It's fun to read fringe cosmology. Time Cube is one thing, incoherent drivel that forms a coherent picture of a happy madman. Then you get to the next level (still very low level, mind you) of like, Ancient Aliens or... Billy.
I had a teacher's assistant once that presented myself and a whole group of friends with Billy. So get this, Billy was an old man - I think Welsh - who used his stub arm to hold a UFO model on a fishing pole and film it. He published these with volumes of writing about "Pleyarans" from the Pleiades constellation, and it was basically space alien epistle with greeting card wisdom throughout. My poor teacher took it really seriously, to the point he asked some of the smartest students in school to come check it out for an evening and try to "convert" them. What I took away from it was that I really liked San Pellegrino and those Petit Ecolier things from Safeway, since he even provided snacks. I was the only one who talked to him for a bit afterward and very carefully signaled to him how off-base he was. He literally believed that different races of humans were different factions or something of Pleyarans - basically Scientology Lite™.
I had already had my journey with conspiracies by the time I was 16 and was put into that situation. For a minute there I had started to look for the "inside job" factor in everything. I perused AboveTopSecret daily, a forum that was a weird mix of teenagers like me and dudes of dubious age and background. The best thing about the site was the owner, they loved their UFO stories as much as I did, but they also had a keen eye for politics. One of the most influential pieces I read in high school was the owner of the site visiting the lobbying centers of Washington D.C. They enjoyed underground tunnel access - including an underground cafeteria, and painted a very clear picture of what was to come. This was in about 2009, post-financial crisis, and it was clear there had been a steadily increasing lobby to deregulate markets for oligopolies and stymie progress in policy reform. These lobbyists focused primarily on the right, and knew the politicians would basically take all the flack while their funders run awry. Citizens United came a year later. Many of the issues that caused the 2008 meltdown have still never been fixed, and we literally elected one of the benefactors of it president, but I'm pretty much done with any doom-saying.
These moments of brilliance from these far-flung corners of the internet sent fireworks off for me. There was a substance to these random acts of journalism that eclipsed the endless drone of Kennedy assassination "analysis" or UFO sightings. New sightings were always a load of fun to see photos of, I've seen some weird stuff myself, weirder than the Marfa lights, but never anything inexplicable. I've also seen weird drones and disassembled things on-base in Edwards, real UFOs yet also nothing controversial. Then came the real journalism and it set me on fire to learn more and in a meaningful way because of the real impact that real, reality-tested choices had on the world - rather than the endless chatter that added more needless labyrinths in my mind.
Where was I going with this? I didn't really have a plan when I started. I've made most of these blogs through many late-night self-indoctrinating streams-of-consciousness. I've felt it should only be curated by impulse, and lay bare my process but never say too much. Half-journal, half-expository, ideally minimal BS yet all tongue-in-cheek. Right now I'm also watching a Down the Rabbit Hole episode about TempleOS, an OS by a schizophrenic programmer who believes he can talk to god through it. Fucking tragic. Reminds me of others.
Quick side note.
Look! I made a thing! It's an HEG that'll cost me less than 10 bucks per unit in bulk. It syncs with your phone, too, and a battery should last weeks before needing charge. Yup, if I don't get sued I should help a lot of people. If I do get sued, you heard it here first that there will be middle fingers flying. Ideally the Biofeedback Institute will back me, they enjoyed my DIY version and this is all going to be open source forever. Just a couple more hours of coding and bam, we got a product. My secret god-complex-driven motivation here is to tow a line for as many people as possible to help them recover from brain-related illness and injury, learn about themselves, and improve their physical foundations for all their "higher" functioning. I ain't gonna sugar coat any of it either, we're on a global bender of brain health and stress-related disorder and I'm clawing at the walls seeing the numbers increase so rapidly. You all realize it's a time bomb, right? We'll see if this defuses anything.
Back to what we were talking about. I noticed that I defaulted to the Next Available Narrative (now called variable NAN) as soon as the first one disappointed me. My education began with all the same cherished myths of America we all know, and got firmly shaken thanks to books like A People's History of the United States which I was exposed to young since my brother had it in a poli sci class. That damn professor is who got me into conspiracies, too, now that I recall my brother showing me Loose Change college student-produced video about 9/11 - also from his poli sci class. Humboldt hippies, man.
One NAN breaking down leads to a search for the next, and so on. A sense of isolation pervades the whole process, and everywhere you find islands of sympathetic, agreeable people, forming ritual circles to perpetuate and reproduce their sensibilities. You see, somewhere along the way I was told I had to believe something, yet I didn't even realize people took religion seriously until I was 12. So I believed momentary fantasies and dreams, but only for the duration of their fun. Movies and music would pepper my brain with impressions and reenactments to potentially experience "authentically." That also produced a distorted sense of reality, but an important one nonetheless for understanding others in this Hollywoodified world - where people start to conform to only the spectrum of people presented by their media. Life becomes a series of episodes, where time is disjointed and everything is closely choreographed farce. The only difference between those conspiracy theorists and ufologists, and those who tune into E! for celebrity gossip, is that their searches for truth follow slightly different impulses. One NAN train is a more individualistic type (and they all even tend to call themselves "libertarian," lol), the other a more grazing type.
