Symmetry Nets? Method of Loci?

I think I might have gotten it. Next I just need to do the math. Here's the gist. This is not an /r/iamverysmart, this is rill dill, I'm just slow at math.

So symmetry physics, according to this particle physics chapter I'm looking at, is a powerful computational tool for physics because it is about the most compact possible ways to compute and organize physical laws and their resulting complexities. Uh did somebody say optimization? Quantum Gravity Research's work is another great example of this with their quantum spin networks, geometric models that have interesting and frankly spooky combinatorial properties that give real-world solutions for physics.

Let's connect that to neural nets, starting from the physics side.

Symmetries are properties that have real influence on outcomes of systems but do not influence other properties. The classic example is the Stern-Gerlach experiment, where atoms fired through a polarized field only tended to one of two spots, demonstrating atomic spin was a quantum process, as in something observed that can be constrained to a list of possible states that relationships in the real world can then be drawn from precisely. Examples: quantum mechanics gave us modern computers, power grids, networks, and particle physics.

To connect symmetry to natural processes we need to look to thermodynamics. In nature, systems tend toward maximum entropy. Entropy defines the number of possible states the system can be in. A ball of hot gas has very high entropy, while an ice cube has very low entropy. One changes rapidly because all the atoms are moving past each other rapidly, while the other barely changes due to being a solid crystal structure. Lower entropy systems take more energy to change, think of it like how you can push your hand through a gas easily but can't push it through an ice cube due to the rigid structure. Also think of it as a system that is less differentiated has less possibilities, and if you think of energy as having a set amount like it does in nature, then possibilities represent the presence of fluctuations in that overall energy field, which were probably massive near the big bang as evidenced by the whole quantum wave idea in cosmology.

Maximum entropy means the system or particle could be in the highest possible number of states, or has the highest number of micro-states available to it to express itself. Think of this as what are all the processes internal to the system ("hidden dimensions") that govern what happens between point A and point B in time, and what could they be doing in that given span or in-between moments? A system in a state of maximum entropy, where it could be in any of the possible states, is considered entangled.

These possible states can be organized into phase spaces, and you can mark out all the possible states and measured states like points in a 3D map. You can calculate an abstract volume within the phase space, or the probability of the possible states, then the logarithm of a given state is the Boltzmann Entropy, or the quantity of information in that event. The Shannon entropy is the sum of probabilities of each event multiplied by the logarithm of each probability, or the average information in the given set of events.

One thing that's interesting and quite peculiar, is that there is an information-energy equivalence. This means that the information contained within an event has its own energy. This was demonstrated in the Szilard engine thought experiment, and more recently in the awesome Information-Heat Engine experiment. Why is this useful?

http://colah.github.io/posts/2014-03-NN-Manifolds-Topology

Remember when I said nature tends toward maximum entropy? Well how do we bring this abstract mumbo jumbo into the real world? When you're generalizing probabilities to solve real world problems, like with neural networks, we now understand a very particular relationship between information, the model, and nature, by how information itself has energy and entropy. You can map probability trajectories (particle movements over time, internal and external) this way and map the entire topology of that system or subsystem in terms of possibilities calculated from more-or-less complete (i.e. testable) datasets, like for image recognition. For growing datasets in adaptive systems, when the measured entropy crosses the maximum entropy of your model after noise reduction, you know your model is incomplete and can extrapolate, at least that's my best understanding so far.

E.g. extrapolate in a "hidden layer" to separate curves linearly to help solve for various relationships.

Symmetries don't change when other things change, that's where it comes into this picture. Gauge symmetries are identified as those found near clusters of less complex phenomena, an idea upon which Special Relativity is based, since higher order phenomena tend to be a complexification of lower order phenomena. A 2015 paper identified symmetries, or "translational invariances" present in trained deep learning network data structures for feature extraction. Manifold Tangent Classifiers, or "high-order contractive auto-encoders" (i.e. fancy dimensionality reducers) look for partial differential equations to build a "topological atlas of charts, each chart being characterized by the principal singular vectors of the Jacobian of a representation mapping." This is faster and more accurate than the average Convolutional Neural Network, and competes with the current best models, which use a shit ton more layers to add combinatorial power. If that doesn't say enough, well here's a little more.

MNIST Dataset to identify handwritten numbers.

Result of a clustering algorithm

Very recent work identified that control equations for manifolds were solvable on deep residual networks when observing them over time. This means they're following the rules of energy and information flow. This means, to me, that a better neural network will be formulated precisely along these lines. Another very recent work identified a neural network decoder model based on multi-scale entanglement tensor models, and achieved better than state-of-the-art performance for compression with significantly fewer parameters. Yet another latest work created a Restricted Boltzmann Machine neural network that didn't need exponential numbers of nodes to represent more and more highly entangled many-body systems - instead scaling linearly with the number of nodes.

