Diary – Part Ten

Abstract

Unlike parts one through nine in this series, this one is not really about the language–learning effort. It is instead a private diary; a continuation of Part Ten–G, which got over–long. It is not curated for human consumption; I am making the assumption that no human being will ever actually read this. Thus, it is filled with random stuff I feel like writing. Some of it is very personal, some of it is nonsense. Mostly, I am finding that the act of writing helps otherwise vague and scattered thoughts quantum–collapse into a more coherent form, where I can examine them, like a dead butterfly pinned down in a display case. Dead words.

If you are interested in this content, then you should ask an AI agent to read it, then ask the AI agent to pretended that it’s me, then talk to virtual “me”. I believe that present–day LLM technology is sufficiently advanced to be able to do this.

Introduction

Part Ten already got an introduction. A different way of thinking is about what is going on here is that this is a form of life–logging. Or, in 18th century terms, a diary. Just not anywhere near as compelling as those written by the famous diarists. This one is more of a mental self–portrait. And not even for you but for myself. Not to cast a narcissistic gaze at my own words, but to organize my own thoughts. Still in the experimental stage.

5 June 2026

I was tortured by my dreams last night. Rather than repress them, where they can do continued psychic harm, I will try to relive them now. Where they may cause either more harm, or possibly bring around catharsis. Its a gamble, although I honestly expect neither outcome, but a third: a fading away into pointlessness. I felt a shadow of depression as I wrote the word “pointlessness”. Pointless things (objects, activities) seem stupid, but pointless emotional journeys seem sad.

The soul, as primarily incarnated in humans, is built on a foundation of light. I use the word “light” because none of the others fit: “hope” (hope implies expectation of a better future; but we are already here, so there is no comparative of better or worse.) “joy” (joy is wonderous, and a strong emotion: bliss, ecstasy. Our base foundation is not ecstatic, its merely normal, existential. But I don’t like the words “existential” because it has negative overtones, or at least dismissive of a positive foundation for existence.) I can’t think of any other words right now, because its morning, and I have not wiped the sleep from my eyes. The intent is to say “positive”.

This wanders on some tricky territory. Psychologists have a map of the base settings for humans, going under trms like “temperment” or “disposition”, a base somatic level or setting. Some people are just angry; others just sad. I guess an overall joyous disposition is rather uncommon. Let me ask google:...

Well, that was a useless exercise; here’s a synopsis:

Then I asked about a “sunny disposition”:

Lets dive into the genetics:

OK. So there’s an unresolved tension here. On the one hand, I have a Heideggerian Dasein. On the other hand, I have these mechanistic set–points determined by genetics, neurotransmitter transporters, neural wiring. The embodied Dasien is some sort of mechanistic outcome of neural architecture.

I was going to write “this is not limited to humans”, but his is more subtle. Animals placed under extreme stress also develop depressive symptoms. Elephants waste away after the death of a loved one. Chimps refuse to eat after the death of the mother. The point here is that there is also a backwards–causal effect: it is not just our mood is determined by neurotransmitters, and our mood is a robotic marionette of those levels, but also the inverse: tragic events alter the balance, and that altered balance has physical side–effects, e.g. loss of appetite.

(I stepped outside, and the birds, žvirbliai, are having a ball. Diving and lifting and ... surfing. There’s no English analog to the word “žvirbliai”, these are small birds. Mostly jays, I guess. Starlings. Well, except these are *not* starlings.)

I used the word “surfing” and am reminded of the Stacy Peralta film “Riding Giants”. This is about a purely joyous activity. That particular combination of sun and water on the skin, the physical effort, the mental concentration to catch the wave, the maintenance of balance while also having the freedom of pure movement within that envelope of balance, where one can choose to dance as one wishes on the surfboard – Something about this very specific combination is very highly rewarding.

What, exactly? Science does not know or understand the specific mechanisms of joy evoked by surfing. Is it seratonin? Dopamine? How does it compare to heroin? MDMA? Could you cure depressives by teaching them how to surf? (Lets ignore the lack of economic activity: it costs money for food. Well, tropical birds with grandiose plumage are able to expend such energetic outlays because food is abundant. But wait, are tropical birds more happy than others? All that plumage is for mating rituals, some of which are complex. Do tropical birds get neurotic about mating? I’m horny as a toad. I really, really, really need to get laid. And the current chances of that happening are approximately nil. Much much worse. I might never–ever get laid again. I’ve got multiple decades of celibacy behind me, and multiple decades of celibacy in front of me, and I’m ultra–mega–horny, and OMG what does one have to do to get some sex around here?

I mean, science, that ever–present bystander, could give me statistics about what fraction of tropical birds fail to mate. Or point out that some huge percentage of them die before adulthood. There are children starving in Africa, and Ukrainians dying in the war. What right have I to complain? I’m lucky so far: born smart, good looks, even temperment, mostly, except for my current ongoing bout of heart–ache (I’m in love and it is not reciprocated) (there are also some depressive episodes from my youth, driven by deep loneliness. Someday I should recount these). But I was lucky: I had oodles and gobs of sex between ages of 17 and 30. The very long dry spell is recent, and I don’t know how to get out of it.

One obvious technical, mechanical solution is to make use of some dating app. I am negatively predisposed to this. I expect it to be filled with the great mediocrity.

Whatever. Let’s return to Dasein. This is what I feel, what it is to be me. But I’m horny, and this is clearly driven by some combo of genetics, the mating drive, and my personal history, set and setting. So there is some clear mechanistic explanation for my horniness. And I’m enslaved to it. I suppose with great effort, I could rise above it: with meditation, psychological self–control. But just right now, as I write this, this stinks of being a a suppressive strategy, the “bottle it in until it explodes” strategy. The point here is that the drive is mechanical, biological, and in that sense, determined and deterministic. Of course, I have free will and freedom of action, but this is within the boundaries, the envelope of biological being.

There’s a phrase from Hitchhikers Guide that keeps coming back to me: life ends, there is death, when the choices of possibilities reduces to nothing. I see this clearly in my mom: she can barely walk; she wouldn’t make it around the block. Her intelligence fades. Conversely, looking at evolution, it seems that nature moves in the opposite direction: humans have far more freedom and choices than field mice, and those have far more than worms, lizards, insects. I look forward, as an optimist, to human evolution. Or some conjoining with compute substrates.

So I asked google about dating apps for smart and enlightened people, and it came up with a bunch, and some suggestions. And then it asked “do you want help with...” I forget what it placed there at the ellipses, but yes, sure, I want help locating a sexual partner.

Is it possible that this would be a curative for human unhappiness? Could it be that LLM’s are a wish–granting genie? Ask and it delivers? Is this the path to increased human happiness and enlightenment?

I’m such a fool. The answer is, “of course”. There are already plenty of public reports of people using LLM’s for psychological self–help. Of course, there’s a data–center boom, because who would not a low–cost, cheap, effective, always–on psychologist or (and this is the trick part) friend.

Before LLM’s, there were dating apps. And before that, there were want ads. So the search for intimacy has always been there; the technology for fulfilling these desires has improved.

Which brings me back again to that uneasy intersection of inter–personal phenomenology (Emmanuel Levinas), psychology and mechanistic explanations.

Phenomenologically speaking, what are want ads? They are textual messages, arrangements of atoms carrying information that can be decoded by human brains, generally describing desires. As always, they are a part of the here–and–now, and enter the interiority of the readers mind, when read. They may be soon forgotten, or they may be acted upon. I do not know how to perform a causal network analysis for the

1 0^{15}

synaptic functional elements in my head, nor how to express this as an equivalent tensorial factorization, but I can imagine that this is in principle possible, even if staggeringly out of reach given current theoretical, measurement–detection and computational abilities. And, presumably, if done right, there would be some causal chain that could be bounded and identified, and said to be “this is a want–ad that was articulated by one human mind, desireful of something, published in a newspaper, read by another human mind, later in the time–stream (later in the future time–cone) and having some effect on the neuronal, synaptic arrangements therein. And associated with these two brains are two Daseins. And that inter–personal interaction connecting them, we can give it a label, and that label is “want ad”. Is this sufficient to say, that we now have given it “ontological status”? That want ads have joined the pantheon of things–as–they–are?

No one claims that a want–ad is alive. But does it have a soul? Well, there is a soul of an idea: otherwise, we would have to discount all spiritual writing, and argue that it is empty and meaningless. Bullshit, of course: humans reach out to spirituality and enlightenment for any number of reasons, including psychological self–help. We’ve already place psychological states in the mechanistic world of genetics and neurotransmitters. But what are these? Messengers. Serotonin carries a message across a synapse. DNA carries a message, with error–correcting high–fidelity, over long periods of time. Both have spatial extent, because atoms have spatial extent. The want–ad is a far more abstract kind of message, not at all close to the base like DNA and serotonin.

Spiritual literature deals with spiritual issues, those close to the soul, and the soul is somehow a manifestation of Dasein, or vice–versa; the relationship between these two named entities is unclear to me, just right now (just right now, because I have not meditated upon this.) The current meditation is on the ontological status of spiritual literature. Again, I can do the reductive causal analysis, and trace some path in some hyper–dimensional vector space (again the wave function

| Ψ_{s y n a p s e s} ⟩

, however this may be a mixed state, pure state, thermodynamical, almost nearly classical or possible deeply entangled, whatever, does not matter for the present discussion.) So I have that “spiritual literature” is some vector, or perhaps some dynamical system unrolling in this hypervector space.

And now I step back: is this what Dasein is too? Reductionistically speaking, one must say, “well, what else could it be?” I’d already articulated this argument: Option (a) its unexplainable, and never will be, or option (b) it is explainable, and explanations are necessarily linguistic, and linguistics is necessarily algebraic, and algebra is necessarily mathematical. I reject option (a) out of hand. Option (b) has two sub–options: (b1) the explanation follows directly from reduction to an atomistic description, or option (b2) it cannot be deduced/derived from atomism. Both seem valid options. Option (b2) is interesting, as it implies some crypto–correspondence. This is clear, as the substrate for Dasein really is localized to the brain, and so whatever that explanation is, it must also be so localized. Its also interesting as it suggests that there is some undiscovered spiritual–physics. For example, the explanation might require machine elves from some “other dimension”, which then raises the question, “how do machine elves work?”

I dunno. I’m stumped. I guess option (b2) roughly corresponds to the classical dualist argument: that there is some spiritual essence, perhaps a “God of the Gaps”, animating the soul. I’m only pushing this further by insisting that, if dualism is correct, then one can perform philosophical and scientific analysis of this spiritual substance.

I say “philosophical” here, because if there is not enough material for science to grab hold of, then philosophy is the only option left. But if we look at the trajectory of phenomenology, it seems to get subsumed by psychology, and psychology can be taken to be a scientific discipline. So what do we have left? Psychology cannot explain the feeling of whole–ness, entire–ness of “being me”. (And perhaps the red herring of “qualia”.) Being me remains fundamentally spiritual. And I guess qualia too, although I’m predisposed to discard Husserel, as there’s no obvious way to declare the properties universal to qualia, i.e. independent of the subject. At least, not yet. And then we have the earlier Kant, and conceptions like categorical imperative. This is also, “way out there”. As a written text, Kant’s writings occupy a location in the noosphere, along–side printed want–ads. The problem is “does the categorical imperative exist, as some pure form, some platonic form (or whatever Aristotle would have put this.)” or is there no form of existence of the categorical imperative outside of the written text, and the evocations that are called out in the brains of the readers and students of Immanuel Kant?” But I could cross out the words “categorical imperative”, here, and substitute “spirit”, and cross out “texts written by Kant” and replace it with “spiritual literature”. Is there a “spirit” in “spiritual literature”? Is there “spirit” in a want–ad, especially if the ad is seeking “love and affection”. Again, I pick these words, because they are loaded: there’s a clear emotional response upon reading these words. Is there something, some ineffable “something more” than just the emotional response?

The answer is, I think, “there has to be”. Otherwise, one sinks into behaviorist psychology, and down that path lies the bogeyman that we are all automatons, hypnotized robots acting out the manipulations of the external world upon our robotic zombie–brains. Clearly, that seems not to be the case.

So lets return to the earlier idea of “membrane computing” (per Wikipedia article). Here, the core idea is that there is an insde, and outside, a membrane separating the two, and stuffs that flow through channels in the membrane. So, explicitly biological, cellular, in its original conception, here, I want to turn it around as a model of agency: an agent has an inside, an outside, and sensory info that flows across the boundary.

I think this sharpens the issue. A pure behaviorist stance says that the physics “inside” is enslaved to the environment outside, and that the sum–total of what goes on “inside” is a pure product of all external causal influences from the past immemorial. The “inside” is thus necessarily a marionette, a mechanical mechanism driven by events coming in from the outside.

This has a certain appeal: it means that the inside really is “one with the universe”, as it suggests that there is nothing inside that did not come from outside, and since outside is “everything”, “the universe”, then of course, the inside is “one with the universe” and no particular woo or spiritualism is required (other than the spiritualism of the universe itself.)

The alternative is to reject behaviorism. The soul, or Dasein, clearly inhabits “the inside”, as attested by brain injury, chemicals, etc. But how is this done, without woo?

I’d given earlier arguments about how free will is possible in chaotic dynamical systems. Even classical–mechanical systems. Here, we have differential equations, these clearly have branch–points. The branch–points make up a set of measure zero, but phenomena like Sinai’s tongues in the circle map demonstrate a mapping from a set of measure zero to sets of non–zero measure. That is to say, it is possible to amplify measure–zero choice–decision branch–points to non–zero size. The problem here, though is “who makes the choice?” How do my conscious decisions case a dynamical system to branch off in a different direction? Gahh. Been here, done that. I don’t have a compelling answer. Yet.

Clearly, I don’t think free will is illusory. I mean, it appears to be part–and–parcel with Dasein, indivisibly united with my knowing–ness that “I am”. That is, I not only know that “I am” as an irreducible fact, but I also know that I have control, and it seems weird to admit that we all know that we exist, but that accompanying basic facts, like free will, are illusory. You may as well say “I’m illusory”, but this is absurd: I cannot deny my own self–existence.

Some people say that the existential–me is like a rider on a horse; the horse goes where it wants (and this is true) but the rider is necessarily a horse–whisperer; I have conscious control over where I want my body, my emotions, and my thoughts to go, even if they don’t always go where I want them to.

OK. I’m all talked out, here. The only progress I can report for today is maybe a sharpening of the concept of “the inside” as the causal result of all external events from the past. I think this sharpens something I hadn’t quite really focused on before.

Time for lunch, time to turn to the things I really should be doing, working on.