There is still something painfully clear between these two groups. It's not just the over-reliance on media, but a very misguided search for truth. I can't say their compasses are broken, because somehow I found my way despite once holding very much the same lacking in rational and I suppose trope wisdom. And being fooled and making an ass of myself - consciously - is what guided me through. How, then, does someone lose a decade to a cult? Half a century to evangelism? A lifetime to fear? Why that hair style, dude? I never stuck to some terrible idea for more than a few months, some conspiracies a few years but nothing that interfered with my health and ability to be sociable. Others aren't so lucky and get drawn away, encouraged to isolate themselves around their supposed golden goose or simply deprived of everything meaningful for some sick programming attempt by another.
I'm still painting a very loose picture here of what conscience development is like in the here and now, and I believe the narrative component is very important (like valves for thought), at least in a society as dramatized as ours, but I'll have to continue that thought later. For now, we need to consider the processes of health & development, language, place, and time as omnipresent among all the different scenarios of people and their NANs and where they attempt to embed themselves in some insecure, cultish sociological organism. It's a primitive in-group out-group sort of thing. Tribalism is timeless and unbounded by species. What percentage of humans spend what percentage of their lives in these cultish modes of being, to the point that it totally dominates each step they take and place they go? What scope does one need to be able to handle at what age to avoid that? And when we learn to arbitrarily craft those motive forces for ourselves, beyond fear, beyond lies, beyond very small but necessary jumps in logic that belie a much vaster, more beautiful picture of life -- just how much farther can we, together, get with language and creation? And when is it too late to start?
The last bit I'll leave with is the thought that began this train and didn't get an opening for a smooth practical metaphor insert. It's the fact that no matter where you look or where you stand in the universe, the laws of physics are always the same. This niche of the vast cosmos is populated with 7 billion+ human minds and countless minds of other species (though rapidly dwindling with climate change and human encroachment). The laws of physics, and thereby of the energy driving evolution, apply evenly to each and every one of us. Less abstractly, my experience really isn't so far from yours, and our brains are mostly the same. Once you learn how to communicate based on that logic, you can resist the tropes and become a tropist! Don't let someone tune your antennas for you! Trust your gut! It's a parade of fools out there, and around here, and anywhere else I guess. Question is, who's leading? And do they want you to know?
My liquid-crystalline matrix is quite convoluted today.
I see you've made your quasiparticle bigger.
Google's AI team thinks the first A.I. will essentially be a system that is able to respond to input better and faster than humans while it is continuously programmed by all the human input in its system. The most successful general neural net problem solving models are all based directly in biology and physics, because nature's been doing it better for millions of years. Most people don't even know much about what the internet is, let alone how it works. And most people are easily mystified, especially by "A.I" in the implementation it's most likely to see on the widest scale first. And many people stand to profit more with some form of mystification around the subject. Now imagine a hologram projection of 3 billion consciousnesses, filtered through global recombinant systems that are faster to respond than the inputting human, creating a kind of computer-user synchrony not just on local scales.
You can start to see how this form of an AI is not necessarily of the archetype of a "true AI," but rather perhaps a tenuous if-compelling reflection pool being looked upon and perturbed by several hundred million minds. That certainly isn't much more than what the internet already is in its current form, just likely more responsive, engaging, and attention-directing. This will have enormous benefits to education and health industries, but if fooled into a more religious association it could be a very hazardous and opportunistic tool. Now imagine someone having the keys. Imagine saying "okay modulate this attention feed so more production and consumption happens for broccoli" and poof global broccoli industry booms. Okay, it's not that easy, but once upon a time cigarettes and bacon & eggs got the same treatment and became unanimous overnight. This is just a much bigger network that enables the same tricks.
There is the engineering of consent and action through a system like this, but through control systems design (flashy micro-transaction UI's, anyone?). Data politics groups (like the now infamous Cambridge Analytica) proved once again it works as long as those on the "down-flow" are unaware of the game being played. Propaganda through all of time has worked through image & information manipulation, as well as pre-emptive attention redirection from unbiased experience to ideological traps (or myths). Simply clamping down on information channels allows anyone to apply their own filters. What, then, is being left out? What loses the possibility for recognition? How do resources get distributed and needs met? And who is the man behind the curtain and what is the tongue in which he speaks?
How many more times will the game change? Well, how deep does the mind go? How little does matter, matter? What matters and why mind? And does matter mind what matters? A beautiful metaphor from a quickly forgotten book spoke of a crystal cathedral being built into the sky, filled with processions of priests and rings of ritualists, floating on an endless starlit sea - the seafloor littered in tangled forests of bodies clambering for air. Who above remembers their names? Who below mistakes that ship for the moon? That book was written by a Harvard law graduate about systemic violence in America, and the siren song of structuralist elitism. So what is today's Theory of Everything? How does it account for everyone? And what, or who, does it seek to conquer?
I've spent quite a lot of time reading, thinking, reading, thinking, doing some writing, reading... thinking... And I can never get unstuck from some of the most prescient issues. I won't bathe you in gloom or idealisms of the future, but I will offer a way to think about it before I continue on muddling through life.