If you can figure out the most optimal way to do something, like how the best neural networks are the fastest, most accurate, and cost-effective, you have thus accounted for all the possible micro-states of that something in some way. Pure combinatorial mathematics are a great way to do that when natural laws are taken advantage of, as the Manifold Tangent Classifier and Restricted Boltzmann Machine show. Mapped with, say, the recurrent LSTM or Residual networks and/or the simplectic CapsNet models, or something better and undiscovered for retaining memories efficiently to map various time-series and topology patterns in data more accurately, this could be a great generalization solution for an adaptive and growing neural net. I will find out, I'm learning Tensorflow and all sorts of other shit, I finally have a good enough grasp I think.

The paranoia is real.

The Method of Loci refers to an Art of Memory technique generalized as referencing memories on spatial maps, where subjects can "walk" through a mental map, real or imagined, and very successfully recall information that way. The Art of Memory is another subject I will be looking to for inspiration, as I have with the whole of Hermetic thought. Proper mnemonic memory techniques have some fascinating beneficial effects on the brain, even to a naive learner. I imagine it can go the other way, too. A locus in mathematics is a set of points that share a property based on some relationship equation, usually forming a curve or surface in a space. In psychology it's more about how much one controls their own life.

I tend to believe that neural nets get a privileged position of being able to test some of the broader metaphysical or otherwise human experience-based wisdom at work across these fields, if all the relationships I've drawn here are any evidence, ones that seem to be aiding computer and data science, as well as neuroscience and health in now amazing yet perhaps still unimaginable ways by humans. That's what the obvious hype behind AI is all about. I also am now thinking a new kind of evolution may kick off if a computer can figure this kind of stuff out for itself and it turns out it's actually as useful a paradigm as it appears to be for natural learning and memory optimization. That also means it's our responsibility to make sure it's not some ZuccBot advertising overlord bullshit either that kicks this whole thing off.

Synchrobiosis

Synchronicity = symbiosis.

Let me explain...

You are a multiorganism made of up to 40 trillion cells, mostly bacterial. Life perpetuates life, every cell in there has a vested interest in reproducing, from your brain to your gut.

Here's another way to think of it: are the farmers farming the plants, or are the plants farming the farmers? It's both!

So what about synchronicity, i.e. those weird synchronous communicative experiences that happen in a bubble, sometimes with inanimate objects, and can never be articulated to others in a way that re-materializes those experiences?

Well, just today I had a major panic, and it turns out my fiance was having trouble focusing and was in panic mode at work without my knowledge (she struggles a lot with it). My friend sent me a song at just the moment my panic nearly lapsed my calm judgment, and I immediately came to the conclusion to deliver her lunch at work. There's a million and one reasons backing me on this feeling that I feel too vulnerable to explain as to why I was tuned to it, but the presence of it was as if in the room with me. Her seeing me and getting lunch calmed her, and I could feel that wash of relief hit me only after I gave her the food and told her I was a bit worried. She texted me after that exchange and told me she was indeed in a panic state until she saw me, in spite of me having no obvious metric, as she was absolutely fine in the early morning by most accounts. This ain't co-dependence either, to be sure.

That depth on my part let me communicate and mend on a seemingly irrational level. Not only did I respond correctly to these emotions, my friend reached me at the very right moment, with this song: https://soundcloud.com/coast-modern/guru-1

We're all taking care of each other, plain and simple, and it's not purely articulated depending on how we listen. Negative impulses will take care of each other just the same, your pain in your gut from your sugar intake is that sugar-fueled biome needing more to continue its biome, but at the cost of the rest of your health. It communicates, you ignore, it takes over what it needs - enough of your eating habits - in spite of knowing better alternatives that produce better long-term and daily health. This isn't completely proven in science but it's a damn real phenomenon to me.

Mothers express themselves on such a subtle physiological level with their children they aren't even always conscious of their subtle movements and responses to their child. In today's world that nurturance can be easily poisoned with ill-intentions in developmental phases, and they become vectors for it rather than moral creative individuals. Feminine psychology is all about this, and it's certainly not exclusive to women. Consciousness can leave the better parts of us due to fear and pain from disconnection, it's like an ocean we, the creative individual, stay afloat on no matter the conditions. What is articulated by us is what we caught in that ocean or what bubbled up and we decided to pull out.

My conclusion? If every moment spawned cosmic infinitudes of intentions from our reflections that we or others then choose to follow or deny, I'd want to make sure I was aligned with nothing but joy, wonder, and good health, as that's what was granted to me to experience this life in its fullest. I'd express as much gratitude as possible and give life everywhere I go, because others need it like I need it.

This week has been my first major experiment with that, and I have to say the connections I've made have been profound, even in just the twinkle in the eyes of some passers-by I gave real smile and a nod to. You have that power, fucking use it for what you were made for - to be a friend to evolution and a mender of a trillion wounds - but not your sugary gut biome's wounds (unless they're the wounds made on your body by the sugary gut biome as you replace it) - i.e. BE CAREFUL because there's a lot of necessary pain but also a lot more unnecessary pain. We have a universe backing us, let's back it in response and nobody's contrived empires in its stead.