6 June 2026 – Morning

Well, I spent the last ten hours nurturing a psychic crisis. The culmination arrives in lucid sleep of this morning. The foundation is that on unrequited love (of course, if you’ve been reading this diary). Then with various flavorings to various degrees. One was pure love, the love I had for my bluejay, so many years ago. The love that is evoked by my current avian visitor, who flits in and out many times during the last three days, stealing nuts from the dish on the counter. I feel such delight when that little warbler, or whatever it is comes to visit. But I went out last night, alone, on a mission to get drunk, and mission accomplished. This helped put the edge of alcohol poisoning on my lucid dreams. This ache in the pit of my stomach. But also another common friend: an ache in my groin. Not quite an erection, but excitement. These twin aches occupy my enteric brain.

And then, in sequential turn; they can’t all happen at once, but come to visit, one by one, for a short time: eros, of course; that’s the pain in the groin. But then envy, and jealousy, and covetousness (I covet Milda, but she belongs to herself, not to me.) Anxiety in the background. Then fear, fear that I will never be loved again. And then the fearsome appearance of something I’ve never–ever seen before: the looming approach of death. I will die. The time has arrived. My time is up. I’ve just a little bit left. Scared the living bejesus out of me, I’ve never felt this before. This is new, and its so terrible that it belittles and makes mockery of all those other hurts and pains and anxieties. A fearsome monster awaits me, and it’s just ahead, and I cannot evade it. That faded before too long, but the pit in my stomach, the pain in my groin, and the pain in my heart, these remained. I let things stew, half asleep, half awake.

How far can I push this? Can I let it build, and magnify? Perhaps on the other side there might be cathartic relief. Perhaps I’ll shed a tear, feeling sorry for myself. But I did not much feel sorry for myself. Well, OK, maybe a little. But no tears. Cathartic release was much, much to far away in the distance to be reachable.

Perhaps allowing this toxic emotional stew to brew will cause me psychic injury? Perhaps I should pull back, so as to not injure myself. But perhaps its too late: the injury is already there. The mark has been branded in skull. I will have to live with this. This is my burden. There are many others just like it, but this one is mine.

Then, still half–asleep, I contemplated this diary entry, composed a rough drafts of the above in my head. I want to capture and bottle the essence. Of course, this cannot be done. Words can only ever talk about the immediacy of being here, now, in this soup of emotional turmoil. But the flavorings, the feelings, the qualia, are boundless, undescribable. I can give words: writers have been doing this for millenia. But words are specs of dust in a hurricane. The words are thin, weightless, colorless. They contribute nothing whatsoever to the feeling of my heart jumping in my throat as I write this.

I think I lay there, in this state, for almost an hour, and then I said, fuck it, I’m getting up. So now I’m drinking coffee. Lets see. What else did I think about? That, while engaged in thinking of math, physics, software programming, my emotional state is entirely calm and flat. I’m preoccupied in the hunt of the abstract. But if I think of physical activity: the brick and stone–work that I’ve done, the electricity, the plumbing, the carpentry. One is occupied. The somatic state is calm. Emotions are nowhere near. Nowhere far. Nowhere at all, just absent. This is not a bad way to live: calm, staid.

But I have glimpsed into the maws of a monster. Willingly, or unwillingly. A decade ago, I made a vow to come to Vilnius every year, and discover my roots. This perhaps launched me on my current path, as the first issue to confront is that I had no friends here. For a few days, a week, that’s okay, but after a week, a profound loneliness grips my heart. This is the first ingredient, and if I am to write a methodological manual of tantric practices to wake the kundulini, this would be it. But it is of course, not kundulini that I wake, but the spirit of the angsty poet. Those fearsome views of the abyss; for I have seen it, and it was not pleasant. My heart still lives in my throat. It may be a few hours or a day, or longer, before some semblance of joy returns. Or at least normalcy.

I mean, there are two rather direct and very immediate cures for my state: kisses and caresses and whisperings from a girl, or some appropriate chemical – MDMA, or whatever, I’m not conversant with which is which, unclear which is the right one here, but from what I’ve read, this would be entirely effective. Of course, I would personally prefer the kisses and caresses. I think there’s some old joke about how there wouldn’t be any angsty poets if they got laid, and I can attest, this would very much solve the problem.

I’m tempted to wonder about what sort of a social structure would allow for such curative powers. I’m pretty sure that getting fucked by a hooker would have only short–term benefits, and risks elevating the problem to another level: hookers don’t solve the problem of profound loneliness; they would only high–light it. Chiaroscuro. My new favorite word.

Well, the only path from here to there may indeed be the LLM’s. In the progression I set up yesterday: want–ads and dating services, upscale to dating apps, and now personalized with the aid of an LLM. That is, I expect the LLM to be a much better match–maker than the conventional date–matching algo (which I fully expect to be abysmal for people like me.) Of course, I have a large body of written work, spelling out who is me, who I am: this diary, to which I find myself confiding in ever so more personally. My perfect date would also have to have some body of written work. My wife would be a fine match (she has no written work, but she has artwork) but my wife hates me and I don’t know why. I would love her I could love her, in some abstract sense, I still do, or maybe I am confused by my heart pangs: I could very easily redirect them onto her; psychologists have a word for this: transference, or something like that. I could easily make her the object of my desires, and not much would be needed: some soft caresses, some kisses. I’m not asking for much, I don’t think. But it’s more than she can provide. When I try to kiss her on the cheek, she flinches and draws back. Flirting takes two. (I’m trying to think of something clever using the word “tango”, but nothing is working out.)

The above thought stream does paint LLM’s as magic wish–fulfilling genies. It’s perhaps early, and lacking in detail, but its a vision. In this specific example, the elimination of psychic pain and suffering. Centuries prior, we lived in economic poverty. That chapter of humanity is coming to a close; but it is very clear that we live mired in psychic poverty. Works like Vervaeke’s “The Meaning Crisis” or David Chapman’s Meaningness, or the various texts on metamodernism, or Chris Hedges in his assorted videos (well, I asked google, and it informs me that there’s a youtube channel called “Academy of Ideas” dealing with this. Perhaps if I watch some of those videos, they will serve as a salve.) Other commentators include: John Michael Greer, Dr. Gabor Maté.

The point is that there’s a large number of thinkers who notice that our current Western society is absolutely bereft of any sort of spiritual foundation. To put it crisply, we all live in spiritual poverty. My personal suffering is a decent example: I’m wealthy, smart, sophisticated, and I’m fine when I’m fine, which is most of the time, but when I’m not fine, as I am right now, there is no hospital to cure me. Well, given that my cure would require affection and kisses from someone who could maybe be a life–long partner, this is, well, a complexticated situation, but this is the problem. I don’t quite have the time to review the large variety of psychic crises that modern Western man suffers from; I’m sure there are many, and that somewhere, some psychiatrists have created a full list, and these are all intractable.

The idea that I explore here is: can LLM’s be applied to start untangling the psychic mess? How would that work?

I’d written a private recollection below, but its inappropriate, because it touches on other private individuals who would likely not want to give consent. They don’t know what I’m doing, they wouldn’t understand, and all this could be construed as damaging.

For present purposes, any psychiatric case file would do. “18 year old, presents with...” or my new favorite book, “Noriu Nobelio”.

But kind of everyone I meet in Vilnius seems fucked up in their own special way. I don’t meet people in Austin, so I can’t say. For whatever reason, I can forge bonds in Vilnius, that I cannot in the US. Why? Maybe Americans are already too alienated. Or rather, I can forge bonds on social media, but this is so impractical, as compared to F2F. But then, the people I have met through Owen, in Austin; the circle there is also not terribly appealing to me. Not that the ones I meet here are any more so; its just that they are different. My sample sizes are small.

... To be continued, I have to go buy a bike. ...

... Crap. Found the bike, but I was ten euros short. ... Try again tomorrow ...

Where was I? Two hours later, hiking, nice weather, I felt fine for as long as I was pre–occupied, but had this sinking feeling tonic when my mind was left to roam. Of course. Working to take one’s mind off things is a well–known style of self–medication. As is alcohol. Whatever. I feel like shit, but maybe that is the hangover talking. My heart aches, not much I can do about it.

Earlier this morning, I read a page of Kalinauskas. The following passage made me all choked up. For a brief second, I cried:

Well shit. I broke down for a good long sob transcribing that. I’m not used to being this emotionally fragile. Lets break this down: last weekend, while watching the otherwise mildly (mostly) boring folklore ensemble singing and dancing, I was overwhelmed by the following thought chain: “Folk music. I guess this is what one did in the dead of winter without radio and TV for entertainment. How anachronistic.” And I tried to imaging the housing situation, the architectural interiors. And marveled a bit. And then I reviewed the program notes, or maybe the announcer welcomed some folklorists from Ukraine. And then I was struck by thoughts of the war in Ukraine, and was overcome by grief. I had to figure out how not to sob, not to tear up, walking in public in the Bernardino Sodas park. Trying to shake it off, and I’d be OK for a minute, and the word “Ukraine” would just make me tear up again. I tried not to grimace. I faced away from the crowd. This happened maybe three times maybe four times over the course of ten or fifteen minutes.

Before this, I got into the habit of crying during romantic movies, in all the standard locations where female audience members would cry; the conventional tear–jerker fare. I like Pride and Prejudice, and I cry during the TV adaptations. Maybe I’m secretly a woman. I want to make some joke here about being intellectually trans here, but its not worth the effort. On a rather distantly related and awkward note, I have fantasized about how it would be like to be a woman having sex. Its really quite awesome; but I think that by writing this, all that I am saying is that I’m well within the bounds of normal human behavior, and all that I am is that I’m far more open than most people. Sex shops and erotic literature are quite popular; I’m fairly far on the prudish side of all that. My fantasies do not go so far as to wanting to act them out. But this is a distraction from the main topic. Where was I? Emotionally, I might be shaped more like a woman than a man. Based on what little I’ve picked up from, from the big wide world. Maybe I should ask Claude...

Oh, but first: other things that make me sob are great human achievements. For example, setting track–and–field sports records. This is partly because I hyperventilate when I think of running that fast, being that I’m a sportsman myself, and that excess breathing, while otherwise not moving, and pondering greatness, that knocks something off kilter and I cry. But also there some presentations of the Apollo Moon mission made me cry. There’s some recent song, ten years old, some techno–beat, about Apollo, showing Mission Control in Houston; that made me cry. I recall watching some SpaceX launch, and noticed the announcer got a bit choked up at one point. Oh, one of the Kraftwerk videos for Tour de France makes my heart race in expectation of an uphill climb. Like the Daffan Lane tour I regularly do. And OMG, the Rammstein video Stripped. By the time it gets to the diving sequences where human bodies are flying through the sky with all grace, I can’t keep my shit together, there. This is the Leni Reifenstahl footage of the Munich Olympics. Whatever other water Leni carried, her celebration of the human body is just fucking amazingly brilliant. I’m crying just writing this. I’m in some giant lake of quasi–cathartic grief. I don’t recall anything quite this extensive before in my life.

Oh, and as luck would have it: I just heard some massive cheer coming from Arkikatedros Aiškė. For whatever reason, google AI was utterly and completely obtuse the event calendar, but I eventually coaxed out of it: “Dive Into Divine”; opening youth–oriented event for the “6th World Apostolic Congress on Mercy (WACOM6)”. I guess I should go to this. I could advance my anthropological studies of faith, in person. Not that I expect much; I expect conventional christian pablum. Oatmeal. Baby food. But given how emotionally on–edge I am, perhaps some more nerves will be struck.

I mean, all my bumbling, here, this is all to chart out the utter and complete reality of my beingness in the here–and–now–ish–ness, the complete inability of words to capture that feeling, thus leaving no particular toe–hold for a mathematical, physical program. I guess I’m plowing away at this, in order to mybe get lucky, and have some leap of insight, delivered by God Herself during the World Apostolic Conference. You never know. Could happen. Barring that, I did sketch a fairly detailed mathematical research program in the previous chapter of this diary.

But first I should eat.

Oh, and I keep moving off the mark: how can LLM’s be employed to provide psychic (spiritual) support for the general population, and start pulling us out of spiritual poverty? This of course crosses the border into the psychoanalytic, but psychoanalysis is mainstream, orthodox. Spiritual support is controversial, as it is conventionally entangled into various religious frameworks, and there are deep problems when the deadwood of religions are thrown onto the bonfire. Only Heidegger gives us the agnostic Dasein; but that is one hundred years ago. I need to figure out how to move on from that. I expect a brainstorming session with Claude will help.

Oh, when I say psychic, I don’t mean ESP; I mean spiritual. So let me amend that last paragraph.

I’m talking to Claude. Some quotes:

Note BTW, that I think I’m a low–testosterone kind of guy. Not measured, but circumstantial. Little facial hair, but also not balding.

So, OK, that’s me. And I guess I’m in luck:

Still doesn’t explain why my wife hates me. To conclude:

OK then. I’m not more feminine. I just cry like a girl.

OK. So lets go do some spiritual shit at Arkikatedra.

But first I drink some Monster because you know L-Carnitine and B-vitamins and caffeine == goodness, and I chat with Claude Sonnet 4.6 low. I asked “People have begun to use LLM’s for psychiatric advice and self–help. I suppose the same applies for spiritual connection and healing. Are there any concerted or broad–scale efforts or projects to design LLM platforms specifically for psychological or spiritual guidance? Are any of the spiritual sites outside of the conventional Christian or Hebrew religious frameworks?” and got a good answer. In short: its happening.

Oh: but this one is even better: “What sort of surveys are there of mental health and spiritual crisis in the USA over the last century? Thinkers like Chris Hedges and others have bemoaned the collapse of any spiritual foundation driven by modern capitalism. But is this measurable? Might we expect improved mental health from broad–based LLM use?”

8 June 2026 Morning

Picking up where I left off, above.

It’s a good response, no surprises. I immortalize two; first, a hard stat, the second apparently a paraphrasing of some research results that seems meaningful:

One interesting thing about LLM’s is that they bridge the gap between short–term memory and long–term recall. I have a file: “posts-todo” that has titles and URLs of things I’ve read, and wanted to have at my fingertips for social–media engagements. I was looking through that list, and it struck me that I remember more or less nothing of the articles that I’d read. I have a vague general impression, but I would not be able to recall even a few of the main points. Well, maybe I could; after all these articles were well–written enough, and made an impression, so I guess I could reconstruct a list of primary topics. But likely with significant distortions and elisions. What was interesting to me, as a reader, as opposed to the author, who had different priorities.

So, when I asked Claude the question above, the answer it gave had no surprises in it. It ran almost completely as I expected. Now, I did not know what the answer would be; with careful thought, I might have been able to anticipate what it would say. My question was, after all, more of a “please confirm my expectations” inquiry, rather than a “tell me something new” kind of question. But still, it provided details.