Okay, so artificial intelligence. Current solutions at least at the billion dollar investment level are mostly just trained layers of feed-forward statistical point clouds provided a-priori ground truths (e.g. game boards or road rules). There are skip connections and other loopy recursive signal analysis-based things too. It's not the newest way to do things but improvements are based in our progress in understanding the animal neo-cortex and the ability for processors to handle that kind of data. Newer methods involve tensor networks, which mostly translates to stacks of n-dimensional statistical point cloud matrices. These are still provided a-priori rule sets to form statistical clouds with but offer orders of magnitude better compression and speed with little loss. It's the proof in the pudding of the biggest scientific advancements of recent decades.
*Whispers* "Ryu and Takayanagi are legit."
Another interesting idea is that tensor networks are also the keystone to solving all the hardest problems in quantum physics, which is really the math of complex systems that are able to be broken down into unit "nodes" in a physical/natural network. Uncertainty in this realm is more due to limited assumptions and abstractions rather than untraceable randomness in nature. This opens up another important ability, and that's the ability to apply the same high level abstract solvers that we apply in quantum mechanics/quantum field theories to these neural nets, the method I'm most read-up on being entanglement. This means not only can broader systems be recognized by the computer, but the a-priori assumptions built into data (e.g. the limitations of the measurement instruments or categorical assumptions) can actually be found exactly with numerical representations (e.g. linear correlations, jet bundles, diagonalized density matrices), which the computer can then add another layer of learning and exploration to and in the most computationally efficient and physics-based manner possible with modern mathematics.
The difficulty in all this is data acquisition and the ability for a computer to form its own categories. I lined out how this will be overcome with wisdom from quantum mechanics, but then how will this be stored and iterated on? What is the memory system and how is it modified? This is where employing genetics may be key, following nature seems to have provided maximally performing models everywhere else. A DNA strand provides explicit memory of a species which modifies with each offspring through the elements and re-combination via sexual or asexual reproduction. It's dangerous, it's error-prone, but as long as the species survives it builds long-term resiliency - though not necessarily homeostatic ability, adaptability or even individual life-span (which are not always necessary to the reproductive cycle). Those are evolved traits that seem to assist in maturing biological intelligence.
While a very large data set is analogous to a lot of experiences of many generations of a species, it does not capture the filtering process. New generations of living animals do not have all the same access to the same information due to direct experience being lost with each generation and history only able to be inferenced through behavioral and physiological changes. It's the invention of language which has allowed experience to truly endure beyond a few concurrently-living generations, something only humans have been able to expand on. Genetic algorithms have had a lot of success, especially with adversarial networks. StackGAN was a pretty cool experiment, it's getting cooler with 3D model generation and self-scoring. This was done in one demonstration to generate drone frames based off physical constraints and a few example models. This could easily extend to aesthetics generators. There are also great memory models like LSTM networks, based off our long and short term memory structure. They're all pieces to a bigger puzzle here.
Human intelligence is based in a structure formed a-priori through generations but utterly ignorant and amnesiac of itself at the upper waking levels of consciousness. The reason we even think in "upper" or "lower" levels is due to the assumption that a higher-order model will successfully encapsulate all the "things" in a way that they can all be discovered to be the same (or at least communicable) by independent observers, thus establishing ground truths through a recursive collective filtering. The human neo-cortex, mainly the frontal lobe, also assumes a lot of control as it develops, meaning the body goes from a "bottom-up" wind-directed sort of development to at least fractionally a "top-down" self-controlled, self-transforming development. Pre-mature infants are often born blind due to undeveloped parts of their brain, where they may have no access to visual functions whatsoever for many weeks until their brains develop and cells differentiate.
Weasel baby brain development.
Diverse types of neurons and support cells differentiate from singular root columns.
Humans develop at a high level through social networks, the body does this at a lower level through unfathomable cellular inter-connectedness and layered information/energy processing from genes to electrical impulses. The only way to really begin finding out which models can do what the human is doing is by beginning with a more primitive structure that can eventually do what humans can do. This means there are more systems to create that can handle wider sets of problems, whether ending up as a series of specific taught solutions (e.g. 100 different board game-playing neural nets linked as one in a network) or one natural law-understanding mega solver that only needs sensory inputs to start building its own patterns and assumptions and languages off of. That means it has to be based in a ground truth structural reality in a way that can fully quantify it and become it and still obey the laws of physics. We have all the tools now to do it, while computers continue to get beefier. And people are doing it, to be sure.
Google Brain is an example of the slow modular approach. This does resonate with the fact that the neo-cortex is divided into hundreds of thousands of columns that do isolated as well as parallel processing. There are some keen blockchain versions of this, which might the best suited architecture to turn a computer network into a controlled genetic brain structure. There is then still tons of mimicry, one of the more recent Nvidia conferences had some dopey VR real time car driving that was "A.I. powered" horseshit from a decade ago, while the chips and algorithms they're sitting on are a real fucking beauty of electrical engineering and physics. I don't know, we'll get there, but focusing on a few conglomerates' work is actually slowing things down, while they should focus their resources on maximizing the quality and accessibility of their hardware - not shareholder gimmicks. And really, most of the world just isn't suitable for honest, optimistic, spirited science of this magnitude, but that underscores the responsibility they're carrying - not just the amount of money they're making.
My fix? Tensorflow plugin with Unreal Engine, now that's the [free] sauce for properly engaging with this loopy world.