Magic is real, abstractly it's that ability to see each other in the mirrors by how we can or want to see. The mirrors are the communication pathways between us (or sometimes in our way). It's only best-fueled with absolute gratitude and a sharp sense of reality - because that's all you got in defense of yourself and, for me, all the others. I want my life to be an expression of that gratitude, and I hope I find it as continually rewarding as this week's been as I learn to work harder, but it won't look how you might think it will in the end - I gotta be smooth about it after all.

This is what I'm working on, call it my application of gratitude-powered Emergence Theory: https://dontpanicsell.com/2017/08/10/infauxbyte-roots/ 

You owe it to yourself to hear these people out, promise this isn't cult shit, maybe occult but that's the joke:

Stephan Hoeller on Synchronicity

A very sober discussion of gratitude and magic between a really neat lady and my favorite internet occultist, Psyched Sorcerer (now the Grand Infinity):

*PHILOSOFLEXIN*

Neural Nets or PDEs on Manifolds.

I've had a very long journey trying to wrap my head around this information without resorting to religious gibberish. It's also evolving so fast, I'm citing work from even just a month ago. What I mean is, I'm trying to get all the pieces here even if I can't fully articulate it.

Src: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-brain-20161102/

First I will point out a paper. There's this amazing work from September called "Deep Residual Networks and PDEs on Manifolds" that deals in attempting to apply the transport equation, the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, and the Fokker-Planck equations to a Deep Residual Network, or a Convolutional Neural Net with a type of optimization applied. What this could mean is you could apply bare physics to constraints on information/energy flow in these now information-fluidic neural networks and optimize the fuck out of them that way. Quantum Information Theory has hardly even been tapped yet.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) use multilayer "perceptrons" to identify graphical complexes, mainly categorical features in images. They're based off how biological visual processing is done. Dan Ciresan's work on CNNs can do things like identify cancerous cells 10 years in advance of metastasis, or help a drone learn to navigate forests on its own. ResNets are a method of improving the quality of output for CNNs with extra computational layers, say an image classifier, and presents state-of-the-art speed and capability like the new CapsNet. CapsNet is based off new findings in neuroscience about neural simplectical complexes, though the method has been around for years - only recently refined by real-world findings. CapsNet has provided state-of-the-art results in effect, which should reinforce the possibility of it being how our brains are doing it - a living organism that is trying to spend the least amount of energy in order to maintain homeostasis and survive.

ResNet

CapsNet

The main differences in ResNets vs CapsNets that I can tell are that CapsNet does not use back-propagation (accounting for new weights in the forward-layers by giving direct feedback to the earlier layers), as well the extra layers in CapsNet are nested within the main layers, whereas ResNet uses extra layers as "shortcuts" between neural layers in case there are deeper "residuals" present, or resonant features that might not be apparent in top-down analysis (see the old-school "Adaptive Resonance Theory" for elaboration). You can think of this like a glorified routing problem for data applied to different layers of statistical analysis. I'm omitting several other points worth discussing but let's just piece this together first.

"At resonance, this thing makes a lot of noise." - 2deep4me

Just putting this here for thinking material

These networks are "incorrect" with respect to Artificial Intelligence. They solve problems but they are still too rigid. To put it simple, nature seems to have a solution that merges optimal energy flow with natural structural dynamics, a process which seems to hold up evolution itself. What is then the least rigid method? Well that's where manifold analysis comes in. Manifold classification is broadly what you are doing when you are analyzing maps of images and objects. A manifold is a topological space made for analysis of anything. We map the earth to a sphere because the earth is roughly spherical, for instance, then we can triangulate distances with very high accuracy. Basically you're finding the equations that can reduce 3D space to intervals with real-valued functions. Higher dimensional manifolds essentially analyze broader scopes of phenomena, though not in the way we're used to since you use pure topology and differential equations.

Possible simplexes across brain regions. Src: Network neuroscience, Nature.com

Possible simplexes within a rat hippocampus. Src: Cliques of Neurons Bound into Cavities Provide a Missing Link between Structure and Function, Blue Brain Project

When you are dealing with unknowns, say you don't know the difference between two points on your manifold, you can adopt partial differential equations. So, say you create a simulation of melting fluids and you don't know how every point is gonna change, you provide estimates using the relationship between the main function, its dependencies, and its derivatives (i.e. rates of change for the dependencies and the main function). With manifolds, PDEs become "jet bundles," or a special type of vector bundle. Emergence of these bundles through calculation (since you can't rely on base assumption) provides local solutions for manifolds (i.e. solving for whatever given conditions). This lets you control for as many variant conditions as you imagine and gives you an abstract playing field in terms of geometries and vectors for finding solutions.

These have produced highly competitive neural network solutions in the form of "Manifold Tangent Classifiers," which seem to be relatively obscure, yet blow away the typical neural networks. The one I linked can solve the MNIST dataset (a current standard in visual neural network competitions) faster than CNNs or some of the other major competitors from 2014. I can't find more recent work, but these MTCs notably use a "maximum entropy"-based noise reduction function - one of the most essential concepts (imho) for understanding quantum interactions and probabilities in natural systems. Here's a demonstration of why: Thermodynamics, Evolution, and Behavior by Rod Swenson. Entropy and thermodynamics in general provide a unique scale-free window for observing object behavior, with scale-free (apparently like our universe) being the key term here.