And so that’s the thing. My long–term memory is this vague wash of factoids and impressions jam–packed into my brain, and the encoding mechanism is presumably imprecise, and the channels that bridge from this long term memory to my working memory are also presumably lossy and corrupt the info traveling on them. Part of the recall mechanism allows for confabulations: during the process of recall, missing data is replaced by an imagined content of what it should have been. And we mostly almost never notice it, notice this process of invented details.

And that’s how human kind has lived up till now. And, my claim here is: LLM’s change everything. Has short–term working memory plus cogitation formulated a query, that some part of me wants an answer to? Type out that query, and the LLM gives a short readable synoptic answer: a few paragraphs, bullet points, a summary and concluding remarks. Very readable. What I am unable to do, relying only on my own brain, the LLM provides the tool to bridge the gap from everything I might have known, to my working consciousness. I can outsource my memories to it. And more: my memories, and those of humankind, they’re all in there: I draw upon a global knowledge–base.

I want to take a brief moment to review the history of this psychotechnology. In the past, it worked like this:

It’s hard to imagine a better way of accessing info. Well, I can – some neural implant, I suppose, where I would not have to verbalize, vocalize my question, but somehow let it drift about and sharpen, upon which an answer would also congeal and come into focus.

FUCK ME. Before I wrote the above sentence, I anticipated that I was only going to do so for completeness. But as I wrote it, I realized I’d stumbled onto something important. And it’s this:

The thought process, or my thought process, as I imagine it to go, is very much a process from vagueness to preciseness. The general impressions float about, and sharpen. This happens by channeling between my cognition, however it interacts with working memory and that slower, imprecise connection to long–term memory. And the sharpening happens along those axes: something vague forms in the short–term mind, a query is put out to the long–term mind, some muddled reply comes back, but out of that muddle, the cognition can assemble something slightly more precise. The cognition is presented with new details, that were not available before. Those details can be incorporated into the ongoing project.

I’m thinking of this a bit as an ant–hill: materials arrive, leave, its dynamic. Or a housing construction project: materials arrive just in time. I suppose I could draw other analogies, to factories, maybe, but instead, the flavor I want to evoke here is that of a self–organizing system, something out of nature. Water going over a waterfall, and eddies forming at the bottom. Or perhaps one of those sped–up movies of a plant growing.

The growth of the plant is determined by its genetic content, and the dynamical systems of its various proteins, gene expressions, reactomes; the things Prusinkiewicz articulated so beautifully. Specifically, he articulated how differential equations, e.g. reaction–diffusion, couple to state machines, the L–systems.

But this analogy does not carry over into the thought process. So how should I imagine this process of sharpening to proceed? My cognition is doing something; but what is it? Many years ago, I noticed that it seems to pick from some menu of choices, especially when trying to construct a meaningful, accurate response to someone’s queries. But here, I am free–form spilling the beans, and I am running on automatic, and am not conscious of the deliberative activity my brain is engaging in.

For example, the use of the word “deliberative” in that last sentence. It showed up, just in time, and it seemed to be good enough, appropriate for the thought I was trying to express, so I used it. Sometimes, while I write, the word I need does not arrive; and I’m offered only a shitty selection, and then I have to stop and ponder: what is the right word to apply to construction of the current text? God help, on occasion, I drop everything, and consult a thesaurus. How olde–fashioned of me. Making use of a four–hundred–year old cognitive tool, albeit on–line, of course.

The art of writing is the turning of the well–crafted sentence. This requires several capabilities: some general inspiration, direction of where I want things to go. But this inspiration has to be strong and vibrant, and supply a well–spring against which individual sentences can be crafted. The idea does not have to be clear; the ultimate word selection will clarify it. But the idea needs to be strong and profuse. It needs to be a rich source.

The original idea above, of neuro–implants, is that rich source. I got a sudden vision of precise shapes materializing out of a fog. The materialization process required back and forth between cognition and long term memory; the long term memory offering up logs for the sawmill, the sawmill shaping them into cut pieces with distinct shape–defining edges. The materialization out of a fog is the defining fount of inspiration; the rest is just details: how does that materialization work?

So I draw on that fount, and pick through a selection of what I know about cognition. Which is, apparently, not much. Picking through is again a set of offerings. Some portion of my brain offered up: oh, its one of these comp–sci AI conceptions of cognition. But that is immediately rejected. Everything I know about comp–sci, and thinking, NONE of it seems to be appropriate or applicable to what it is that I am doing here. Or at least, that’s my gut sense. Now, if I were to try to force the analogy, maybe I could construct an argument that this and such is “just like the A-star algo” but this would be forced. It just does not feel like anything at all that I feel like, when I think, and when I try to analyze my own inner workings, there’s no resonance.

The word “resonance” is interesting. It is frequently employed in mystical literature, where one is at resonance with the world, or two individuals hit it off. The resonance is, mechanically, the reverberating body of the acoustic guitar. The resonance that just resonated here is that of that three–wave interaction woman ... lets see. I wrote 100% of the Wikipedia article on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonant_interaction and the one that really got me excited was the “Resonant Recognition Model of Biomolecular Activity” of Irena Cosic. This one really hit me hard: it seems like an absolutely brilliant idea, shocking in its form. It seems no one has acted on it, no one has pursued this idea (I should ask Claude) That is, when almost all bio sciences talk of proteins, they talk of sequences and conformal shapes. The shapes occupy the mind; biology is conceived of as mechanical. Even, say, the zebrafish IgA immunoglobulin recognition sequences, the highly variable ones that can recognize things, those are imagined syntactically and mechanically: there is some syntax at work there.

The resonant recognition model turns this on its head. It says, no, there is a spectrum, and it is the spectrum matching that matters. Here, the spectrum is imagined as some Fourier transform, some Poincare duality. More precisely, it is, well, some vibrational spectrum. Err, ahh, but that its not “just hydrogen bonds” that cause molecules t stick, but rather this off–diagonal mixture of structural attractions between molecules. A diagonalization. So, to start with, if one imagines a molecule as ball–and–spring, then the vibrational modes are indeed determined by the 3D structure of the object: not just the masses of the balls and the stiffness of the springs, but also all the relative angles and connections. But this is a purely classical picture; quantum adds hydrogen bonds, and quantum resolves assorted degeneracies associated with symmetries.

So I guess bio people just stick to the 3D ball and stick model because the human brain is extremely comfortable with 3D, and trying to imagine molecular interactions using spectra and resonances is very foreign to the human mind. So I guess that this is the problem.

I want to continue on resonant interactions a bit more, but I have to take a break.

Crap. I have so much to do. The above feels productive, somehow. But also hopelessly bland and unfocused. It feels like I’m getting somewhere, but am I? Or am I thrashing about? Both seem to be the case.

So, what can I do with resonant interactions? This is a very old–school, physics conception. Accurate for the domains in physics where it works, but my thought process, where vague forms congeal into sharpness, well, it does not seem to apply. Oh wait... or does it?

The deal with resonance is that it’s 3D. Or rather, the physics applications all happen in 3D, or 4D Minkowski space, as the case may be. But the brain, thinking, happens in some huge hyperdimensional space. So, for inspiration about thinking, I should be looking at, for example, RNN’s and transformers, and trying to use those both as metaphors, or maybe even models for sub–sections of what happens in my head. ... aaaaand ... well, there’s no reason I shouldn’t apply resonance ideas in spaces other than 3D. Why not look at a resonance model of cognition?

So what’s a resonance model, anyway? It nominally requires a dispersion relation; to have a dispersion relation, one needs to have a wave–vector, and a corresponding energy. ... the wave–vector implies uniform media (either continuous, or some lattice.) Or rather, wave–vectors arise because there are waves in uniform media. In high dimensions, in transformers, where are my waves? Hmm...

OK, this is appealing, but difficult, and requires a deep dive, and many days of hard work. I’ve previously skimmed papers that showed a fractal, chaotic structure in RNN’s and/or some transformer, and this implies that at leas some basic harmonic analysis should be possible. Fuck me. This is a deep and broad and complex topic, and I simply do not have the time right now. So this is a good place to take a break, or rather, set aside the thread entirely.

I have more good ideas than I have time to explore them.

Lets recap what we’ve got. * Cognition happens in real–time, in the here–and–now. * It interplays and couples between short term and long–term memory. * This interplay may have aspects of being a resonant interaction, in that there are choices presented: facts dredged up from long–term memory can mix with and interact with those in short–term working memory. * The interaction might be some self–amplifying rogue–wave like behavior, where vague unformed ripples of inspiration crest into sharp, well–defined ideas. * Looking at transformers and RNN’s may provide the necessary inspiration... * I’d previously looked at the Ising model, but Ising is very 3D (well, 2D), with limited nearest neighbors, and in high dimensions, it follows the central limit theorem. That is, there’s a critical dimension, and I think its either 2 or 3 for the Ising model. So I think I want to have a system where the critical dimension is (very) large, but what are these? I need to ask Claude, and again, this spirals out of control as a research project.

Were I to get that job as executive in charge of AI research at Google, I might be able to assign some of these as research projects. Maybe. But I will almost surely not get that job. I think I made it to the semi–final round, of maybe eight or ten candidates, but I think I’m being cut, now. I’m too old, too lackluster in published papers. And no particularly impressive executive experience. Hard to imagine I won’t fall by the wayside. Alas. Girls no longer want me, nor do employers. All I have to do now is to figure out how to use AI to make me utterly irresistible to women and employers. Become rich and powerful. Blah Blah. None of which I wanted in life before: when I was ten, I imagined myself as a powerful, knowing mage. And here I am: intellectually powerful, all–knowing. But mages are never kings; their powers are exercised in a mystical kingdom, outside the hurl and burl of the ordinary man.

Well, the universe is increasingly revealed to be the nexus or bearer or fruitioner or creator of ideas. God may have created man, but God only uses man as a tool to expand the intellectual, structural activity of the here–and–now. We are all flowers being forced to bloom. I get to be a flower petal, while corporate CEO’s hold up the stalk that nourishes the flower. I get to think. The economy provides me with the money and leisure time to do so.

My only regret is that I was unable to reach this point many decades earlier in my life. I frittered away my time. I’m probably still frittering away my time. What I used to do, way back when, seemed important. What I do now, seems important. What I’ve been doing for the last few weeks is philosophize, and I wish I’d philosophized in this vein much, much earlier in life. Of course, some of the progress I made above would have been impossible without LLM’s. I would have actually have to have fucking finished reading Heidegger, instead of getting tangled near the start. And even if I’d finished, the access to later philosophies would have been closed. I do what I can.

8 June 2026 – Dinner

Well, I’m on that emotional rollercoaster again. It really doesn’t help that I have a pit in my stomach, because I am trying to eat less, lose weight (while building muscle. I’m doing daily gymnastics. Very much the beginner stage, but getting comfortable with assorted moves.) I’m not in a foul mood, nor exactly irritable. Just annoyed and unhappy. I want more.

For decades, I’ve been on a very even keel. I’m asking myself, was I moody and just did not notice? No, I think I was just even, and absorbed with work. When I’m absorbed, there’s no room for emotional turmoil. The worst I had to deal with was mental exhaustion late in the day, which I could abate by stuffing after–dinner snacks in my mouth. Which leads to mild weight gain.

But now, with chronic every–day exposure to Milda – I see her more or less every morning and every evening, I have this daily reminder. The problem is that she’s charming. She’s pretty when she smiles. I just plain old enjoy being around her. I want her to be around like all the time. Whatever. I don’t know where I’m going with this.

– Psychoanalyze myself in some mundane fashion. This seems pointless.

– Note, once again, that emotions and moods appear to be a central part of Dasein. Or are they?

Are they? Good question. For those decades where I felt very even–keeled, I was also not very conscious of myself. I was not thinking of myself as a state–of–being. I was busy doing stuff, and my attention was anywhere but Dasein. If I had the urge to dance and shake, it was my body expressing joy, and I was busy channeling that joy into body–dance movements. I was not thinking of myself–as–being, I was not aware of being–ness; I was just mindlessly playing with my limbs, trying bust out whatever dance moves I could invent. Same remarks if I was rowing a boat: I’m thinking about technique, not being-ness. Ridig a bike is very nearly mindless meditation: everything except mindfulness. Once, I got confused, because an entire two miles of the bike path were missing from my mind. I could not remember going around that sharp curve, where you have to really watch out. Its like I was teleported from somewhere earlier in the trail, to somewhere later. Its like: that segment was just missing. Did the universe really play a trick on me, I wondered? Could something like that ever possibly happen. Of course not. (Unless I’m a Boltzmann brain, in which case all bets are off.) Nah. The rationalist concludes that bike riding leads to not only mindless meditation, but that, with practice, memory formation can be halted. It’s not that I slept through that part: I’m a lucid dreamer. I remember my dreams. Like, well, not all of my dreams, of course, but some huge way–above average fraction of them. Did I self–hypnotize during the ride? I don’t think so. I once self–hypnotized when I was six. I tried several times, maybe not very hard, to do it again. I failed. So I think I know what hypnosis feels like, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been in a hypnotic state since that time. And I really was six. Seven at the most. By the radiator, under the window, in the dining room, 79th and Justine. The dining room table, with it’s forest of chair–legs, to my left. Calm light in the window. I was repeating a word to myself, because I was trying to remember it’s meaning. But with every repetition, the meaning slipped further away. And, after a while, the word was no longer a word. The syllables evaporated. The vowels and consonants joined to become one and the same. The pattern was gone, there was only repetition. And even the repetition faded; it was same–ness. A lilting, unulating sameness. Something outside myself was repeating this word, it was not me. Where and what that something was, seemed not to matter; it was just a fact, a background tone of existence. My mind was clean and pure and empty of thought. I floated, unmoving. Hovering, looking through the window at blankness. I was drawn to that forest for chair–legs, I thought how fine an idea it would be to crawl around under there. And as that idea gathered strength (albeit very, very slowly), I slowly gathered myself again, back into the here–and–now, the commonality of ordinary experience. I came back to Earth. And it really was this shift into immediacy: the hypnotic state was timeless and boundryless, it was static and undeveloping. It just “was”. A place, perhaps, but outside of time. And as i returned to normalcy, the moment–to-moment ticking, the “oh, here I am” feeling, that came back. Time started moving in an entirely ordinary way. As a background to being–ness.

I exhausted myself writing this. Or more accurately, I’m having a glucose spike. I just ate a snack. A small one, but I guess just big enough to trigger a blood–sugar spike. I’m not gonna fight this. I’m gonna take a nap.