And just in case you forget in this goopy mess of writing, this is all tongue-in-cheek creative non-fiction writing. I am nowhere near an expert in systems and A.I., but I do get a kick out of the airy metaphors and some of the functional progress in computing going with it, mainly for my electronic hallucinations - I mean video games. Not enough people really understand how down-to-earth most of the engineering is either, the only way some silly computer networks are going to create an all-consuming black hole of optimization (or in the real world: speculator-generated inflation) or be used for mind control (again, it's about who's using this stuff for market manipulation) through predictive mechanisms outclassing humans is if we mystify ourselves, just like others mystify their dear leaders. Luckily most nations aren't dumb enough to continue allowing data to be exploited willy nilly - the U.S. not being one of them, however.
New technologies invite new perspectives, just as they invite new cautions and new abilities, and it's our duty to be educated enough to participate meaningfully in those discussions. What are the new creative standards going to be when a kid can create a Pixar-quality film or Naughty Dog-quality game just by talking to a digital cloud for a few minutes? What about the standards for education, health, and individual empowerment? Modern computing has the potential to assist in all those realms as it already is doing, it might even fold enough proteins to solve major illnesses. It's all there and it's happening, how fast depends on how many properly screwed-on minds can get into it. I ain't counting myself until I can actually code one of these damn things.
In other news, my HEG biofeedback project (https://github.com/moothyknight/HEG_Arduino) got picked up by Crowd Supply and it might actually go mainstream after all the contacts and potential partners I'm meeting. I fucking love science.
Edits: forgot to give specific examples of genetic algorithms, they're nothing new either.
Today I talk about opening space, and all my little meandering thoughts about it. But first...
The gist of how mind mapping works is this:
Link the key ideas of a subject and then deep-learn those key ideas in relation to each other, and
Think through the key ideas of a subject in depth, re-arrange the ideas in relation to an argument, then link the ideas to loci in good order.
You're memorizing by encoding information by all the associations you can manage, including going so far as to create mental spaces where subjects "physically" associate. It's like writing a story but for your mind to organize itself around and not just experience as a story. You can elaborate and strengthen memory by adding mixed sensory details, from sights and smells to emotional sensations. The goal is efficient recall but also efficient perspective in general - if that makes sense.
I've been letting the whole mind mapping Method of Loci thing tumble around in my head for a while now as new things happen and as I compare new notes with old ones, and I feel like I've reached a pretty good understanding from both the philosophical and physiological ends to make some valuable insights. Too bad you're gonna have to wade through a personal ramble with fat paragraphs to get to it... Or scroll to the next dotted line.
I share this stuff around with a few friends here and there, and sometimes I have the balls to share it with professors and people I look up to because I want to be able to see what they're imagining and where I might go from here. Generally the feedback is only silence, and that's okay because I still have a lot to learn.
This blog isn't much more than high level creative fiction in actual substance, sometimes creative nonfiction, but it does represent my serious attempt to learn about the real known limits of life and lay out associated words. I am also trying to reduce a lot of it to plain speech so it's a bit more digestible. I'm doing it on limited resources by today's standards, and with only my own naive drive to better myself. I am coming out with so much practical wisdom it's not even cool, even if the vagueness of my writing might indicate otherwise. The only reason I'm vague or pin my thoughts to things too big for me to possibly articulate correctly, and without as many of the years of training others have to make many immediately useful statements on those things, is that it stretches the brain and forces me to measure every word - even if I'm not as thorough and structured as I'd like to be as a writer.
I'm granted more power with words each time I practice. Each measured stretch of the imagination seems to grant more memory. Focusing on such difficult but highly sought after concepts - and in no particular order - prevents a lot of mythologizing of the particular perspectives I and others have constructed. It's also helped me find a lifetime of inspiration to carry forward, and a tongue sharp enough to cut the air - not that I use that tact as often as I should. I'd say the only thing I've mythologized is a sense that a constant traversal of applicable ideas at the frontiers of science with the traumas of global real politik, a sense of rationality, and an inescapable - and terrifying - knowingness of the nature of life underneath anyone's immediate ability to articulate it... that this is a viable formula for gaining a highly tempered wisdom. Wisdom becomes a rhythm for doing, as anyone who ever looked up to anyone can attest, or anyone who ever used a practical theory. That's its open secret.
Lol @ Disney sexism.
The only people who ever seem to understand are either way too busy because they've obligated their weeks and months already with their life's work. Or I find them on the fringes - often drowning in their own health issues and social isolation so that they were chaotically forced to learn about the real world. And out there you find people with insane beliefs like people who are anti-vaccine or think faith-healing and crystals and fruitarian diets are a better alternative to quality* therapy and surgery (looking at you, Steve Jobs). Or they're on the opposite end of the stretch and can't hear alternative views without feeling an existential threat against them, and use shows of force to shut it down thinking that's a better argument. It's generally - in my experience - because lack of education and life-caused depression bereaved them of sense. If not that, it's because their preferred media tells them so - and it seems to be more and more due to media now as education budgets tank.
*Quality meaning the health professional actually has an *up-to-date* and more-or-less holistic approach, and isn't either overspecialized or a huckster. Talking real engaged humans here, not ideological boogeymen.
Check out the first 10 minutes at least.