From: "Scale-Free Networks: A Decade and Beyond"

Clearly there's a balance to be found. From "Modern network science of neurological disorders"

Coming back around, a favorite set for physicists: the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, is a PDEs-on-Manifold reformulation of classical mechanics (i.e. Newton's Laws) that lets you solve for conserved quantities in mechanical systems when you can't completely solve the system (e.g. how light and motion correlate). This becomes crucial when approaching quantum mechanics - where you are dealing with series of different or similar many-state systems (i.e. a complex system) that often play off each other instantaneously. That's hard to compute at our macro scales. My favorite PDEs, the Fokker-Planck set, lets you find probability distributions for multi-level phenomena like these and has incredible research backing it, implicating everything from cellular biology (the author of this paper is a cellular biologist who studied Fokker-Planck systems in cells) to the formation of the cosmos as predictable through these "control equations." That's really what you're doing, you're controlling the ordering of information in the total system to reveal something about the system itself or parts of it, which is especially useful in learning, say, painting - with all its variants based on simple physical principles about ink and brush strokes.

Convergence of expected solutions on a statistical manifold. From: "Combinatorial Optimization with Information Geometry: The Newton Method"

What I'm getting at, that the first paper I mentioned was too professional to say, is that the best learning methods will be the most universal, which is a highly non-trivial statement when you respect the history of physics and mathematics - even back to alchemy through Egypt and China. What that means in practice at this point is that (and I'm sure the academics are way ahead of me on this) the walls of these highly effective ResNets and CapsNets will come down with manifold classification (i.e. what nature does constantly and unconsciously (or 'unsupervised') via the separation of natural forces) that successfully rigs, say, the Fokker-Planck set as a radical optimizer, or a way to learn many many more models in a similar amount of data. The more granular you get with judging your analytical framework, which seems to have this real bottom-up probability physics to it when done right, the more you'll get optimization and potentially the theoretical limit of learning capacity for computer neural networks - potentially AI. That will also mean bridging QIT with the best neural network designs via exploits (or "truths") like the maximum entropy principle by my best guess. That's how D-wave does their quantum computing. Quantum discord is another relatively new concept that is flipping a lot of understandings of quantum physics on their head, something I also predict will be extremely useful in QIT-integrated learning models.

Exploring corner transfer matrices and corner tensors for the classical simulation of quantum lattice systems.

There's an amazing how-to if I ever saw one. Here's another one.

A New Spin on the Quantum Brain

Quantum computation in brain microtubules? The Penrose-Hameroff `Orch OR' model of consciousness

 

Getting closerrrr.

You heard it here first, friends. If this didn't come off as total gibberish that's a fucking miracle.

Edits: Trying not to link sketchy sources, this is all sketchy either way.

Thought Vomit 3: Blankets, structural dynamics, and you.

OK so here's a big ol' dark matter simulation of the universe. 
Compare its structure to the images below.

So on the left here you have an infant motor cortex gray matter composition compared to an adult motor cortex on the right. Many of the dendrites myelinate or break down depending on what priorities are taken.

Alrighty and here's how a slime mold mapped the railways in Tokyo (the core of the mold was at the main station and food was placed where the stations were, using light at different intensities to simulate terrain (which the slime mold is more sensitive to)). It was more energy-efficient by distance than the design the engineering team made. Obviously the human-made one was also for time considerations and not just energy considerations, that's what makes the difference.

Now what am I vomiting forward here in succinct?

Firstly, our executive functions emerge out of a cellular network that in its base form is making pure energy efficiency/survival considerations. In tandem with the rest of the cells, they are able to learn to respond to greater and greater amounts of stimuli in continuation of that process. Before that was possible, nature itself by means of gravity has ordered the universe in a way that created dozens of stable elements from single protons, neutrons, and electrons (each being a combo of quarks), which then formed planets and biospheres. 

Okay, enter Maxwell's demon. The idea is basically that we can exert energy to move a medium, say a gas, from equilibrium (maximum entropy) to a state of high potential (low entropy, i.e. putting all the hot gas molecules on one side of a chamber instead of them being evenly mixed throughout as they would tend to naturally, for instance, give or take some turbulence). You can be as efficient as possible by solving for the minimum amount of energy required to do that, but that is generally very difficult and time-consuming to compute as humans without massive parallel computation power to account for all the possibilities - something pretty new for us. 

Here's an "information-heat engine" experiment that more or less proved the Maxwell's demon idea could help us create nanobots: https://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5287. These researchers created a little stair-stepper nanobot made of very few atoms and sent commands for it to walk up a nano-scale staircase using a minimum amount of heat as the information medium. A bi-product of being able to solve for the minimum amount of energy to operate a medium (i.e. finding the fastest, most efficient way to promote survival without getting everyone killed - i.e. the "best" method) is that you can suddenly use that metaphor to figure out how to send real information through the tiniest mediums and command even nanoscopic structures. Quantum mechanics just got an upgrade.