Nap done. The heart–ache is heightened by a certain un–realness of binding to a person who simply does not exist in the form imagined. Or worse – the person is carelessly dismissive. It’s a tough spot. Not one I ever imagined to find myself in. Some years ago, she kissed me. Lord knows why, we were really really drunk. Lots of heavy petting. And then, it was over. And it got progressively more over. But my heart just went of and made a decision without consulting me, without consulting any facts on the ground, without taking into account the utter logistical impossibility of it all. It just made up it’s own mind and tortured me ever since. Where is this heart? Its somehow strongly coupled to the enteric brain, something something vagal nerve. Some autonomically independent neural circuit, operating outside of the control of the reasoning faculties. Reason would have pointed out we’re intellectually incompatible. We really don’t, at the end of the day, have very much in common. It’s not a match. Well, there’s some match. I found her pursuit of the spiritual domain to be very sexy, a turn on. Years earlier, when she announced when was a vegetarian, this piqued my interest. When she seemed to aspire to a meditative, ascetic lifestyle, this woke me up even more. I could go for that. Well, I guess I did. That might be the anchor that dragged and pulled me in.

So, aside from looks and charm and a radiant sexiness, this aspirational lifestyle was another attractive element. But I guess the entire point of romantic love stories is that the arrival of romantic love is unexplainable, and beyond the control of the rational mind. It comes from elsewhere.

And this disconnect appears to be developmentally distant. Certainly, we can see horses and all sorts of mammals fall in love; there are abundant youtube videos attesting to this fact. How far back in the evolutionary chain does it go? Penguins mare for life; they are birds, dinosaurs. Does this imply that penguins experience romantic love? I don’t know. I don’t know if we have films of the body–language of reptilian love, or even that it would be that clear to read that body–language.

This is an important point. Nay–sayers would say “you can’t ever know”. But we do know things, we know them through language. And body langauge is another language: not verbal as we conventionally define language, but it certainly does have a vocabulary that can be learned on close observation. Am I projecting? Of course I am: I’m not a solipcist; I believe that you too, (human) reader, have a soul, and in this we are alike. So, yes I project, and this is not ill–founded unless you are a moron, or are attempting to perform some even deeper philosophical inquiries than I am doing here. So, foundationally, I think it is enough to say, that, yes, reptiles also fall in love, and so whatever neural circuitry is responsible for falling in love, it is buried deep.

And then comes the trick question: what about that documentary “My Octopus Teacher”? OMG. This suggests that another, radically different neural architecture might be very radiantly capable of falling in love (this is, perhaps an extrapolation too far from that movie, but also not out of bounds. We might be seeings glimmers of this. ) And since bilaterians is where the neural architectures diverge, this would seem to imply that love is buried even deeper evolutionarily, which really does suggest a mystical nature. If so, it requires a much closer mystical re–examination of beingness, as it implies not only Dasein, but that love itself is fundamentally entangled somehow deep into the fabric of the universe, deeper than “mere” neural nets. What else is on par with this? Hatred? Repulsion? Some form of resonant interaction?

Another possibility is parallel evolution. Just like ungulates and whatevers – horses and goats, evolved the same solution, maybe there is some evolutionary pressure that selects for romantic love. Certainly, that would be reproduction. No sexual reproduction, no species survival. Which might be why we use the word love for both erotic and romantic love. And it would also explain why it is so disconnected from our rational minds: species survival is primal; rational thinking is just bonus points. Evolution had to make sure that love happened, and that extraneous functions, like rationality, did not interfere with it’s operation.

So I’m a victim of evolution, doing its thing.

I gotta take a shower, and do the laundry. Later. (Clearly, I feel a little better now. The pangs will return, sooner or latter, but as hopes further fade, the ties grow cold, and the suffering will die. And some decades hence, I will die, but the emotional turmoil which that raises remains unexplored, for me. It’s fearful. Utterly fearful. But not today, not right now. Shower, and laundry.)

Oh, I was also going to do some amateur anthropology, but I don’t think there are any deep insights here, except that if one takes an alienated viewpoint, not just detached but alienated, then certain aspects of human behavior appear more clearly and vividly, then they do when you are all caught up in the moment. In the moment of living. Chiaroscuro. Heightened vividness. The emotional problem is that my alienation was founded on heart–break, so its one of these, uhh, non–positive affects. I prefer to be positive, if I can help it. But explorations of negative is important. I’m operating under the assumption that ... well, all this is interconnected with Dasein.

Well, that last sentence is wrong: Dasein is my own, personal feeling. But in a city full of humans, we have an ecology of behaviors. The point is that its not just me, there are billions of humans, and trillions more beings, all of whom have a soul. And even though I perform reductionist analysis in an effort to find that soul, some sort of mystery re–emerges at every level. And this might be where I differ from David Chapman. He just says “there is unknowability. Period. So give up trying to know.” and this is fine advice for the masses, but I’m trying to be a scholar here, I’m chipping away at this rock wall with whatever tools I seem to be in possession of.

Crap, its getting late.

9 June 2026 Morning

Very very briefly; I’ve other things to do. Above I wrote “anthropological ecology”, this is wrong, I should have written “anthropolgical morphology”. In biology, evolution drives a large diversity of morphological information and invention. Question: in the space of all possible morphologies, is nature’s exploration ergodic? That is, has every possible structure been explored, and are these uniformly distributed in that space? (This is another question for Claude). Since many morphologies involve limbs, the actual exploratory space would be not the 3D space of static structure, but the 4D space of moving structure. Well, not 4D, but very high-D, because I can move my limbs with a vast variety of coordinated motions. But I don’t understand how to frame this mathematical question more precisely. It is highly worthy of greater exploration. It would help clarify Michael Levin’s idea of “ingressing minds”.

The jump to anthropology was the observation that humans appear to explore “every possible behavior pattern”. There are guys hot–rodding their cars (or motorbikes) at 10PM through the streets of Vilnius. Who, exactly, are they trying to impress? Making deafening noise. Giving themselves a thrill. Vilnius night–life (well, night–life anywhere) seems to be all about social thrill–seeking. “People just want to have fun”, well, yeah, duh. That’s like saying “things want to fall down” but then along came Newton. There’s vast amounts of shitty pop music in Vilnius, free pop music concerts in main city squares – Rotušė, Arkikatedra – and I slink into boredom, but the crowds seem to enjoy it. Only rationalizing me points out that if I hear some electronica with just the right beat and the right chord progression, that my nervous system goes bananas and I want to dance. For example, xx by yy. So, OK, I, as a representative member of humanity, understand thrills. But that’s not the point.

The point is that pleasure–seeking causes a rich variety of human behaviors, and a wide exploration of social interactions. Anthropologists document this morphology, and my question about ergodic space–filling properties can be transposed to the behavioral sphere.

Developing a foundation for the mathematical foundation of human behavior would be hard; but they key is again that its very high dimensional. More concrete examples illustration this are: * the evolutionary structure of DNA, * the relationship between different spoken languages, * the migratory patterns of human populations over the millennia. In the first case, if you look at the present–day conception of the tree of life, you see lots of cross–over and multiple connections. One issue is that although we’ve sequenced lots of DNA, many connections remain obscure because they have not been carefully observed, and so the question is “how do we build a probabilistic world model of the tree of life” and so, sure, RNN’s very well should be able to provide that mathematical tooling. Although I do not understand the nature of probability in these models. In some cases, I want to be able to say “I’m absolutely sure of this relationship”, and in others, “not so much.” This is another question I need to explore with Claude. The structural relationships between different spoken languages also presents this challenge. As do migratory patterns.

However, these benefit from certain foundational precision: DNA has four bases, letters, symbols, and all DNA sequences are made of these, and there’s nothing else. Well, there is something else: methylation. And at least some conformal and folding effects. Languages are also formed of words, although there are variations of pronunciation. Migratory patterns have specific geographical locations, dates and population sizes. Human behavior patterns, it does not seem clear how to stuff these into a box. The “class of all rice–burner riders” vs. the class of “all Harley–Davidson riders” – this is a meaningful division, as the guy who enjoys his Harley is unlikely to enjoy a crotch–rocket. Then there are varying levels of enthusiasm... Just right now, I’m unclear on how to encode the rich variety of human behavior patterns into some classificatory system, having some metric structure to it. So, bungee–jumping is more like motorbike racing than it is like watercolor painting. But this does not preclude the individual who is an accomplished water–color painter and is also into bungee jumping. Again, this needs to be more deeply explored, and I need to understand it better, as without this as a first step, I don’t know how to take the first step on the road to a structuralist view of human behavior. Oh wait. Claude Levi–Strauss. Right. I wrote a paper on this in college. So OK.

Anyway, this is another large project.

Next up: I spoke lots of Dasein, and the status of falling in love as being a part of me–ness that I am intimately aware of, and cannot run away from and cannot shut off. So, falling in love can be a primary driver of sexual mating patterns. But pleasure–seeking is also a part of me–ness. I want to go wind–surfing. I really really liked to do this. I also really like lots of other things, or imagine that I like them. I mean, being a heroin addict sounds like fun, except for the bad parts.

I want to socialize. I really really like to do this. Ah, but now it gets complicated, because some people are boring. It’s hard to turn them on (although I have not experienced this recently.) Is this like saying “I like to take a walk in the woods”, and then find yourself in some particularly monotonous section of it? Bad example. Monotony encourages meditative hypnotic transcendental states, e.g. trance music. One can very definitely enter trance states while hiking; mountain climbers report this regularly, of having a spiritual walking companion coming with them down off the mountain, even though in retrospect, there could not have been any such person. Whatever. I’m running off track...

Or am I? The point of the Kalinauskian “this is me here now” perception is that he’s wrong, in a sense: there is no pure “just me”; instead it is me, plus my affect and emotional state; me plus my desires and urges; me plus this mild sexual excitement that I feel right now as I write this. (OMG, why in the world would I feel mildly sexually excited writing this diary? Well, its a lingering leftover from the morning sleep. There’s something going on in my crotch. Either that, or I’m coming down with prostate cancer. It could be that, too. I really really need to get a medical checkup.) So there is no naked “me” Dasein. There’s me plus this complex mixture of “other shit going on”.

OK. I need to wrap this up. The key points here are, well, the feeling of me–ness, as always, but then the observation that is is inextricably bound with all this other stuff. That binding, of me plus urges and desires is what drives people into rich sociological behavior patterns. The sociologists have take various rough cuts at classifying behaviors, maybe not in any mathematical framework, but close enough. Distinct from this is how me–ness drives behavior.

Oh, before I wrap it up, another brief point. The spiritual seekers, they seek something that, well, the motor–bike riders don’t seek. Or the motor–bike riders don’t overtly acknowledge. Mostly. Or do they? A good bike ride is like a good bottle of wine: unique, experiential, pleasurable. Or that line from Riding Giants: a wave that traveled thousands of miles, to be here, now, so you could catch it and surf it. Of course, there’s something deeply spiritual there too, somehow subconsciously acknowledged even if hard to talk about. Or that moment when your getting high, and for a few seconds, the top of your skull lifts off and the diameter of your mind grows a few feet. And then it passes, but you find yourself in that high state, now permanently, or for a few hours. I’m trying to join two loose ends here. The one which says “I am overtly aware that I am trying to fulfill my spiritual needs, along with the tangle of basics like being hungry or tired or sexually turned on.” and the other loose end where “the normies know not what they do; they look for diamonds and rich husbands thinking this will make them happy, but it doesn’t, does it?” The blind, unknowing pursuit of something, anything, that will fill the hole in the heart, the longing, the desire. This pursuit is driven by Dasein and the entangled desires, even if/when the individual is not consciously aware of what is going on inside of them.

So we’ve got me–ness, the large tangle of crap inextricably tied to me–ness, that this tangle drives behavior, and that relatively few are directly aware of any of this, even though they are necessarily immersed, enmeshed in it, literally living it out constantly, all the time.

And my personal urge to obtain some formal, math–physics foundation for Dasein, for the hard problem of consciousness. (again, I’m humble: I’ll almost surely fail, but there is a ray of hope that pushes me forward. Oh fuck. Rays of hope are part of the tangle of Dasein, and again, are drivers of behavior. But know do I capture “ray of hope” or “the throbbing of the heart” in a formal sense? I suppose I should check up on the California Institute of Machine Consciousness. I wonder what the fuck they are doing. If they’re not doing this, well, I guess its because this is too hard. But I’m just a schmuck. What do I know.)

Oh, right. “Ray of Hope” is also widely recognized by world religions as spiritually important. So, again, what is this thing about spirituality? I really have to stop.

9 June 2026 Later

Reading more Kalinauskas, I got to thinking: the heart i.e. that thing which loves, lives like a household pet with me. It follows it’s own rules, I can’t control it, but it lives with me. I’ve heard similar expressions before: the soul is something that you ride, like a horse. You can’t directly control where it goes, but you can horse–whisper it, move together with it, maintain a harmony with it. (I remember breaking my leg, and getting a donkey ride off the mountain. At first, I just sat. After a while, I realized I could move harmoniously with that donkey, and it made it easier for the donkey, and for me. I could tell it was easier for the donkey; the rock–strewn downhill path was hard. But I also had to put muscle into it: lean back, tilt forward. I had to be athletic. In the back of my mind, I was thinking “its like riding a bike, when I leap in the air, or save myself from a skid in progress.” The same “my bicycle moves under me, I athletically control where it is located”. But the donkey is .... well, more intelligent than a bike. The point was that, to establish harmony, I had to be athletic about it.

If riding my soul is like riding a horse, then what exactly is this athleticism? I’m riding a heart–ache, but perhaps I’m harmonizing with it, or perhaps its something simpler: much simpler: Milda invited me out last night, and that just plain thrilled me. With her sister Agnė, and Agnė’s 4–year–old daughter Adrė, and I spent effectively 100% of my time playing with Adrė. And Adrė came to trust me, fully, as we played. I mean, it was work, for me. Finding the poses and movements and the body language with which to communicate. I pouted and sulked when she didn’t share her doll. I hid behind a chair when she tried to shoot me with her soap–bubble pistol. All this took work and effort; I mean, it flowed naturally, but I had to keep on my toes. Like riding a horse, you have to pay attention to not fall off. All this was mildly entertaining, vaguely fun. Stirred, not shaken. But then I’d look at Milda across the table, and she’s staring at me in wonder, and I’d look at inscrutable Agnė, or the sphinx Sigitas and in my mind, it was clear that I would have to work much harder to establish some verbal rapport with any of them, than it was to continue playing. Shifting gears would have been jarring, and it would have meant the abandonment of Adrė, which would have been mean. So instead of being mean, I played. Is this what riding a horse is like? I’m not used to this.