I'm lucky enough to be healthy and to have a good upbringing, and I'm lucky enough to have detached that from any navel-gazing sense of identity (at least from my perspective). All I'm left with is a boundless energy and will for life, yet a massive struggle in where to place it, because everywhere I look I find closed off spaces - including at my last University that was just too out of date to be worth the time, or at least offer teaching for my major that isn't about how well you respond to operant conditioning and forced recall-based "learning" (as in shit a computer could do).
The only fields where that makes sense (literally making sensation - i.e. input bumping into thought structures already arranged in your head and causing a reaction or rearrangement) are the ones where people's lives are at stake. I'm talking fields like health and engineering, where it's at a level where you have to make a conscious agreement to condition yourself - and that's a totally different thing from the kind of undercutting I'm talking about. I think it's largely due to how the institution is organized that's doing it, from an excessive presence of business administration to a gutted CLA and ethics department.
There's a lot in my life that I take care of alone, never asking for any sympathy or even really sharing much of the reality of it. And that's largely by choice for generally not trusting anyone else's experiences for how people always project themselves into a situation just to satisfy their own needs - and not actually offer insight or friendship or just a goddamn hug. I also don't think every issue needs conversation to solve, but that can lead to self-defeating levels of discretion too often. That thought always made me pause and recognize just how many others must be in the exact same boat, and I wondered how I could begin to organize my life in a way that starts to reach those similar people. Well, turns out it's about opening up the space in-between us - to put it in deepity terms. I see this working every day of my life now.
I have many optimistic projects in the works that will offer something to the world in hopes of expanding the average human experience, and simultaneously educate myself into a professional capacity. I'll make a more detailed post about that soon maybe. Learn by doing, right? But not the corporate propaganda way. I prefer to be an apprentice with no master. And I need willing people to help me with little tidbits, people with a spirit similar to mine because I don't see these projects really paying off for years - monetarily speaking. Money isn't really the goal of these projects, either, but a little of it will be important at certain stages which will create vast opportunities afterward.
That's as long as nothing breaks as I have little to replace my tools with. I only see money as a way to take care of people, and I have spent plenty of time in the realms where it's so abundant it can be wasted and costs maximized. I've wasted plenty myself without realizing. I've wondered how many soiled opportunities could be represented by the wasteful spending margins held in the "use it or lose it" public budgeting mechanism we have, something I experienced firsthand at NASA, which struggles for a better and less politicized budget. It's being overtaken by private contracting as a result (generally paying contractors for their projects instead of developing in-house). Especially when someone in a poor part of the country might need 50 bucks to afford a part or license or internet connection they need to start their own business. For me it's a few hundred per tool and license, and tens of thousands for a certification through a university. Fuck that!
The opening space idea hearkens back to five things in my mind: psychology, neuroscience, occultism, game theory, and the scientific spirit in general. I'll speak about these things in order so you can soon see more completely what I mean by "opening space." I'll also note that when someone who might know more than you uses words, they're probably using them more precisely than you and it's sometimes more on you than the speaker to figure out what that means - because sometimes they want you to stretch your imagination. I write with imagination and general curiosity in mind.
Psychologically, "opening space" can be described well by the idea of dealing with a trauma patient. Imagine someone is on a hair trigger at the slightest touch, but they want you to help them with physical therapy. To ease them you might ask permission and give them as much authority as possible, as you have to provide a meeting space and not just your efficient skills with physical movement. They have to feel it's cut off somewhat from what's causing their pain, or even standing in opposition, and you can't give them social cues that might be associated unless you direct them through it. Humans are wild animals in this sense, we have powerful circuitry for responding to perceived phenomena at a moment's notice. At the same time we could have full control of ourselves, and that's where we begin navigating our spaces internal and external.
You can think of these overriding circuits as space-closing, as in the fairly deterministic set of behaviors that stem from their firing are acting in place of a calm, otherwise choice-making person. That person is still making choices, to be sure, but it becomes skewered to certain planes of thought - generally states of fear and physical agony - where surviving the next few moments is all that can be managed. And because these lines of thinking and behaving are so railroaded, one will spend much of their lifetime on it - thus all of their outcomes, thereby any resulting evolution, will have been influenced by this set of circuits. Domestication is a good example of how this can be overridden in animals, but in our case we should use love and the power of the human spirit to heal to be less creepy.
Think of consciousness like water running along a web perhaps. Think perhaps you can tilt this web and guide where the water will go. Imagine each place a droplet touches as the water runs along this web as a place that you are able to view as a memory or sensation and be aware of in that moment. You can also know pretty well where the droplets will go as they move, as the web has clearly defined junctions. Now imagine that web gets tangled or is added to erroneously by a drunk spider, those droplets as they move are no longer able to move in a predictable pattern, or will be moving to unwanted areas - perhaps saturating the whole thing to the point it's senseless.
Cloud of Souls by Lynda Schlosberg
Brains contain maps that respond to themselves and to external stimuli through many senses. Different areas of the cortex lighting up are wired to different senses and different distributed areas of the brain and body. Outer areas in the cortex contain columns of neurons that are individualized to handle specific processes. The hippocampus also contains bundles called place cells, and similar grid cells in the visual cortex, which light up in response to the environment. These can draw "maps" within your very brain using literal neural electro-chemical grids.