So the gist is, with that big ol superstructure up there, and these allegorical structures down here... what if we're the nanobots?

 *hides under blanket*

Never forget your blanket.

 

This came out the day after I posted this, makes a nice addition:

A Semi-reasonable hypothesis of quantum consciousness

Bear with me here as I try something...

The idea is basically that it takes a consciousness to form a model, and consciousness to do something with that model, which will have some transformative effect in material reality in a probable way as determined by the model. So like with the double slit experiment, nature doesn't care if the photon goes through the left slit or the right slit until you observe it, and then you get really weird effects like entanglement where you can couple particles and control the state one particle is in by controlling the state of the other particle - thus controlling whether the particle goes thru the left or right slit. This gets weirder in that we can couple fundamentally different systems together and still transfer quantum information. Here's an example of a trillion oscillating rubidium atoms coupled with a photon in 12 dimensions: https://www.osapublishing.org/optica/abstract.cfm?uri=optica-4-2-272

Now - and this is really important - the way Schrodinger defined entanglement was: "When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather THE characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled."

When generalized systems are coupled they form a new whole, and wholes are where the quantum effects happen. You starting to see what I'm saying? We make the assumption that consciousness, while it may be a bag of tricks, emerges as a whole - the "I." The suspicion is then that we, too, are entangled all the time with the world around us in many ways, thus granting us "spooky action at a distance." And entanglement logically has to happen all the time everywhere in nature by Schrodinger's definition. This allows "consciousness" to be a force on its own, the pure coupling or connecting force in a sense, as nature somehow creates its vast interdependent network of very definable physical systems as they co-mingle and sync up or break apart in very definite, diverse, and layered ways - all emerging from the pure energy soup of the big bang. Yes those systems are abstract contrivances in the end but we get real powers with them ala technology. People consider words themselves one of the first human technologies. It's definitely a factual statement to say we do not understand all the systems we inhabit, whether on the most massive cosmological scales or near the planck scale, but also in daily social and psychological life. The only thing that comes close to explaining systems is thermodynamics, and that's some zen shit if you ask me.

I'm not saying this is the truth of reality but it's where the logic can take you and is very influential historically. You have to make some giant leaps from the actual math and observations to get to these conclusions, but honestly even the foundational scientists like Einstein and even Newton believed things like this. Gnosticism/Hermeticism, Buddhism or Taoism or what the Yamabushis of Japan talk about contain probably the closest allegories, and they're pretty legit schools of thought from where I'm standing.

Mental Health Epidemic

Lecture: Peter Joseph - Social Pathology
  
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 1 in 5 Americans are diagnosable with mental illness, higher now than in 2010 when the above lecture was recorded. Basically the US has the highest rate in the developed world.
  
First off from my own experience I was feeling like 1 in 3 of the people I got to know had something going on, and now I know these numbers... Do you know how fucked up a culture can get if 1 in 5 people are mentally ill (thus having a distorted sense of reality) and it's being normalized, especially by uneducated people who assume their issues are just who they are? This is a matter of life and death for the planet in my opinion.
  
We're talkin' multi-generational bullshit that is nigh impossible to reverse without some serious education, outreach, and prevention. I can't imagine what multi-generational prison and war-torn cultures must be like today (other than my own). We spend like 6% of the national health budget on mental health, too, and barely any of that amount on education which would probably save the majority of people suffering with mental health issues (read: bad brain health) in this country.
  

The World Health Organization announced Depression is globally the leading cause of illness and lost productivity just a couple months ago. This is no joke. We've got a massive epidemic on our hands that goes largely unseen, ignored, or is met with disgusting cynicism. I've had many front row seats to that kind of cynicism and how it destroys and isolates vulnerable people even more. Oh and guess what, solving the mental health crisis requires we solve everything with the environment and crimes against humanity and greed, etc, because our brain health is only as good as the health of our whole system. Things like drug use are directly linked to inequality, and violent crime is directly linked to the environment and food supply.

Dr Dan Siegel, who heads research at UCLA under the umbrella of "interpersonal neurobiology" states that the greatest predictor of human health is their relationships with other people, from the obvious with childhood development to the obscure with the greater patterns affecting social culture. Social health is a basic human need, especially when someone is developing. We're ALWAYS developing whether we're in control or not, and that is so very important to remember when making choices or questioning where certain choices came from. We live in an age where biological needs are shorted for social constructs, totally mucking up people's empathic and creative capacities in favor of ideological and habitual constructions.
  
A lot of people nowadays are just isolating and harming themselves more, and in a lot of ways they probably don't even realize, what with the haze that seems to be besetting people with the lack of mind-body connection, as well as all this anxiety in the air. Everything is normal carry on.