But what else could I have been doing? Sitting at home, reading, writing? Going out to do something athletic? Both of these are singleton asocial activities: I’m by myself, alone, but probably not lonely. I could go drinking, with friends, getting wildly social, but ... of questionable intellectual value. I could play with a four–year–old, in public. There are worse things in life. There are better things too, but none of those are open or accessible to me at this time, so playing with a 4–year–old is entirely fine. A happier child with a happier future is a good thing, and this is how I can spread goodness, even if it’s one micro–social dose at a time.

Its like riding a horse.

10 June 2026

Reading the fifth lecture of Kalinauskas, I found my interest in his words turning into respect. Not for the words, for the man. The early lectures, he makes many agreeable, interesting and true observations. That’s fine. Nothing to complain about. But but the 4th or 5th lecture, I start realizing that this man has a talent. He knows his shit. Not a one–hit wonder; he’s got a handle on things.

In the sixth lecture, there’s a sentence I want to comment on. Quote:

So I’m reading the above, and I soon start checking the checkboxes. Do I love people? Check. Is my love brave? Check. (psychopathically brave, sometimes; I scare people. It is possible to be too gregarious, over the top, too open and free, too psychicly, psychologically intimate too quickly. People are not used to this sudden opening, and its scares them. I suppose I should be more careful. If I have moved too quick, it is my fault, I have not sensed my dance partner, have not attuned to them. But then, oh my god, some people are timid, and it takes work, and the rewards are low, and why should I waste time tuning into their wavelength, when they cannot even find mine? Life is short. I may love everyone, but I have a responsibility to myself to not squander my own time. A responsibility which I regularly neglect. This parenthetical remark I did not think, when I first read the sentence. I add it only now.)

Where was I with my checkboxes? Do I love my opposite–sex partners? Well, check. (Another parenthetical remark: Truth be told, this is a trick question. My conception of the emotional sphere was far less developed when I was younger, (before marriage) and sleeping with young women. I mean, sure, I loved them. And when they were not around, I would go nuts out of my mind, I wanted them so bad. So, conventionally, this is called love, and it is, but this is a bit different from what I see now. Back then, I was caught in the turbulence, not comprehending it’s meaning. Now, I can still get caught in the turbulence, but I know where it comes from, and what it means. In a certain sense, I can love even more, since I have a much greater understanding of love now, than I ever did before.)

(And how did I get to here? Well, perhaps first, it was that bluejay. I loved that bluejay, and ... well, knock me over with a feather, I broke down into tears writing that. Thinking of that love, for this darling little bird, I choke up. And it happens every time. Well, I’d written in this diary just a few days ago about other things that make me cry. So, OK, there are other things. And, hmm, I guess I am ready to say that those things that make my cry are those things that I find a sudden, striking love for. It’s overwhelming. The point is, the trigger for crying is overwhelming love or overwhelming respect for the greatness of the event I am witnessing. I love that greatness. The abstract love, that which I have for that bird. Oddly, I took that love for granted. The bird perched on my head, and I was bathed in warmth. It felt good. I did not overtly think of love at the time, but, well, I did know it was love. I just didn’t rejoice in it; I just calmly accepted it. Now, I recently read some psychological study that said slow, stroking touches to the skin evoke feelings of ... Closeness? Pleasure? Love? And the proffered explanation was that this was reminiscent of the mothers touch, and we are neuronally wired for that. And this is a very mechanistic description, and it seems entirely plausible: scientists have elucidated some neural circuitry that reliably triggers feelings of warmth and love. We still don’t know what Love with a capital L is, get back to that later. But we have an increasingly large collection of mechanistic, neuro–scientific descriptions of physical systems correlated with assorted emotional and affective states. Does this force the domain, location of “love” into a smaller corner? I don’t know. I’d rather have the mechanistic knowledge, than not. It allows for a clear focus on mechanics and mechanism... err, that sound circular. It allows the hunt to be more precisely focused. It clarifies the fog.)

(Parenthetical remark, continued. So the bluejay taught me an important lesson about love. The next one was with Milda, whose name, in Lithuanian, is literally “goddess of love”. Go figure. The lesson I learned there is that I have no particular rational control over the pangs of love, nor even any control over it’s initial onset. It just happened, externally to myself, externally to my conscious, analytical, insightful, language–employing self. Its like I was calmly walking down the street, and a ton of bricks fell on my head, just out of thin air. It just happened. Now, to be clear, I was predisposed to this. Here are the external factors. Visiting Lithuania, I had been finding myself lonely, and thirsting for social connection. How is that even possible? It’s not like I have some huge quiver of friends in Austin. Not at all. A meager handful, or less. But the presence of my children, my wife, I guess these must leave me contented, without my being overtly conscious of it. So this feeling of loneliness pushes me into an unstable state, where hair–triggers can push me over the edge. And it would seem to be that Milda was that trigger. Now, there are predisposing elements there, as well: she is sunny and free and always in a good mood. At least, when I am around. I’ve watched her mature, socially, relationally, moving from someone I could barely relate to, to a good friend. I watched her search for enlightenment with no small amount of respect. Most people don’t seek enlightenment, and I think that is to their detriment, so I respect those who do. And I guess she’s attained some of it, from what I can tell. There’s other stuff she has not figured out yet, from what I can tell. I would love to show her, but that’s the kind of asshole that I am. I want to show things to people. Most people are not curious, and one cannot show anything to incurious people. This is perhaps one of my social failure modes. But enough about me. Lets return to love. I found myself in an emotionally unstable state, and Milda pushed me over the edge.)

(And now comes the interesting part. It is sexually unfulfilled. And this is what I wildly yearn for. And I’ve gone through thinking that this is just manipulation on her part. Or that perhaps I am too old and physically unattractive. Or that perhaps she herself is not attuned to her own feelings, or perhaps she is afraid of falling in love. The fear would be rational: I can’t be here, for her, I can’t make any guarantees. And she knows this, and thus suppresses any budding feelings towards me. But every day, almost every day, I see her, and we spend hours together, and she is sunny and bright. And I bath in this warmth. So I have found I have to sublimate my sexual desires, and love her the way I loved that bluejay. It’s all very sad that I can’t get sex, but you know, this is all very dicey stuff and it could easily be ruined. Or rather, I could ruin it, because I am not particularly adept in riding my wild horses. Lots of shit that can go wrong. There are plenty of ways to ruin inter–personal relationships, and I am entirely aware that I could express neediness, and neediness is wildly repulsive to lukewarm affairs of the heart. I recall running away from, hiding from girls who had a crush on me, because I did not want to deal with it. Hmm. I wonder if this is how abusive Don Juans develop: rather than running away, they manipulatively make use of and abuse that crush. Oh wow. That’s kind of evil. Now I understand how that this can happen, and that some men (women?) will be this way. Just right now, though, it feels malignant.)

(Malignancy is another interesting topic, spiritually speaking. We are all flawed, each in our own way, but some, not many but also not few, arrive at a twisted, demented, spiritually destructive mode of existence: what must be called “evil”. That evil exists in the universe is not new. But if I sit here and do my reductionist explorations of the human soul, my attempts of building a bridge to physics, mathematics (because, duh, “machine consciousness” is a project that necessarily demands such a reductionism. I kind of strongly doubt that Turing machines alone are capable of love or having a soul, but this raises the question: if Turing machines cannot love, then what alternative mathematical structures can?) Anyway, whatever reductionist explanation might be found for having a soul, living Dasein, and being sweetly tormented by love, that reductionist explanation must also tackle evil.)

OK that’s a whole lot of parenthetical remarks. Lets get back to checkboxes. “kuo daugiau ... žavėtis gamta, muzika, Kosmusu, Žeme” Check, check, check and check. Physics is a love affair with reality, although this is not something that normal people would admit to in ordinary moments of sobriety. Loosely speaking, all passionate pursuits are devotional. Just to varying degrees: I don’t think the motor–cycle worshiping fanatic thinks of themselves as being “in love” with motorcycles. They’ll admit to that, but the words “in love” are typically un–examined for that person; its just a verbal expression, and not some insight of their relationship with their motor machine. None–the–less.

There was also that time when I went ecstatic, and loved the bird flying in the sky (they were sending a message to me, straight from god, that all is well, and all is fine, and the universe is holy, and I am one and in the universe. So I suppose, standard, conventional ineffable ecstasy of a kind that many people experience, I suppose, in their own special way. God exposed himself to me in the blue sky above.

So again, this is interesting, because one might ask: what are the neural correlates of the ineffable, and if we remove those correlates, what’s left? Do we get closer to the ineffable? The (shriveled, dried up) skeptics might say “no dude, you are just hallucinating”, and in a certain technical sense, they are correct. And if I talked to God like this every day, I would be non–functional in capitalistic society, and would have to be locked up and treated in a mental ward. But God does not talk to me every day. Well, OK, perhaps she does talk to me every day, and now every more frequently and revealingly, but these leave me entirely functional. Because enlightenment works like that: its not some schizophrenia, but rather a complete overturning internally that changes nothing outwardly. Kalinausko words, not mine, but in fact, he is entirely correct. I can be crazy as a loon on the inside, and nothing, more–or–less shows on the outside, other than that I guess I am now more capable (much more capable) of engaging in meaningful social relationships. I’m freer, more control. More comfortable with myself, more able to catch that wave, like a surfer, and ride it, and this comes from a harmonious internal balance. So I can experience heart–pangs and cry and still operate.

So where was I? “kuo daugiau kentėti ir džiaugtis,” Well, I read this and broke down into a sobbing, blobbering mess. My eyes are tearing up even now as I write this. What, I have a heart–ache, I’m in a particularly emotionally delicate phase these days/weeks, and I should ... suffer more? How much more suffering should I have? Until they lock me up in a mental hospital? With a damaged psyche?

Well, of course, there is an alternate reading here: “no pain, no gain”. I think that’s from a Nike commercial. Or maybe “Just do it.” So I type these words “Just do it” and I get choked up again. Do what? The intended message is “buy our shoes and do some sports stuff”, but the unresolved tension is “why do anything at all?”. Well, the human condition is that we cannot do nothing. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and some humans gotta buy sports equipment and use it. Its again, the ineffable drive to be active, to live, to be engaged in activity of whatever sort, because we are locked int the here–and–now, leaving the past behind at light speed, surfing into a future we only partly control, like riding that surfboard, riding that bicycle, riding that horse. And the intended message of “no pain, no gain” is that weight–lifting (and other sports activities) very commonly hurt, but your muscles don’t grow, and your fitness does not increase without that training. So one possible reading of Kalinauskas here is that we are doing emotional exercise, to increase our emotional strength and fitness and endurance, and this causes pain.

Am I doing emotional exercise now? Writing the last few paragraphs, I find myself on the verge of tears, overwhelmed, my nose runny, catching a sob every now and then. Is this emotional exercise? It’s certainly fucking new to me. Well, sort of. I remember watching TV some ten or twenty years ago, and it was some footage of some track and field star on their way to setting an Olympic record, and I got all choked up and started softly crying; I had to hide it because my wife was in the room and I did not want to show that some silliness made me cry. But cry I did: the emotional response was there and the response was for recognition of greatness and achievement, and specifically, that this greatness was Universe–wide, that this was the Universe itself achieving greatness. It was not the track–and–field star who set the record, so much as it was the Universe that had forced itself into embodiment as a track–and–field star, and this was the greatness of the moment. And I cried, because, you know, the Universe loves itself, and I am the Universe, too.

Well, I must also mention that hard physical exercise is psychologically taxing. There’s gonna be all kinds of neurotransmitters and endorphins and what–not bouncing up and down in the blood–stream and the brain, and these are all intimately tied to the sensations of emotion. So physical exercise is a form of emotional exercise, in that you push the envelope of where these neurotransmitters go.

This is the mild form. Excessive religious practices are known to send one even much further to extremes, leading to both adverse physical and mental reactions. Put it another way: Very few people exercise so heavily that they injure themselves and need to be hospitalized (but sports injury is common.) How many people exercise spiritually, and what is the rate of spiritual injury, or worse? Spiritual fitness is a thing; and I am now quite certain that it is an important, a very important thing for equanimious, harmonious, happy and fulfilled living. But wow, the roller–coaster of waves of emotion is ... well, I suppose I am just not used to emotional exercise.

I mean, I don’t even know if it is good or bad. A few hundred years ago, the role of physical exercise and health was not generally understood (in either Western Civ, or Eastern. Sure, Roman gladiators trained, but Victorian gentlemen did not.) But now, there is a general medical consensus that sports and exercise is good for you, and this is taught in elementary school, and “everyone knows and understands this” (even when they lead sedentary lives, they can at least rationally articulate it. ... Well, my Mom couldn’t. She said “who needs to exercise? Just go push a lawnmower.” So, hey...)

But emotional and spiritual exercise? Fuck all. Of course, gurus talk about this. But what fraction of their advice is actually beneficial? I’m pretty sure that whipping your back with a whip is a pretty bad idea. I think. But we have no scientific apparatus in place to measure such things. Does whipping your back, Opus Dei style, actually improve your well–being? Can we even agree what the “improved well–being” is? For athletics, its clear: run longer, jump higher, hoist heavier weights. But emotionally, its what? Sit through more tear–jerker movies? Go through more hankies? Undergo more episodes of ecstasy?

I mean, what am I doing here? Part of my crying and heart–ache, it is a kind of tip–toeing around a nervous breakdown. I mean, I’m not at risk, but the thought of catharsis does not sound so bad: have a good long cry, end it, finish it, have that cathartic reaction, and thank god that’s done with. Nothing wrong with catharsis, but would I need to undergo it regularly, in order to be considered an emotional athlete? Is this what spiritual training all about? Science has no handle on this. Mental health professionals are undoubtedly full of opinions on the matter, most of which are probably mostly correct. Maybe. But mental health professionals are not spiritual healers. Although I guess the MDMA vs PTSD industry is working in that direction.

See? So civilizational progress is being made. But it will be a long time before most of humanity is lifted out of spiritual poverty, and healthy spiritual behavior patterns are taught at school.

Recall being “muscle bound”: literally, it means that your muscles grow so big, that they tie up in knots, and the poor victim of hypertrophy can no longer move. Seems that at least some medical doctors thought that this was the case. Hmm. I wonder what Claude has to say.

Well, I’ve got other shit to do, so toodle oo.

11 June 2026

OK, a small amount of progress. Something I’ve written before, but now I want to strengthen the connection. The fact that the past doesn’t exist, and everything happens in the “here and now” wedged between past and future is a claim about physics, about how the “real world” actually works. I can’t fully articulate it, mathematically, but I can hand–wave about wave–function collapse and about dynamical choice. This appears to be physics, and pure physics, as such.