Grid cells and place cells work together to filter important information at all scales.
Yes your brain is already way smarter than you realized! This results in a massive response network that shares as much information as possible while maintaining a high level of order, in order for action potentials to communicate correctly across the body. Every circuit fired strengthens the likelihood of that circuit firing again, granting us habits and refined skills. It works so well we are hardly aware of the intricate chain of events involved even in the simple opening and closing of a hand.
As that Donald Duck episode above describes, symbols like Pythagoras' pentagram or the Golden Ratio serve as useful reminders of the combinatorial possibilities expressed everywhere in ourselves and in nature, ones we ourselves can engineer with simple math and tools into wonders like music and art and architecture. We can encode those ideas into simple formula and symbols that are - ideally - so universal they could be decoded by strange people many hundreds or thousands of years later for them to use as we did - and more - when our line no longer finds them useful or even threatening.
Today my favorite modern art might just be the hordes of scientific papers and experiments and code samples I've collected, things that serve no purpose but to demonstrate to any curious eye a perspective or a possibility. They're both modern learning tools and a snapshot of thousands of years of natural curiosity and optimism as manifest today. Yeah okay that sounds pretentious as fuck but who's gonna remember it otherwise? You find wonderful snapshots through the ages, like the Ebers Papyrus, or Giordano Brüno and Leibniz's works, or Isis Unveiled by Blavatsky to name a few off the top of my head. Those are all Hermetic works, as has been my fascination of late. Hermeticism is mostly a theory of mind from my point of view.
Hermetic thought crops up culturally from the ancient Egyptians (perhaps inspired by Eastern practices), Greeks and Christians, to modern scientists. It has many parallels with Chinese and Buddhist thought, and I'd say might be responsible for more scientific discoveries and general artistry than many other original philosophies in Western culture - if anything because it's an ageless imaginary forum for ideas and experimentation, and thus an idea (or charlatan) factory for people who organize around it. Pythagoras' pentagram is a perfect example of the kind of linguistic tools a Hermetic would use. Hermeticism became a major source for modern occultism as well with people like Blavatsky, GRS Mead, or Aleister Crowley, as well as Carl Jung, bringing it back into style.
Occultism in general is about that magical connection underlying all our earthly needs, theatrics, and expressions between us. It's about all the orderly/disorderly sensible/nonsensical ways we can find that connection and amplify it, often with ridiculous rituals. It's a very useful layer of culture to understand when approaching all realms of diplomacy, or psychological illness not caused by some obvious physical health issue. People organize their lives and reflect themselves in the world by all those needs, theatrics, and symbolic expressions that make up their personality. This becomes apparent in their linguistic patterns, but also in the very flitting shapes, communications, and memories in their heads. Some occultists and shamans have their own effective language with which they can "see" those patterns in others and roughly determine the nature of it, much like a psychologist can identify symptoms of disorder. Some deal in spirits, attitudes, and emergent entities, others deal in observable cellular and bodily conditions. The latter method is more efficient and easier to communicate, while the former is modern medicine's historical progenitor. The surest path to wisdom lies somewhere in the middle for today's topic.
An emerging idea is that all mental phenomena take a "shape." This is expressed literally in a study that found that certain thoughts corresponded to geometric homotopies - as in neural processing centers in the brain arranged in certain ways - like our grid cells which process room geometry and then build connections to that geometry like "where is the food?" Words themselves correspond to different Brodmann "cytotechtonic" areas, like the Broca's or Wernicke's, which then correspond to specific uses of language. That's all reflected in pathways that get reused or referenced constantly in other processes, evidence for how highly adaptive and sensitive our brain truly is, as it is able to differentiate signals in an incoherent (to the naked eye) biological mapping system.
Rat grid cells in a square box scenario, where the rat's in the box. The third row is generated by auto-correlation.
This discovery earned its researchers a Nobel Prize in 2014.
The nature of the cortex is not discussed enough, where such discussion would be very useful for pinning down the best general learning methods - like the Method of Loci which likely leans on those handy grid and place cells. Math taught as just symbol manipulations and not essential navigation tools always ends in a piss-poor understanding of math, to show where this modern learning science could make a major difference. Hell, a lot of mental illness is now being associated with neural arrangements and network distributions, something that takes a lot of very high powered tools to gain evidence for. We also know tried-and-true mnemonic training rearranges brains without the user even being aware of it. Visual stimulation creates direct changes to gene expression in the brain, as found by Harvard Medical School.
1.5 month old infant cortex on right, compared to adults. The
gray is adaptive gray matter, which becomes myelinated (insulated
and sped up) over time as patterns are set.
See, I'm drawing a circle around this central substance of learning and perception and our place as individuals. We ultimately can gain choice. Whether those choices are granted opportunity is not necessarily our fault, yet we still have some internal choice through an education no-one can take away - our mappings of our maps. Take precious care with those, too. As I have pointed out countless times, you're not necessarily conscious of all the connections being made - stuff others will happily make for you without your consent - like you're merely a product of your environment and not capable of interior choice.
This understanding about choice leads us to modern game theory, where a playing field is provided and perceptions aligned around the win-conditions and resource needs.