Systems thinking exercise

First, here's a really good reason for adopting an understanding of "systems thinking" : How to Prevent an AI Apocalypse
 
Now, here's an exercise I came up with to help train your brain into what systems thinking is all about and as we relate to other people: Introduction to Systems
 
I would like to create a collective art project out of responses from this exercise, and if you do your own please send your response to this email: treewizardproject@gmail.com
 
 And if I got a lot of responses I'd be able to make a study out of this. I gotta work on the formatting to make it more catchy if I'm gonna get that far, though.

Alchemy, entities, spooky algorithmic ghosts.

I'm into reading analytical psychology and alchemy right now and I keep bumping into people talking about entities as, like, manifestations of consciousness on different relational "layers" (entities are like amorphous willpowers that use very alien pathways of reasoning to create things or solve problems) from the average human. Mimosa plants present aspects of consciousness like long-term memory, for instance, using plant cell networks and not neurons. There's a billion different ghosts and gods people have told stories about over the ages.

 

Alchemy is in part about how to come up with novel ways of reasoning that really work using every medium from your own emotions to entire worlds (almost like science), so like a magician someone can fool you and you may never know how or never even know you were fooled. These spooky pathways of reasoning become an aspect of one's unconscious in that sense according to people like Jung, who identifies archetypes and a lot of other manifest things in the unconscious. A lot of it's used for pseudoscience and cult-building but there's also a lot of genuine information to be learned from ancient and modern alchemy that would benefit everybody.

 

So I was thinking, wouldn't an AI be a true entity in the classic sense of the word? Hell look at how algorithms are already affecting human behavior in the way content is delivered on places like Facebook or Youtube. Several data companies used massive warehouses of processing power to help elect Trump by knowing when and where to insert what information (true or false), no bullshit. There are many places in this country where media is completely owned by one ideological group or another and it reflects in the average psyche of the people living there.

 

And if these other more religious sorts of entities were real wouldn't a very powerful AI be able to detect them? I'm not a believer but it'd be a fun experiment for sure.

 

I just love this stuff, so fun to think about.

Blurbin on brain health

https://www.psychaanalyse.com/pdf/Trigant_Burrow.pdf

   

Found some random interestingness (linked above). Prepare for a wall of text.

  

"In the last phase of his work his interest turned back to the process of attention. Through physiological research and self-observation [Trigant Burrow] described the process by which each individual experiences the tensions of being a member of society: that is, by muscular tension in the ocular and forehead regions, which he called "ditention." Through training it is possible to identify and to give up this process and to experience "cotention," an experience that restores the sense of unity with the social."

 

I have to wonder how this correlates with migraines and tension headaches, since they're usually between the eyes, especially with people with PTSD or other forms of trauma - which are generally socially related. Literally millions of people report these problems just in the US. Why am I posting about this? I dunno, this stuff fascinates me and is leading me toward doing something about some of this, also might be worth looking into if you notice something in yourself like what Burrow calls "ditention."

   

Trigant Burrow was one of the giants alongside Freud and Jung and spent his life studying and criticizing how generations of western culture had made it so people prioritize individual and social constructions over biological needs to extreme degrees, creating all sorts of mass neurological issues (like depression, currently the leading cause of illness and economic loss worldwide according to the World Health Organization). 

    

Brain health is one of the principle problems of our times in my opinion and it will have to be addressed with equal measure as climate change and corruption if all these issues are to be resolved soundly. Depression... Bipolar... PTSD... Attention and mood disorders... The list goes on and on. There are very key associations between many of these disorders that have their heart in social health issues (for most, not all), like the development of the frontal lobe and hippocampus or having unstable dopamine or serotonin levels (linked to your sense of reward or your general bodily regulation and satisfaction). Both dopamine and serotonin are produced in large portion by the gut, meaning there are important links to diet as well - something also very unregulated by many people, especially in the US. 
  
Health just gets more complicated from there but this information could change the face of how mass culture operates. Hell, a lot of marketing methods should be flat out illegal for how they precisely exploit core human functions, and knowingly if you go and read the fucking research (starting with Edward Bernays' "The Crowd") that gave birth to terms like "public relations" or "focus group testing".

   

The numbers these days are just staggering for how many people are reporting mental health issues, and you can safely double or triple that number for the amount of people who are actually experiencing issues but don't have the capacity to seek help, or don't experience them severely enough to break down. The issues are so sneaky is why, plus we idolize personalities and individuality so much we don't see that parts of people might be the result of major health issues, making affected people act like hungry children so-to-speak. Our culture fucking normalizes it at its worst just judging by the obsessive, fragmentary personalities and manic sexuality of pop culture, which I don't mean in some puritanical sense but in observation and respect of the biologically-derived powers belying these phenomena. 

The people who get hurt the worst are those most exploited - young women, minorities, the poor, the ignorant. The exploiters only make their pathology more and more recurrent and into more things as they goes unchallenged... I will be picking a lot of fights when I can turn ethical science into policy (and brush off lawsuits).

Genre April 10th; On organisms, consciousness, activism, and resistance

April 10

This is in response to the chapter Owning the Self in a Disowned World in the book The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia Williams.