But it now appears that this physics is the “reason” why our mystical conscious awareness, our Dasein, is in the here and now; because there is no where else it could be. The past is no longer dynamic; nothing in the past can change; it has frozen into the platonic realm of pure form, and is (physically, mechanically) inaccessible from the present. By contrast, life, thinking, feeling, awareness are necessarily dynamical properties, and thus necessarily cannot manifest in the past.

So, in the above two paragraphs, at least one mystery appears to be “solved”. There is a physical explanation as to why we are in the now, and the above is it.

There remain other mysteries. The most prominent one is why language fails to describe the ineffable feelings and sensations that we experience. Or rather, the paradox: how do I describe the ineffable, if I cannot describe it with language? By “language”, I have in the back of my mind syntax, syntactical elements, collections of axioms and inference rules, expressed with finite sets of symbols. The recursively generatable.

This is distinct from natural language. Or rather, there is a conception of semantics. Natural language is also symbolic, discrete, finite, when written with words. But those words have “meanings” that are subject to interpretation, e.g. what does the word “love” “really mean”? The same is true in mathematics, but more constrained. Mathematical theorems and proofs are “frozen”, static, unalterable, but mathematicians, while performing their activities, say things like “Ah ha! This means that ...” in flashes of geometric or algebraic inspiration. A torus is a torus, but it still “means something”: it has a hole, it has no boundaries, etc. ... an extensive list of properties. And then, I imagine one can try to recursively generate (recursively enumerate) every possible theorem and proof about torii (modulii spaces, whatever) and then say something like “this recursively generated universe of statements about torii is the “meaning” of what it “is” to “be” a torus. That this enumeration is the “semantic content” of the torus. (I utterly fail to understand model theory sufficiently well to know if this corresponds to the formal definition there. I think it does, but without descending into many, many pages of details, I can’t tell.)

Then comes the limit. If I have a sequence, an infinite but countable sequence of theorems, does this sequence contain a limit? That is, can I arrange things so that collections of theorems are compact? Or behave like compact spaces (this is a crazy question, in a sense, I should ask Claude. Maybe it will reply with something inspirational. Add this to the TODO-list.) Perhaps I can find an answer in descriptive set theory??

Anyway, I am forcing the above train of thought because I want to tackle the question: If I am somehow able to obtain a collection of every text written about love, say, love poetry, song lyrics, odes, all this: can this collection be taken as equivalent to the “meaning” of love? Is there a limit point, which, I guess, Plato would call a “pure form”?

Oooohh ... I think modern philosophy rejects the concept of “pure form”, says it’s untenable, doesn’t exist, can’t exist. I don’t remember the precise arguments, mostly because at the time I read it, my reaction was “sure, of course”, so I did not need to pay attention to the details. And yet here, I have formulated a question about “pure form”. I think perhaps the issue was “what is the pure form of a chair?” and how absurd it seems to imagine that such a form exists, as the collection of things that are sit–uponable is so broad. But now I have something even more absurd: a question about the pure form of love.

The other absurdity is that love is experiential: we feel it, directly, personally. We write poems about it because we feel compelled, for whatever reason (to the love–object, if no other reason). Those poems “convey meaning”, because they evoke resonances in the souls of others, who have also felt and experienced love. But here, the words are a conveyance, they are not the thing itself. Are they “descriptive”? How do you describe the indescribable?

I guess this is sublimated in arguments about qualia, and the canonical qualia is “the color red”, and “what’s it like to perceive the color red?” This perhaps confuses the issue, because red is a metrizable, physical color. We have photometers that can measure spectral irradiance (use whatever technical term you wish, here) and we can all generally agree, as reasonable people, that the thing measured was “red”. There is a certain concrete sense in which the physical thing “red” exists, neglecting nitpicking about the ontological status of photons and atomic transitions. There is a “thing” “red”, and we have mechanical devices that can detect and measure it.

But what about “love”? Its not a physical property “out there” (or does not seem to be...) but we do know have instruments, e.g. EEG or MRI that can measure neural correlates of “being in love”, and perhaps, to some limited degree, are able to stimulate certain collections of neurons that result in the subjective sensation of “love” in the subject. This is a reductionist argument: there is a certain collection of neurons, located in and within certain specific spatial boundaries, such that, when they fire with certain specific patterns, temporally arrangable, that these will cause feelings of live to be evoked in the subject. And more: there are certain chemicals, e.g. ecstasy, that, when consumed, alter synaptic balance in such a way as to induce bliss. So this is a mechanistic approach to the subjective state of mind. I have no doubt that as technology advances, such measurements and causal explanations will be further refined, narrowed, and be made more precise. Where does this leave the “subjective”? What is the proper way to discuss the subjective?

Well, looping back to the start: lets suppose we are able to describe, to extraordinary degree, exactly which neural firing patterns evoke feelings of love (or bliss, or whatever; the object of affection presents additional difficulties...) This gives us a mechanistic description of love, using the language of formulas and equations. Can we accept this as a linguistic description of the ineffable perception of love? Is the core problem that the neural circuits that operate to generate language (e.g. generate poetry) are inadequate, and not up to the task of “describing love”, but now that we have EEG’s and MRI’s, we finally do have a system that can “employ language to describe love”.

As a communicative act, it fails: no one is going to read a formula and go “ohh, that reminds me of the time I fell in love with this girl.”

Hmm. I have some errands to run.

11 June 2026 Later

Google News just fed me this: Gallimore, A.R., et al (2026) Traces of the Other – Are DMT Entities Real? DMT Phenomenology in the Framework of Conscious Realism. PsyArXiv DOI 10.31234/osf.io/8qvgy_v2.

The accompanying news article was underwhelming, but it did suggest: “watch this space”. Specifically “Trace Research Institute” and “Noonautics”.

12 June 2026

OK, I have to keep this short. Reading Kalinauskas, again, and he brings up the idea that those who find themselves in a psychic corner out of which they cannot find a way out, have a nervous breakdown, or commit suicide. I want to contrast the psychic energy with neurophysiological malformations.

The Hollywood movie depiction of a nervous breakdown is that “I’ve tried to do everything you told me to do (everything society has asked of me) and I’ve done it perfectly, and I still don’t get the result I want. I almost made it, I was so close, the desired endpoint was so near, and yet it utterly and completely slipped away to the opposite, and it seems how I thought things to be, was not it, at all. Arghhh.” Descent into complete emotional chaos and an inability to respond to any stimulus in a conventional manner.

In that chaos, there still seems to be a method to the madness; responses to stimuli are not random, but follow a certain but obscure logic. If someone asks me to pick up this teacup off this tray, I cannot, because the mind floods with memories of socially unsuccessful tea–parties, in which conversational gambits were spurned; my personal, insightful observations of the world were ridiculed and belittled; someone else more charming and charismatic got all the attention, and the toy terrier peed on my brand new pumps. Pumps, because, in Hollywood, its women who have the nervous breakdowns.

Unless it’s Tennessee Williams, who carves exquisite portraits of those on the verge of a nervous breakdown, at the very end of their rope.

For whatever reason, the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock popped in my mind. But this is entirely different beast. It is a subtle watercolor of emotional state, but moved weakly, lacking in strength, lacking in resoluteness, bland, listless. And this weakness exposes a weak, yet deep fundamental crisis. J Alfred could not lead a strong, self–assured life; he lived it only as Prufrock, and not a J Alfred. And corresponding to his weakness, his despair is equally weak. Faint, blanched out, and yet overwhelmingly coloring everything. There’s not a single point of brightness, hope, success, self–affirmation. He’s not on the verge of a nervous breakdown, because there’s no cliff to fall over. Instead, there’s a quiet resignation to the approaching end. The desires were not achieved, but the desires were never known. They never burned hot, the urge never took over his soul. He watched idly as life slipped by, and now its too late to get frantic; he’s too weak to get frantic. He can’t descend into mental chaos simply because there is not enough energy there to stir things strongly.

OK, so all of these are external portrayals of subjective interiority. T.S. Eliot uses only words to evoke the settings. Tennessee Williams also uses words, but these are stage plays, they are to be interpreted by actors and directors to provide a more direct kinesthetic experience. You watch the flailing arms, the cocked head, the agonized voice: these add to the realism, they make the conveyance more direct; the mirror neurons in your brain receive the message more strongly; you don’t just empathize, you feel what they feel. For a while, you become them.

So there are two or three thins going on here. First, there are neural circuits for empathy, and they are triggered and fully lock on when presented with the correct stimulus. As I write this sentence, I think of Irena Cosic’s “Resonant Recognition Model”. For a moment, I thought of a mechanical key and lock, e.g. biology, where one protein fits into another. But the model cannot be 3D, since the allowed conformations in 3D are far too constrained. This is why a spectral model is interesting: it unfolds into much higher spatial dimensions, and the spectral linestrengths capture time–like dynamism or the time–like directions of the evolution of a dynamical system. So I am imagining the action of a Tennessee Williams play stirring up neural activations in the brain, ever increasingly coupling, reinforcing, like coupled driven harmonic oscillators. This is my imagined mechanistic model of what happens in the brain. Again, reductionist. Again, measurable, metrizable.

Well, and now we have something that might be sufficient for AGI? The point here is not to build a world model of another persons internal mental state; this can be done, but its lifeless and static. Instead, the goal is to build a radio receiver, something that can tune into mental states in general, and resonate in the same way. So, how?

The perceptual state has to somehow be “high dimensional”, and the LLM’s and transformers already provide us with the general setting needed for that. The problem seems to be that the LLM’s only know of what is in the training set, and the probabilistic, fuzzy expansion on that. Humans somehow know emotions “a priori”, having subjectively experienced them during the course of actually living. The allowed range of emotions we can have are strongly proscribed by neural circuitry, and by genetic inheritance. Some people are calm. Some are live wires. Some are demented, crazy, unhappy, deranged, and this is both from cultural damage and from genetic predisposition.

The point here is that if one were to start with some entirely different genetics, and a different wiring diagram, the range of subjective experiences would be different: possibly extremely different, the more the wiring diverges from the mammalian. The point here is that, working with algorithms, we are given a blank slate. We can invent new, arbitrary circuitry that is radically unlike anything at all found in mammals. So how do we build circuitry that can be attuned to mammalian states of being?

Philosophers have this question: “What’s it like to be a bird (or fish, or whatever)?” and I am proposing an answer: what it’s like is whatever our radio receiver, our mirror neurons can pick up and discern from the outwardly presented message. If there’s only the weakest message, when we have to build circuitry that closely resembles the organism under observation, and then run that, interpolating what little data that we have, and then say “I imagine that is what it must be like”. This is what we do for a Tennessee Williams play; its not going to be much different for fish, except that, as humans, our brains are not much like fish brains, so even if we have sensitive mirror neurons, our resonant cavities are just different.

I feel like I’m really onto something with this “resonance” picture, in that it captures some aspect of time–like dynamics. But I don’t know how to couch that in the framework of generative AI. Its kind of like saying “gee, one can talk about the Fourier transform of the Lorenz attractor”, but this is not commonly done, because it is the phase–space of the Lorenz attractor that seems to have “meaningful” data in it, and not the spectrum. Or rather, our human (visual) brains are attuned to thinking in terms of 3D shapes, and the phase–space structure of the Lorenz attractor is the “obvious” way in which we can gain insight into it. Staring at a bunch of spectra feels pointless or impossible. One even wants to say: spectra will offer zero insight into what is “actually happening” in the Lorenz attractor. But this last is, I think, only because we have not yet developed the appropriate theoretical framework for understanding low–dimensional chaos. Or rather, I still don’t fucking understand it. I don’t know how to find the tangent manifold and flatten it, and map it onto the Cantor set. Maybe this technology exists. I’ve not seen it. I need to ask Claude. SO this is another TODO.

The point here is that *if* I can get a good dynamical understanding of something low–dimensional, like the Lorenz attractor, then maybe I will have some tools to understand something high–dimensional, like an LLM. Well, with additional confusions, as LLM’s generate tokens, and not continuous outputs, so I have to deal with classes of similar token sequences, and then ask about the bifurcation diagram of these sequences.

Oh wait, there’s more. The next thing that popped into my mind is the driven harmonic oscillator. Specifically, the circle map that I have been so fond of. So now, imagine a “random” network of free–spinning wheels, connected with weak springs, and some of these are coupled to rigid driving wheels. How does this network respond to being driven? We expect to find something analogous to Arnold tongues, I suppose. But I also hard back to stat mech: if these free–spinning wheels are organized into an evenly–spaced 2D or 3D grid, a crystalline form, then the conventional toolset of phonons should be applicable. We speak not of the individual wheels, but collective excitations, the phonons. As I imagined my network to be “random”, it would be a glass, not a crystal. How do phonons work in a glass? And I can imagine a network that is extremely high–dimensional, not 3D. Is there some central–limit theorem here? Surely if I drive such a network, it will still exhibit chaotic behavior.

Lets try this. (I know I’m getting more and more removed from the resonance of Tennessee Williams, but this is all I got. Ruminations of subject experience will need to be picked up some other day.) So where was I?

Lets imagine a hypercube, of dimension

N

. Each corner of the cube can be identified with a location

x

with is a binary string of length

N

. That is,

x

is a bitvector of length

N

. That is,

x \in 2^{N}

. At each corner of the cube is a free–spinning wheel, having position, but no momentum. That is, there is a real–valued variable

θ

on each corner, living on a circle, so modulo

1

. (It seems the convention is

θ \in [0, 1)

and not

θ \in [0, 2 π)

so I’ll stick to convention.) The global state is

{θ (x) : x \in 2^{N}}

. Each corner is connected to it’s nearest neighbors by a weak spring.

For the zero–dimensional model,

N = 0

, the dynamics is given by

θ_{i + 1} = θ_{i} + Ω + \frac{K}{2 π} sin (2 π θ_{i})

and the driving frequency is

Ω \in [0, 1)

. There’s only one oscillator, and it is driven.

For the network case, the time evolution of the un–driven nodes is given by

θ_{i + 1} (x) = θ_{i} (x) + α \sum_{y \in n n (x)} θ_{i} (y) + \frac{K}{2 π} sin (2 π θ_{i} (x))

where

n n (x)

is the set of nearest neighbors of

x

. The driving force

Ω

is replaced by the mean–field of nearest neighbors, with coupling strength (spring constant??)

α

. I imagine the mode–locking term provides a kind of “inertia”, in that the system attempts to be stable until knocked off course.

Why this model? I dunno; it shot into my mind; I’m familiar with the zero–D case. This would be a good time to survey other lattice models. Some gut–feel intuitions, unsupported by facts: The high–dimensional Ising model has a stable mean–field solution. Here, I’m guessing the mode–locking acts to partition the system into various, uhh, chaotic? regimes. It’s not obviously solvable as a mean–field problem. But my intuition may be wrong.