Modern game theory extends into political science and cellular biology as well. It is as spooky as John Nash's famous Equilibrium theory, where the game plays out based on the level of rationality and information the player has. He came up with it in the peak of his paranoid schizophrenia, at the same relative time as his electroshock treatments, and his most famous case became about equilibrium based on the players being equally irrational and uninformed of each other. Guys like Kissinger picked it up for their schemes and it became a Cold War tool and an expansionist tactic for both military and marketing. Game theory is also as fun and optimistic as, well, actual games, but also in the way scientists construct cellular automata "games" of resources and populations - famously Conway's Game of Life.
The point is there's a board or field for the observers with a certain amount of information available or discoverable, and physical rules and actions which they must abide by to participate. That's the fundamental basis of running a society on one level. It's also how you design any communication system or language from the top-down. See what I'm getting at? This is a powerful tool, much like systems theory. It may seem obvious as a general organizational principle, but a broad-spectrum intuition for it takes much time.
What do these convolutions of reality, these filtered perceptual tunnels and maps, have to say about that reality thus far assumed to exist? It shows that there are very tangible, reliable ways to map new patterns onto that reality. We see this every day in everything from the reliably repeated genes expressing our bodies and our foods and our loved ones, and the reliably repeated particle/waves of light generated in the sun by the zillions, to our reliable architecture and data networks and, ultimately, our not-so-reliable hairless ape selves. Those repetitious actions become a backdrop for a constant growth process and a growth-of-growth process (as in evolution). Less abstractly, it seems to me to be our source of creativity, something I find being echoed by others more and more today. On one level these reliable patterns and creative notions (including all the fields I've mentioned) are the tools we get, on another level it's what generates all our momentum and possibility in our lives. Science shows that only the methods that adhere to present patterns, say a ball and a wall, will pass consistent tests, as in the ball bouncing off the wall and not passing through.
Our imagination, however, can make that ball go through that wall. If our initial assumption was that it would go through the wall, the space left in that error upon testing would be mystery and, perhaps wonder. It's only a measured creativity that bridges the gap. Haha that sounds like an engineering religion. Look the point is this thinking is what's carrying our modern ways of life into the next decades, and it is riding on the optimism and grace of a hundred thousand million people who've lived and died through time and passed little bits of their wisdom on so that it began to accumulate. This has opened our possibility space, just as we've witnessed our universe accelerating its expansion so have we accelerated our knowledge and capacity as humans. That acceleration has also become necessary as a means to traverse the exponentially rising tide of information and systems swirling in the backdrop of global economics.
This social evolution manifests in education as neater ways of thinking about more and more complex topics, like geometries or metaphors. The stone age education systems are those which have not risen with the tide so-to-speak. Yes I'd go so far to say that a cursory knowledge of everything I've covered should be in the common sense, from the obnoxious platitudes to the up-to-date readings of computers, math, and biological physics. There should be constant effort, not necessarily to popularize, but to demystify, as that is what will keep our imaginations and efforts fresh. There's too much careerism and railroading today, it's totally unhealthy and robs others of imagination they'd otherwise have.
Perhaps most people will still settle into whatever century, willfully and blissfully ignorant of every precarious thing that generated their status as living, but at least they wouldn't have been compelled to lose out. I can only feel a bit of sorrow, as I too may never master my own fate as it were, but at least I got the privilege to try. And tomorrow a meteor might hit me or a fascist takeover might throw us off for another thousand years, creating yet another million dystopias of all scales. I vote... Yummy food! *runs off to stuff face*
My opinion on how innovation works in this economy is a mix of common knowledge and game theory conspiracy. I don't think it's at all controversial but I just wanted to make a note of it on here and cultivate the idea a bit for myself and whoever likes this shit I write.
Real innovation optimizes the society and creates entire new layers people can operate within. The fields I study all follow this tradition of optimization via improving human health and individual power using less time and resources, but at the same time have come with immense risks and catastrophes. The examples that come to mind are nuclear energy and the ensuing decades of fear of global destruction, powerful medical manufacturing and a nation hooked on price-gouged opiates and mood stabilizers, the invention of psychology and the utter appropriation by marketers and propagandists for the conditioning of masses, a hundred years of computers and the most funding going to data mining money-printing financial bots and weapons industry-approved drones and other over-engineered stuff by overpaid engineers who willfully forgot their moral imperatives, thousands of years of political philosophy and an army of aristocratic stooges running the government from Alaska to the Fed to Saudi Arabia and Russia - packaged with a monetary religion, etc etc.
When you create something that a society WILL adapt to - done on principles of evolutionary optimization - you create a platform that will be added to the top of that hierarchy of chaotic reasoning called global society. It spreads like a virus and it might only be necessary for a flash of time, but it partially determines human evolution and the fate of this planet by its implantation and symbiosis with other social and biological structures. It will reflect your creative intentions - as expressed structurally - then by natural adaptive survival power most people will essentially grow into it.
Think of how much better my or the younger generation can communicate with the internet - which didn't exist prior to the late 80's, or how we're to the point that there are separation anxiety classes for people hooked to their - insert brand here - phones. Think of a seahorse that adapted to camouflage with one species of seaweed or coral via frill growths on its body. Think of a kid so addicted to a computer he can't even process the real world properly (yes it's a thing). Now think of an AI with unrestricted growth coded to perform specific functions, then running out of control when exposed to novel material.