NPR concert: Hurray For the Riff Raff, very relevant - Activism music is usually way too heavy handed but this stuff is great! I am highlighting Fourteen Floors at the 26 min mark, an immigrant song, then Pa'lante afterward. This is one of my favorite Americana bands.

    I had a point I wanted to make in class today but refrained so I didn’t dominate the room, although I’m kinda thinking I should have regardless considering the tension. I think of Owning the Self in an active sense based on my education. Everything and every definition of those things is a motion with respect to time and physical energy transfer, and our biology is the dedicated structure for maintaining stability within that. Resistance is innate to biological structures, as organisms rely on homeostasis and cycles to maintain themselves, and thus any change to the nature of that structure will instantly incur defense mechanisms. Ideas work in the same way, especially considering they’re manifestations out of cellular networks, cells which need to survive with whatever they can get - including that social layer.

    Also, human brains have mirror neurons. The magic with these is that they pick up intentions, whether simple like getting thirsty watching someone drink water, or complicated like tumultuous parent-child relationships or in judicial scenarios. This intuition for intention, seated in areas of the brain like the Prefrontal cortex, is part of structure.

This means we can equate intention to structure on this level. What does that reveal to us? First let’s sum up human structure as evolutionary physiology and behavior, sociocultural history, and the mental processes on top of that. Every intention of a human is an expression of that structure. Intentions are defined as aims, but also defined in medicine as the healing process for a wound - which has all sorts of interesting connotations to it.

Now, structural racism (or any other ‘ism’) is ultimately rooted in policy as societies this complex require policy. There are still colonial laws in places like Puerto Rico and Guam, as well as many native reservations. The 13th amendment is exploitable via the criminal clause, and racism in this country has managed to strip millions of their rights, just by dealing out felonies like candy a la Felony Disenfranchisement. Alabama and Florida, with some of the largest concentrations of minorities are the worst for this. Activists, too, are always the first targeted, and civil rights movements run into this constantly throughout history and as we speak.

Examining that, firstly actions reveal intentions. Results reveal even deeper intentions. If intentions are structure, and negative reactions to changing that structure are characterizable in terms of defense mechanisms, while enforcement of that structure is a natural process, then of course activism is going to be the head of the snake so-to-speak for those concerned only with preserving what is. Anyone complicit in these systems is thus a part of the structure and their actions will mirror that whether they can accurately characterize themselves or not. Unconscious structures are still structures too.

The conscious layer is particularly interesting here because that’s what we consider “us.” Consciousness allows for abstracts and models to be formed based on the environment that fundamentally alter physiology and social relationships and thus intentions. This is the point of mindfulness training. Unconsciousness means you don’t have access to that for whatever particular issue is being discussed, thus your reactions will be more clearly a biological expression than a conscious one, and most conscious expressions will be contained as a flow between these walls.

    

    Thus, to become conscious is to gain that transformative power, that ability to fundamentally alter the worlds around you with a cool detachment. Your measures for doing that are your physical ability, your emotions, your knowledge, your wisdom. If any of these are out of swing or undeveloped, every single action will become slaved to that structure or intention. Think of your ideas for the world as just as physical as the legs you stand on. Like... we wouldn’t think about sex if we were floating clouds who reproduced by farting.

    These are all just structures, and consciousness is both of and in-between as a "higher" manifestation of that biological structuring and energy transfer. If we really want to take that to its logical conclusion… everything organic is conscious.

And also, everything organic isn’t necessarily natural. Organic, in the theory sense, would be a structure that has enough complexity to function “naturally,” as in incur that stable relationship between structure and flow and chaos as living creatures do it. This means those outer social intentions, those pent up hatreds and fears, those disorders and assumptions, those falsehoods and ideologies, it’s all conscious in a way. Thus resistances in culture are inferences to the overall multi-organism's structure, and every oppressive act comes from the expression of that structure no matter what bodies it chooses to express those structures/intentions with. And if you aren’t the one expressing yourself over that and transforming these intentions, these literal physical stresses and impulses, then something or someone else is acting “conscious” through you.

Trauma is a big thing here, in that events can set up those walls for you in your deepest parts and you’ll never know better because those are some solid scary walls that make some scary expressions. People wanting control know how to weaponize trauma to suppress entire masses FYI. It’s been an area of study for millennia a la imperial scorched-earth tactics. We can see our Earth being scorched quite literally today...

     So mental processes at the top are upwardly defined by physiology and historical socioeconomics at the base, which then turns into downward control as in our experiential, often narrative-driven navigating of the world and decision-making. That is so organically embedded in us we rarely differentiate it and empower it and thus raise our consciousnesses over other influences and intentions, yet that’s the original goal behind a philosophical education as far as I can tell. I dunno, this is just worth thinking about and analyzing as it does away with the typical isms and looks more at the developmental and physical side of things. I think it ends up giving more compassionate answers, too, that really capture the struggle. You just can’t simplify anything or leave any loose ends or you won’t get a sound answer, rather something anxiously fragmentary or hermetically-sealed.