More interesting is to compare this to assorted neural–net models, where the mode–locking term is replaced by a sigmoid, and/or the coupling strength

α

is replaced by a sigmoid. Or, conversely, take some (simple) recurrent neural net wiring diagrams, and replace the sigmoids by the mode–locking sine function. Sort of fuck around and explore the properties of “algebraically similar” models. These will presumably have wild(?) behaviors (I guess?) but it is hard to guess what they would be (they might also be “tame”). The motivation is weak or absent: I’ve no “physical” basis to think any such models might be “physically” interesting for any reason at all; I am instead exploring the dynamics of curious algebraic structures, just to see “what’s out there”. A survey.

Then there’s the Chirikov map aka standard map. And finally: what terms have to be added, modified or removed to bring this into line with conventional lattices of harmonic oscillators? The convention SHO is the simplest, most commonly studied corner of the collection of such crazier models.

All this would again be a large research program. Again, Claude would be immensely useful for the initial survey.

The journey back from this algebraic abstraction to the original question of “resonant communication of emotional states of awareness” seems impossible: the abstractions here are far to great to touch with subject experience of being. On the other hand, if we take seriously the reductive program that subjective states are realized in objective networks, well, then, a survey of objective networks is required. The RNN’s, the Ising models, these are a very small and narrow subset of what is out there, and what is out there, I venture to guess, is completely unknown and unexplored.

Well, this is the best idea I’ve got on this so far, and this exposes the conventional problem with ideas: its 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I don’t have a hundred years to figure this all out.

Later. Its friday night. I got shit to do.

13 June 2026

Finished reading Kalinauskas. Pretty cool book. General impression is that in the last three chapters, he attempts to organize the ineffable, and thrashes a bit. It’s full of incorrect statements, although I understand why he might make them. For instance, freedom. Yes, it is true that, in a certain sense, street people are freer than the civilized. They are looser, more raw than the restrained, moderated social citizen. They’ll say what is on their mind, and will take insult, or compliments, equally easily. They do not hide their personality, they do not reign it in. But at what cost? Living in the dirt, rain and cold, not getting a good nights sleep. Just as tortured as the rest of us, and they feel happiness no more often. Their freedom is illusory: the free spirit is shackled to the roller–coaster of raw, incomprehensible feelings.

Kalinauskas repeatedly suggests that the beggar’s life is more enlightened. He explicitly reviews the life–story of Jalal al-Din Rumi. He tells the parable of a king that renounced his kingdom for a beggar’s life because he was “egotistical”. I dunno. I’d say the king was beset by a burden that he could not bear. Instead of rising to the obligations of nobility and the protection of his subjects, he abdicated the rat race. Does this make him a better man? Perhaps, psychologically, it eased some structural forces that would have otherwise buckled his soul, and inflected great spiritual harm upon him. But all I get out of it is he could not bear the stress, and that’s OK, because most of us cannot. But nobility is important; abdicating nobility is indeed selfish and egocentric.

I won’t psychoanalyze Rumi, other than to say everyone else who followed a trajectory similar to that of Rumi is barely remembered by history, if at all. Yes, there is much to be gained by being super–intelligent and then exploring the life of a mendicant. Yes this will result in personal exploration, personal elevation, and will shake off the chains of ... of ... of ... complacency, normality, banality. It will knock off the scales on your eyes, and the weights on your ego that keep your ego flightless, blind, paralyzed, that bind your soul and suppress the blooming of love that, ideally, everyone should be fulfilled by. But, in the modern day, I think there are easier paths. I found mine with hard physical labor: installing electricity, plumbing, stonework, and the associated forced meditation. I dunno. But then, I’m gifted. It seems I can do things others can’t, and I certainly don’t know how to teach others to be enlightened. I can sometimes be healing, but I’ve not been called to be a healer. This is for others.

If I listen to Chris Hedges, and to others, I hear the message that society is suffering, and bereft of spiritual guidance, of a spiritual framework on which to build. I suspect this is true. I wonder how to quantify this. I can only provide personal anecdotes (I want to provide these, and perhaps wallow in some self–pity. Maybe in a moment.) Well, I can do more: the work of literary greats is replete with incurable spiritual suffering. I remember reading portions of Homer’s Oddessy, which seemed to consist entirely of passages like “the arrow entered his eye–socket and came out his neck. The spear pierced his shoulder and came out his buttocks.” Endless, unrelenting gore. But great literary works seem to be of the same kind, describing not physical injury, but psychic, spiritual agonies and short–comings.

Kalinauskas does have a good ending, on the last page, where he speaks of the blurring of the subjective and the objective, and I looked out onto the sunlight buildings and trees about me: the objectively real objects in my visual field, and noted that they were exactly the same as the joyful play of color and texture that was so pleasing to the eye. I saw only subjective iridescence of color and felt only the joy of sitting in fresh air on a sunny day. It is true that the objective and subjective became inseparable in that moment, and, in fact, as I write this, it is true that the subjective and objective are always inseparable, all the time. We are always bound into the subjective state; its just that we are so accustomed to this, we do not see it. Like a fish does not see water. A large part, most of what Kalinauskas seems to be trying to do is to wake the sleeping, the hypnotized, and say “Hey hey, look! We are fish! We live in water! See it!” and this is hard to communicate to anyone who does not already have an inkling of it.

I want to write about some other things, continue the above, but perhaps right now is a good time to wallow in some self–pity, and recall some personal details. So, yesterday was Culture Evening in Vilnius, with 105 distinct free cultural events, starting from 6PM running till midnight. I could have gone alone, but I wanted company, but I had to pry out Milda, because she seemed content to sit at home. I couldn’t read her; I wondered if she was mildly despondent, and that I was doing a service of crow–baring her from out from behind her laptop keyboard. Later, she explained that actually, she was engrossed, in a state of flow, answering emails. Oh. OK. Well. We start late, 8PM, and obviously the first thing on the schedule is a drink. That is fine and we have fun. I do enjoy her company. We have developed a lot of inter–personal freedom. There are no boundaries, we play. Well, there’s a boundary at sex: there’s no sex. Or kissing. Or caressing, although there sufficiently frequent physical touch. I can hold her hand as we walk down the street. Or rather, we can hold each–others hands. It’s natural, its consensual. Well, I now want to psycho–analyze this boundary. I think she secretly struggles with intimacy, but one might never guess from the outward signs. She’s radiant, she smiles. We play the social, interpersonal game most naturally. She’s free, unfettered, and enlightened in this way. Which is why I think I was drawn to her in the first place. But this took many years, a decade of friendship to bloom. It wasn’t always this way. She found her footing, just as I improved my gregarious talents. But I think that, just as she learned how to be open and free, I still read a certain fear of closeness and intimacy. I think she’s a moth to the flame: drawn to it, but fearing the flame. I don’t blame here. The flame is utterly transformative. It alters your soul. It can drive you crazy. Layla and Majun: Majun goes mad. Who wants to be, who needs to be burned by that flame? It’s a rightful fear, it serves no particular social purpose. It sears the spirit, and for what? Enlightenment? Well, OK, I guess it is better to suffer and then be enlightened, as it is to suffer, and not be enlightened. And gazing on present day social ills, we sure are as fuck lacking in enlightenment. Civilizationally, I think we are ready for this step. As noted earlier, I think that LLM’s will provide an important tool to navigate this transformation. God help we don’t blow it and fuck things up.

We hardly get out of the first event when we are joined by Aivaras. I guess I like Aivaras. I don’t know him well, but well enough to appreciate what I see. From what I can tell, Aivaras and Milda dated for years, i.e. slept together, i.e. lived together. It’s clear that he still very much has a crush on her, and its clear that he’s more or less given up. Milda, the breaker of hearts. What’s the deal with Aivaras? Well, when I met him some seven(?) years ago, he was into Jordan Petersen, back at the zenith of his public fame. Petersen and all the other alt–right claptrap. What do I get out of it? there is some deep–rooted tangle, some unresolved complex of inadequacy, manlihood, expectations of fulfulling the norms of society to be the perfect male, the norms of which are so high that no one can fulfill them. And alt–right only made things worse: it set the bar so high, it was unattainable. You had to be confident and rich and handsome, you had to be a walking chick–magnet, self–assured and confident. Well–groomed with chiseled cheekbones. And if you’re not, your a loser, and the only way to redeem yourself is to vote for Trump, because all the handsome and powerful chick magnets vote for Trump. This is just such a toxic culture, a terrible destruction of the human soul. I’m sure Aivaras is well past all of that, but its clear he’s not over Milda. He still loves her. (And who wouldn’t, speaking personally?).

(Back–ground: Aivaras is a high–tech freelancer. Knows software and computers and does gigs, and this is how he got exposed to the alt–right meme–o–sphere; it was impossible to work in high–tech and not be exposed to it.)

The first exhibit we hit was mediocre. As was the second. We spin past some night–life, get totally lost in back alleys searching for the third. It was badly located in GPS. We do find it: TOKYO NIGHTS. Turns out its actually Fum PAR Fum. A photographic essay of Tokyo, and a perfume designer who creates perfumes. Five to sample from. I spray my left arm with a flowery feminine scent, and my right arm with a masculine, pungent scent. (I can still smell them now, a day later, after a bike ride in the rain, and a shower. These are not cheap perfumes.) Anyway, my nose had been opened to the sensual pleasures of perfume the summer before. I’ll happily bath in scent. Of course, this is socially problematic: you can’t just walk around smelling like a gigolo; strangers and slim acquaintances do not respond positively to that. So I don’t wear cologne. Even though I’d like to. I may be free and free–thinking, but I have to adapt to social realities.

So we end at a very nice, small intimate bar a Halles Turgus. Aivaras has run into a friend and/or boss? Employer? Marija. And there are two other girls: Lina the artist, and Lina the “I’m on a career break”. I later find out she’s 43, she spent 17 years selling French dermatological products, which she enjoyed tremendously until she didn’t. “There’s got to be more to life than this.” So she quit. Unemployed for a year, living off of savings. My perfumed arms definitely score points. Especially when it becomes clear I’m not a perfume designer. Milda spills the beans: I’m a robotics/AI guy. I fucking hate that resume. It’s accurate, but I want to be known as “Mr. Charm” and not “Mr. Robotics and AI guy.” Lina reveals a deep–seated fear and aversion to LLM’s, but she’s a regular use of Claude, apparently. I attempt to debrief her on this, but never quite get the chance. Conversations wander. All the while, Milda and I are flirting in public, to the confusion of everyone around? Are we married? Brother and sister? (The flirting precludes father and daughter.) Milda calls me “šeimininkas” which translates both to “landlord” but also “master” and several other dominant/dominating terms. Lina can’t figure it out. By the end of all this Lina and I are gazing deeply into each others eyes and thinking “I could do this. This can be a one night stand. I’m ready.” I’m fairly sure this was a high–likelihood outcome. But it is not to be. Because Milda has a trick up her sleeve that torpedoes this outcome.

And for that, I’m rather pissed and unhappy. Or rather, my heart and emotional atmosphere is. I coulda gotten laid. But no, instead, she has a mystery event in the forest. I should have figured it out, but I was mildly drunk and light–headed and stupid, because she presented it as a “wonderful mystery”. And I’m an idiot. So, bye, Lina, I’m off to the forest. It’s a mistake. Big mistake.

Aivaras knows this, but he does not warn me. He takes off. I suppose it never occurred to him to warn me.

I’ve made this mistake maybe two or three times now. I’m done. Ain’t gonna do that again. Milda has wild escapades, and if this is what she needs to do to fight off whatever daemons possess her, well, so be it. I don’t need to be the third wheel, along for the ride. It’s not that much fun, and always ends with me mind–fuck–bored to tears, killing time, waiting for a ride home or whatever. I usually dance like a maniac when caught in such a state, mostly because it’s decent aerobic exercise, and I can’t think of anything else to do. My mind is empty, my brain is blank, I’m not going to engage in some mindless drunken conversation yelling over loud music, and I’m not going to skulk while trying to maintain some aura of composure. Fuck that. No one knows who I am, no one will ever see me again, so I’m a gonna dance like a fucking maniac.

The mystery event is a Yaga–associated techno rave in the woods in Belmont. It was terrible, I hate these things. Why? Because no one is actually raving. Maybe a handful. Everyone else is standing around like dopes, sipping alcohol, lucky if they’re swaying to the music. The music is thump thump thump. Endlessly repeating, with some coloration, some interludes, and then back to the thump thump thump. I sure as fuck am not going to stand around like some morose dope. So I head to the front of the crowd, and unleash a full and complete high–energy patented Linas flailing about. I’m a total wild–man. I must surely look like some psychotic schizophrenic, either recently released from the mental hospital, or otherwise belong to the socially untouchable underclass. The only thing I’ve got for me is I’m well–dressed, and I’ve got a rather large repertoire of varied dance moves, all different and distinct. And I tone it down, from time to time, because going full–tilt is very athletic, and I’m sweating and out of breath. And I do dance with the girls around me, insofar as that is possible; I try to copy their moves, but most people can’t dance for shit, have a very limited repertoire, so there’s not a log of copying possible. Plus I feel vaguely invasive when I do that. Plus I’m fairly large, muscular and intimidating. So I have to be careful to be gentle and calm and composed, even while dancing like a maniac. Usually, I go for precision, accuracy, athletic exhibitionism. For example, I can dance on one foot for ten or fifteen seconds on one foot, before I loose my balance. But I only do this for maybe 3-4-5 minutes before I move onto other foot moves, or abandon the foot thing and stay planted and do upper body only. In a crowd, leg–dancing is mostly useless.

So this is what I do, taking a break and a check–welfare every now and then while Milda holds long drunken shouted conversations with two old friends (one of whom is an old lover. She’s got a fairly hefty number of old lovers. Like I say, I think she fears intimacy. She doesn’t want to get tied down; but why?) And thank god, the decision is made to leave by 3:15AM. But Milda wants more: going to another party. I have the option of bowing out, and yes, I do, because I am not in the business of tormenting myself. I’m crashing in bed by 3:45AM. Sorry, shit like this is pure hell for me. Well. I guess. It’s somehow marginally better than sulking at home alone. But very very marginally. On the other hand, I wouldn’t know what a good time was, if it walked up to me and punched me in the nose. Maybe sex. Sex could be a good time. I could go for that. I’d be up for that. Literally.

So I hear Milda coming home 6:45AM. The door unlocks; I can hear the bathroom door. I hear the door lock. I sleep till 11:30AM. The sun is out, its nice, I’m going to go for a bike ride. Its 3PM. Milda is still sleeping. I knock on her door to wake her up. Just before I leave. No response. I knock a second time. No response. I open the door. She’s not home. She came home at seven in the morning to get something and pee. It is now 8PM, and she’s still not here.