Yes there's something about this worldview that rings quite hollow to me, but the fact of evolutionary adaptation being managed through game-theoretic political schema is quite a real phenomenon and has been for millennia, though originally done with theology and theater. The Greeks used tragedy and comedy to educate the masses during the golden age, with catharsis being a pointed tool to move an uneducated, illiterate crowd into ethical and political thinking - or also to manipulate them (considering Socrates' demise had a lot to do with a comedy by Aristophanes that mocked him much like how Nazis mocked Jews). In the realm of information these are all forms of engineering, of making the energy flow how you want to flow by design.
That abstract (or essential, depending on who you ask) notion of energy, flow, and self-control extends clear back to the beginning of the religion of empires, from the Chinese to the Egyptians and Sumerians - and probably the Indus Valley folks if Hinduism is any evidence. Its many many forms are generally in response to the times and the culture of those times, thus their power in modern day - like Kant, Locke, or Rousseau - are through the lessons in the logic and not in their literal application. However, if we're all inherently creative beings then that's all simply conditioning our creativity in one sense - both the will and the imagination for it. Those who never get their basic needs met are often found in a mire of their own mental and physical trappings - from people with developmental mental disorders to anti-education creationists - and generally need a lot more guidance at that point to - maybe - see a self-empowering way out that isn't suicide or shutting off your possibilities (thus becoming a living death).
Just don't go thinking that wealthy entrepreneurs and speculators aren't aware of this. Watch any Adam Curtis film for a moving look into that. This is how one may accumulate a lot of power in their lives - currently represented globally through monetary gain and competition. There are many fields where competition is a bit of a moot point, like the major oil companies out there generally working together to game legal systems (looking at you, Oklahoma and Alaska, also Ecuador and Venezuela) - not to mention most of the major ones used to be part of the singular Standard Oil.
US politics are a great example, considering the closeness of the two parties in policy, and yet the endless circus of rehearsed adversarialness blinds people and commits them to narrow emotional political schema that those paying for the policies are perfectly well versed in creating. It's now well known and even has been proven through data analysis that industry gets about 90%+ of the influence over politics. This makes sense when you think of doctors making decisions about public health versus, say, a gardener, but really it represents a bribery system with the encroachment of business lobbies and a lack of a cap on donations and what people do with those donations.
Professionals who could do something about this seem to be less and less immune to propaganda because of how their attention stays captured through personality cults and entertainment, bureaucracy, and the way things are done with money right now, so I don't see them stepping up enough in the ways they should - as compassionate educators as well as practitioners. How else could an opiate epidemic fly so far out of hand, or so many people be on mood stabilizers for too many years that determine their very brain structure - and like a club rather than a scalpel - with no therapy or oversight to adjust dosage or, more importantly, get people off the hook and rehabilitate their specific needs. That's not to say the drugs are all bad of course, but there is a real problem with over-prescribing pushed by big pharma. De-institutionalization of mental patients in the US did not come with merging the health fields like it was supposed to. I am convinced this is a major part of the de-structuring of society currently happening, and it goes nowhere good if the rises and falls of civilizations through time have painted an accurate picture.
I'm also convinced that open source technology will be one of the major sources of renewal for everybody, like Elon Musk's reading and writing initiative, or Ray Kurzweil's desire to see AI help in the medical and engineering fields as well as in education (think autonomous search engines). I wouldn't know any of this in the relatively little time it took me to learn had I not an endless trove behind a search bar and some skill with rationality. This information is what is motivating me to keep going and push as far as I can into this mental space to hope see others' lives improve with my effort.
My focus on AI has a lot to do with my hypothesis on how new social strata form in society, having everything to do with the thousand plateaus highlighted here. I am focusing in graphics applications, partly as a self-indulgent desire to see wicked motherfucking simulations in my games through optimizing computations, but also to help create a powerful avenue for opening that possibility space to as many people as possible and inspire them to self-educate with the powerful tools at their fingertips as I have, and hopefully transform society that way. I've also got my Roots project that I know will work if I can get enough artistry and scripting help. I can't even bring myself to go to college for psych and comp sci anymore due to my disenchantment with the whole thing, including a horrible lack of stimulating ideas at my industry-led, liberal arts-ruining school, and instead I'm focusing on what matters most to me. It's already paid off in my mind, but I still have a lot of work to do to realize that in full.
I'm being as stealth as possible so as not to attract undue attention or to get too distracted with dumb incentives - something I took from Hermeticism (f.y.i. the root of Western medicinal practice via Egypt) - while I work on my skills for however long it takes. In fact Hermeticism might be a fantastic way to teach core theology and how it really functioned through the ages like a merger of political and proto-scientific theory with spiritualism. Deleuze's work is its modern counterpart in my opinion. Bruno, Spinoza, Blavatsky, and I argue many of the scientific greats from Newton and Leibniz to Einstein and Jung, are its rescuers. This is considering how the Art of Memory, an alchemical schema, became what we know as science during the Renaissance. It was - in my opinion - far more nuanced as a naturalistic philosophy than modern materialist tool-making science could ever hope to achieve. That's wisdom traditions for you. This doesn't take away from the importance of science, but asks it to be always vigilant of the humanity and universality underpinning it in its expression, lest it be used for great ills.
