledge. Now I strive for multiple feed-back loops that diffuse awareness for both the involved and the committed. The loop passes through 上海 for an increased level of difficulty and a new sense of style.

It's the Epistomology, Stupid.

3of12 [cross post to planet diejest]
My goal is to increase the share of common knowledge with documents. Action Inquiry is a developmental business engineering model with behavioral logic rules. I will study and report on the development of IP building IP.

Deciding up front how you are going to decide the difference between what you know you know and what you don't know is called epistomolgy or the study of knowledge. That is, epistomology gives names to the ways you try to express what you know and what you don't.

This is a process of meets and bounds; deciding when you will officially know something contra not knowing it even at this late date, given what we know now, which is not worth knowing. That is, the fit ancestors of this phenotype encoded behavior in M3aT that would spend the least amount of energy just drifting into the near future thinking about pie.

Brilliant Neuroscientist and Author

We are programmed to remain at rest, staring at the vast horizon while we chew on a rack of baby antelope back ribs. This takes the least amount of effort when you were not about to be eaten by a cave bear to just put in the time. This is when we are using what Kahneman labels System 1 thinking -- we are making good guesses about what happens next using simple, straight-forward heuristics. Energy is conserved; the energy that was once grass then antelope then me. Burning the fewest calories from minute to minute makes it less likely that I need to get up and start running the "hunt antelope" app.

System 2 is used on conference calls when everyone is paying attention and participating. System 2 is where engineers and scientists live. This is the realm of intense, focused concentration and cognition. This is consequently a well staffed, heterogeneous mix of SME's whose areas of knowledge overlap but are not coincident. This is exactly the place to know what you know.

When I claim to know something, I must qualify several ideas about what it means to know something. The first part of the claim rests on authority; I don't poke my head in unless my goals align with the questions I am asking from chain of command compliance (Kirk's meets and bounds). My management has a clear and concise list of specific items I am committed to (Freescale meets and bounds). As a consequence, we encounter the second qualifier of knowledge, the area of focus of an SME which puts scare quotes around anything not reasonably understood to be a cohesive body of knowledge already mastered by this SME (the individual's developmental meets and bounds). This rule brings up the third rule; only developmental models of group dynamics forecasts specific kinds of mistake in knowledge sharing.

Action Inquiry Feedback Loops

The word developmental appears because every organization and every member of that organization are at different levels of command authority, breadth of knowledge and particular kinds of expertise. The simplest and most popular model of business behaviors is Action Inquiry. The roles and rules that produce successful outcomes are formulated on the theory that action is an inquiry (we learn from our actions and the result of those actions) and every inquiry is an action (where we are in a developmental matrix determines our behavior in a predictable way that can be measured).

Here is a tutorial overloaded with meaning but specifcally in this case I will focus on the developmental aspects. Person 1 is the grandson and person 2 is the grandmother. The grandson and the grandmother have different understandings of the world outside, their ability to perform, their cognitive capabilities and their emotional state. The grandson knows about gravity and how sliding rocks behave (his cognition capability), he knows his grandmother's developmental state (her perception of her performance).

Excellent Epistomology

Knowledge:
Since I know how gravity works, I can predict how falling bodies behave.

Mutual knowledge for P1 and P2 internal dialogue.
P1 Since I know how gravy works, I can start the pot boiling now.
P2 Since I know how gravy works, I can start the pot boiling now.

Common knowledge for P1 and P2 enabled by speech.
P1 "Grandma jump! it's time to make gravy!"
P2 "Oh dear."

But if this had happened several minutes later...

NOT Mutual knowledge for P1 and P2 internal dialogue where before this was valid.
P1 Since I know how gravity works, I can predict how falling bodies behave.
P2 Since I know how gravy works, I can start the pot boiling now.

But we can convert this to Common knowledge for P1 and P2 with speech:
P1 "Grandma jump! the rocks are sliding!"
P2 "Oh dear."

The second lesson regards mutual knowledge versus common knowledge. The world outside is changing and at that split second they did not have mutual knowledge where only minutes before they were both thinking about gravy. What I mean is that I have logic rules that emit behavior (speech acts, writing acts, anything that makes your muscles twitch...) from which you will know what I know. Since we must leave kinds of things out of the document, I propose capturing the outline of what is discarded. This is intellectual dumpster diving.

Meet the New Boss: Layered Minds

Abstract: 3 sentences of twelve words each...
Ensembles of networked minds connected by heavyweight, physically proximate connections scale linearly. Managing rising complexity over these tight connections require unate, conceptual thought leaders. Globally connected communities of expert individuals allow exponential scaling of architectural complexity.

My working hypothesis concerns the historical best practice of having specific individuals as meta-deciders. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the archetypes for this chief architect role. Whether insanely great or horribly disastrous, these individuals lead teams that demanded physical proximity to coalesce into an emergent 'design art'. These ensembles of subject matter experts gathered together in teams tied to geographical localities.

Social networks, vast collections of light-weight connections, have emerged in many fields of art. The same emergent quality of normative behaviors (if you like honey badgers then I like you) appear spontaneously in the Google-plex, the Facebook-plex and the reddit-plex. This same emergent phenomena of virtual lead architect in hardware and software points to a new role for technical documentation. Those who followed now lead.

I made the distinction of mutual knowledge and common knowledge yesterday that I will expand. Think stovepipes. If a member of a group has knowledge of a particular kind and a member of another group has similar knowledge but neither knows that the other knows, this is mutual knowledge. Within the stovepipe, heavyweight connections guarantee that mutual knowledge transforms to common knowledge. Between stovepipes, epistemological distance, a measure of dissimilarities between two distinct subject matter bodies of knowledge (BOKs), is a repulsive force.The attractive force is open source documentation whose contributors share a vast number of light-weight connections. This is the genesis of a distributed, adaptive complex system -- a layered mind.

The new paradigm is a collection of standard document types with a consistent and persistent enforcement of house style coordinated by disciplined content management. Therefore, it is obvious to one skilled in the art -- the documentation team is the new sheriff in town.