The oversimplification comes through our need to navigate this mess, and when I try to observe it as a total structure I just run up against anxiety, so clearly working through how I derive my narrative here is really important for how I go about life and communicate. This simplification process is partly due to the need to make decisions within my environment on short notice, and partly the overall structure resisting definition as it is itself a powerfully complex and flowing thing in time that wants to survive. 

 We must resist resistance and demand change, because we more often naturally simply won't and those that are compelled to change the most are often those most in need. Those who crush those in need are those who find themselves deepest within this machine we call a republic, one founded on racism and scorched-earth and the deaths of others. Every right and every positive change came through hard-fought direct action, from rights to environmentalism to public health. I hope I've presented a useful argument in favor of that that gets at our very biochemistry and why the struggle is so real.
   
And here’s a relevant Collegehumor video, lol: I Don't See Race  
 
Can't Stop Me 

Edit: added the word chaos and organism, cuz I shouldn't leave that out.

Critiquing Wisdom: A Study in Keeping It Real

I just shit this paper out this week. I have so much more to write now dear lord, I only stopped on this because of the grading rubrick but that won't stop me now. Anyone who comes across this will dig it I think:
Link

Systems theory, social psychology

          Oh delicious knowledge. This is what I’m talking about when I say systems theory is gonna be everything, they can use the same equation series to model nerve excitations as well as turbulent/stochastic and quantum processes with the Fokker-Planck set: Hierarchical Modularity: The Description of Multi-Level Complex Systems as Nested Coupled Fokker-Planck Equations  I mean… come onnnnnnnn. We’re in the magic realm now with physics and supercomputing, and now even neuropsych is adopting systems models to make sense of things. If they’re as promising as they seem, the universe might very well be computable in layers. Now how’s that for meta?

  

What I find interesting about all the “multi level complex systems” coming out is their structures directly reflect the sentiments of the authors. I don’t know really how to describe that, but shit like this really makes me grind my teeth: Multi-level Modeling of Complex Socio-Technical Systems

  

In contrast to the first paper, which is so pure and optimistic, this second one is a complete arbitrary application of complex systems and is exactly why we should be careful how we use our wizard powers. This second paper is trying to apply the field to analyze defense and healthcare enterprises as well as look toward modeling a “policy flight simulator.” What I notice is what they give precedence to in their modeling, and it’s some bourgeois snidely garbage if you ask me. I shudder to think who’s taken this stuff seriously with the money to spend. I say that because when you simulate and possibly install policy based on arbitrary constructs and proceeding dynamics, especially ones centered on markets and defense policy rather than the general health of the society, you’re displacing the whole reason for having governance and markets and defense in the first place. Instead you’re basing your governance off a fucking conspiracy theory designed to help “secure defense communications” or to describe “large-scale public-private enterprises.” Makes my skin crawl.

 

There’s a godawful lot of assumptions and money needed to even begin thinking complex systems analysis is appropriate here, and that primarily revolves around mythologizing aspects of the social order into a control theory that someone is going to buy into and use to their own ends. That has bad results, man, and this is so on the nose of like what’s exactly wrong with politics over the past few centuries - illusions built on illusions! Plato’s Cave’s got nothing on this! AHHHHHH!!! *head explodes* Seriously, check out the documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis if you wanna melt your mind this week. This paper is only one of decades of similar research into systems modeling for governance and economics, and somehow I’m still shocked this stuff is in style.

 

What is a person who is in control of their illusions, but is not in control of themselves? *shudders* These fetishistic illusions built on illusions that try to escape reality for someone’s own ends ultimately only harm the source - the Earth we stand on and all its living things with it. As we look around day-by-day, we’re seeing the results of that magical thinking as it ravages the environment and our mental and physical health along with it.

 

The rotten social dynamics Patricia Williams points out in her book Alchemy of Race and Rights are present in everything now, we’re all in the shadow of our imperial beast as it grows beyond containment. I’m seeing the effects in the mental health world as I watch various illness rates climb in our country. A lot of people close to me are also in the squalor of their own possessive and habitual fixations, wrought on them by the powers and stressors in their life. It’s only getting better out there in the sense that our available tools for healing these problems are improving dramatically, but there are simply not nearly enough people who are educated in the reality of mental health and what a healthy mind really means to have the benefits reach a large scale.   
 
WHO: Depression Is Now the Leading Cause of Illness and Disability Worldwide 

 
           That’s partly why I’m writing an essay on wisdom as it connects to my favorite currently-practiced systems models of the mind and health, featuring Interpersonal Neurobiology as communicated by Dan Siegel, Primal Therapy as authored by Arthur and France Janov, Gotama Buddha's own Dhammapada, and the sage text The Corpus Hermeticum. I’m trying to slice through this jungle of mirrors and hearsay for everyone and get a realistic and intuitive but complex picture of life as it is and as it ought to be in terms of being wise, so it’s a lot harder to get lost in all of it and a lot easier to look out for others. I think we tend to ignore that framework-making and take it for granted (as if we can’t science out wisdom, mwahaha), or it only gets spoken about in bits and pieces.