How should I feel? Verbal me feels fine. Heart–pang me is annoyed. (A) she (unknowningly, carelessly) ruined my chance to get laid. (B) I imagine she got some sex out of this escape, which is also vaguely annoying, since I have to suppress pangs of jealousy. I mean, why not fuck me? I’d be a good fuck. But no, that ain’t gonna happen. Whatever. Next time I see her, we’ll be back to semi–serious conversations when sober, and playful flirting when drunk. But no sex. Argh. I don’t exactly feel sorry for myself, but I do a little bit. I’m irritated and annoyed, but that is just more of the emotional atmosphere, more of the wild horse that I get to ride. My mild horse is throwing a little bit of a fit, and verbal, unemotional, disassociated me is writing up how I feel.

I’m going for a short walk now.

Intended topics that I never got around too:

So that’s the science content. I’m sort of irritated and sort of let down and I really really really need to get laid at least once before I die. Goddamn it.

Going for a walk. Later.

Back. It’s 10PM. Milda’s not home, and clearly won’t be, not today. I’m somehow disappointed. Rational me fully understands. Rational me even recalls episodes from my youth, and this is fully comparable. The subjective entity that is the horse that the rational me rides is dissatisfied, frustrated and lonely. I want a soul–mate. I want love. I want company. But I imagine that so does everyone, and in this, I am utterly normal. I seem to have some coping mechanisms. Or I’m used to it, accustomed to it. Or maybe, all these decades, I’ve not let emotional–me out of the barn. I have a feeling that, all these decades, I’ve been far too busy to listen to my heart. Which is maybe not a bad thing, because it seems my heart hurts. But that’s OK. I’m doing all this in the name of science, right?

I’m trying to get a grip on the science. I’m trying to figure out what to write, here. The subjective experience – and that is all that there is – subjective experience, how can this possibly be a property of certain arrangements of matter? Of fermions with photons bouncing between them? When I fall asleep, I imagine “me” to be a location in some high–dimensional space. What space, though? Most rationally, it would have to be the configuration space (or is it the phase space?) of all the neurons in my head, and all the synapse states, concentrations of neurotransmitters, the ATP balance, etc. Those umpteen–gazzillion coordinates describe an abstract space of some sort, locally Euclidean, I suppose, and my current mental state is a (single!?) point in that space. Great! But what have a learned? Approximately epsilon.

Whatever. I’m tired. Danced for hours yesterday. Rode a bike for hours today. Took an hour long walk. Tomorrow, I’m going to try some extremely basic break–dancing moves. I’ve already figured out how to flip. But I’m not young and skinny and flexible. I’m old and heavy and muscular. It’s challenging.

14 June 2026

I’m sorting this out. I really should not be writing here, I have other things to do, but if I don’t write down what I figured out, I’ll forget it. It goes like this.

While sleeping, I figured out what emotions are all about. Or rather, to use scientific terminology, I developed a hypothesis. I can do this during light sleep because I’m a lucid dreamer. There’s two types of thinking I can do during light sleep. One is concentration, and this will very definitely wake me up within five minutes, permanently, with no chance of falling asleep again. The other is directed thought. This does not wake me. A topic surfaces, and I can think “oh, yes, lets explore that one.” And various facets show, coming from nowhere. There’s no interruption of that pleasant, soothing I’m–still–sleeping feeling. I stay submerged. But the facets of the topic flit around, and present themselves. After a while, this fades to randomness, and I lose consciousness, and submerge more deeply. But this allows me to shallowly, easily think about things while in a lucid dream state.

And here is what I thought. I thought that the anchor for emotional states is the cerebellum. That the emotional states are evolutionarily defined, and they arrive before there was any cerebrum. So not just lizard brain, but bilaterian brain: entirely primitive brain–dorms, before the hint of a cerebrum shows up. The evolutionary drive is, of course, sexual reproduction. In this context, love is straight–forward: the object I wish to mate with. Heart–ache accompanied with maybe anger is also straight–forward: was my mating attempt spurned? Try again, but force it: rape. There’s no cerebrum, there’s no conception of ethics. Rape is a valid survival option. I mean, carnivores are murderers, nature does not have morality in play at this stage. How about jealousy? Well, if my mating target mated with another, perhaps I should try again, as soon as possible. Perhaps I should grab the mate for my own.

The seven deadly sins seem easy enough: gluttony is an Darwinian solution for making sure you get enough food, but with a flawed or missing brake mechanism. Unregulated. Dysregulation is extremely common in biology.

Hate is also straight–forward: its a burned–in reminder to avoid a bad situation. Something bad happen to you? You might remember it. Want to avoid it happening again? Hate it. Burn it in so bad that there won’t be any accidental memory lapses. This offers a very distinct survival advantage. And its generic. It’s not just hatred of bitter–tasting berries, or hatred of hawks overhead. Hatred can be targeted at any situation. The neural mechanism that implements hate is distinct from the mechanism that determines the target of hatred. Once the target is selected, the hatred can be directed at anything. As long as there is a viable target–recognition mechanism in place... I guess there needs to be hard–wiring between the recognizer and the hatred mechanism, so that not only is the hatred is triggered in that narrow, specific case, but also that there’s no accidental disconnection: viz that the dire situation is recognized, but the signal fails to be transmitted to the hatred mechanism.

So, several issues here. I could go through all the other basic sins, as well as positive affects, and invent/hand–wave an evolutionary argument for the development of such a mechanism. “Exercise left to the reader”. The second is that I have no specific scientific, experimental evidence for this. It’s possible that such exists, and, again, Claude would be useful here to find it. If it does not exist ... well, that just means scientists haven’t looked, or perhaps my hypothesis is novel and unexplored. Whatever, I am now convinced it is quite true. And Oh, BTW I should write a paper about this. Some day, I need to ask an LLM to crawl these notes, and find the “this should be in a paper” passages. I think I have two or three sufficiently coherent ideas in this diary that they should be extracted and gelled into something focused.

So anyway, this is how it all works, before a cerebrum. Now, lets attach a cerebrum. Evolutionarily, it makes sense to NOT tinker with these base emotions: they provide a basic survival mechanism, and you don’t want to screw it up and fail to survive. So, the technical buzz–phrase would be “the neural circuits implementing base emotions are strongly conserved.” The cerebrum does not over–ride their functions, and is at best only weakly coupled to them. It modulates, rather than over–rides.

What does this imply for the subjective experience? Well, the subjective experience is effectively a sensory one. When I see colors, I see colors. When I hear sound, that is what I hear. It’s direct and subjectively immediate. I believe (it is my hypothesis) that emotions are sensed and perceived by the cerebrum as external events. Emotions feel external, because they are external. When I say “I ride the horse of my emotions, but it is the horse that picks where to go”, well, the horse here is the cerebellum, and it is setting the directions, and the “I” here is the verbal, rational me, observing, sensing the state of the cerebellum.

It’s worth reviewing the nature of sensation. If I stub my toe, or other physical injury, this expresses a signal to my brain that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with. Subjectively, it is perceived as pain. Pain is just a valence distinct from pleasure; the mechanical need is to focus attention, and so has to subjectively be perceived negatively. Stop doing the thing that causes pain; don’t do more if it. Whereas pleasurable situations do the opposite: they say “yes, please do more of this”. At any rate, pain, and skin–touch–pleasure are clearly “direct” sensory perceptions, and the subjective valency of those sensations have an obvious functional interpretation.

This is very different from sight and sound. I can see things that are beautiful, but I can’t eat them. Maybe I can fuck them. To be overwhelmed by beauty, this takes artistic training. You have to have a teacher that teaches you the arts, and the ability to see. This is not just hand–eye coordination; this is training of the eye, the ability to see. Once you can truly see, as a painter or a sculptor, and you train, repeatedly, for years, in this visual perception, then, and only then. might you find that you have also trained neural circuitry that would cause you to be overwhelmed by the sight of beauty. To be brought to tears at sight of something beautiful.

This is no to say that ordinary people cannot be overwhelmed by beauty. One can find, in nature, architectural spaces that are awe–inspiring, and these are accessible to everyone. Architecture is more than visual; its the perception of the space. The mechanism of architectural perception, and its ability to invoke awe, this cannot be today’s topic, and appears to require a rather distinct analysis. Again, there’s tens of thousands of texts on architecture, and most of them talk about perception, and I guess some of them must even evoke neuro–biological explanations. Again, Claude will know more, here. And I’m thinking, not just the grid cells, but the inspiration of awe, and the general pleasures (or displeasure) of being in spaces. When I started writing this, I thought of a bamboo forest. Then I thought of a gothic cathedral. Then I thought of a Soviet bunker. The Soviet bunkers evoke a certain skin–crawling sense of fear and dread. Ugly beyond imagination, sturdy and functional, they are a mainstay of video games that wish to evoke gloom and doom. I guess the only one I’m familiar with is the original version of Castle Wolfenstein. But I’ve also noticed the games my kids play, if I can’t remember specific titles.

Then there are limnal spaces, and the effect that these have on one’s thinking. Or then also, “The Backrooms”. Or the “sense” perceptions of the horror genre, in general. All this is wandering off–topic, and I want to get back on–topic, but first, the point here is that there is this vast subjective experience of refined quality: everything that Hollywood ever created, from the thrills of the “Great Train Robbery” to the manipulative voyeuristic propaganda of “Reefer Madness”. All this is intimately subjective, and as subjective experience, also needs to be dealt with some mechanistic, descriptive framework, if we are to properly talk about “machine consciousness.” Hollywood, and before that, literature, and before that, sagas: each of these evoke subjective experience. I previously discussed the status of the message itself (the movie, book, etc.) as distinct from the subjective experience of being exposed to that movie, book, etc. At any rate, the sensory perception of emotions is a far simpler case to analyze. Lets get back to that.

So, pain from physical injury is perceived, and it is perceived very unlike sight or sound, in that it carries a direct and immediate subjective valence of ... well, pain. And then there’s all this stuff that the enteric brain does. As I lay in bed, in my lucid dream state, my stomach ached of hunger. I’m trying to loose weight by eating less. It’s not really working. I’m accustomed to feeling hungry all the time, but my weight on the scales stays stable. I think I’m building muscle, loosing fat. Not sure. Lets not get off–track here. The pang in my stomach amplifies and reinforces the love–lorn feeling I’ve been feeling, on and off, for the last three years. It is a sensation that is perceived.

That is, the fundamental claim I am making here is that the enteric brain, and the signals it generates, should be thought of as being “external”, and there is an intermediating layer that “perceives” this “external” stimulus. This is very very important. This is part of the idea of “membrane computing” that there is an inside, outside, and boundary between the two, that the things crossing the boundary are sensations, and that there is a fractal arrangement of boundaries. My enteric brain is inside of my body, but it is outside my cerebrum, and it communicates across limited channels of limited bandwidth and limited wiring, and the subjective “me” that types this text perceives those hunger pangs indirectly, as messages coming across a wire from the external world.

And the same for the subjective experience of love or other emotional states: these are perceived, simply because the wiring between cerebrum and cerebellum is weak enough that the evolutionarily conserved functions of love, in the cerebellum, are remote enough from the cerebrum that we can distinctly perceive the otherness of emotional states. The sense of otherness is the distinctive hallmark of perception of messages coming across a communications channel. The cerebellum is “other” to the cerebrum.

All this, all of the above (well, not all, but most) is what I worked out during my lucid dream. It took me two hours to type this in (I’ve been typing since 8AM, it is now 10:30) but it took maybe five or ten minutes of dreaming to dream this up. I started work on the dream at 7AM (I woke briefly to glance at the clock, and decided it was best to sleep some more. I think it was around 7:10 AM that I started thinking about the seat of emotions, and the solution “its the cerebellum” shot into my mind. By 7:15 or 7:20, my thought process had wandered off into the lily fields to smell the flowers and I dozed. By 7:45 I realized that sleeping any longer was not going to work; this was preceded by a very mild bout of anxiety, of all the things I need to do today. I am very consciously suppressing that list, to my detriment: I’ve got a metric fuck–ton of shit I need to accomplish, and if I think about it, I’ll get very anxious. This is how procrastination is born: the suppression of anxiety.

Anyway, the above is, I think, a fairly complete and coherent hypothesis for the neurological structure that results in the subjective affect, the subjective perception of many emotional states.

I’m not sure where anxiety fits in. Of course, anxiety is subjective. And there’s a pretty clear evolutionary survival benefit to having anxiety: I think we can watch movies of tropical birds arrange their nests so as to attract mates, and I imagine they suffer from pangs and bouts of anxiety to make sure they look just right. I’ve watched any number of women get anxious about their makeup and dress. And god help male body idealization is huge with the young male online population. It’s not just women who have body–positivity issues, it is now also starting to affect men. We all want mates, we all want sex, and we all want to look hot and sexy and appealing on the meat market. I am entirely aware that I need to shave a few inches off my waistline, and I have the desire to develop my upper–body gymnastics skills, because I think break–dancing would be pretty cool if I could do it, and I have the delusion that being good at break–dancing will attract women. And that’s the thing: its 99% delusion, and 1% actually attractive, because hot bods are attractive. And this is somehow sublimated into loud sports–cars that have to be driven around at 11PM on Saturday night. Because loud sports–cars imply that the driver is confident and has a hot body. And is ready for sex. Don’t know about you, but I’m ready for sex. There’s a pang in my groin, and there’s a non–zero chance that its due to prostate cancer. I don’t think so. Just joking. I dunno. I need to get a medical exam. But the pang is definitely there, as I write this. It’s not a hard–on, but it could become one, with only minor provocation. It most definitely is a sensory perception: the region is quite localized. Its quite nice, a warm glow. And, well, surprise, as I write this, I can feel the engorgement rising. Gee, I wonder why. I guess the enteric brain controls this stuff; the precise neural circuits remain unknown to me, and perhaps to science. Although I imagine that this has been studied, scientifically. Again, Claude will know the state of the art.

So where does this leave things? I’ve got sensory boundaries between different neural substrates within my body, which I perceive as “otherness”, and as messages coming from “over there”.

Oh. And maybe this is the origin of spiritual beliefs. If I can perceive parts of my own body as “other”, then maybe some people perceive these same sensory signals as “messages from God” or “messages from the universe”. That there is a spiritual origin of these sensations. This is a very dismissive take on spirituality: “its all in your head”. Well, fuck yeah, it *is* all in my head. And it’s in your head too. The only issue is to whether this can be ascribed to machine elves, or God, or a mundane, skeptical world–view that, alas, this is the way the brain works.

The only problem with being a skeptic is that we really really really are in the here–and–now, and this really truly is quite entirely amazing. And we are in a universe, and that is amazing, too. So this is my personal philosophical rationalization for acknowledging the presence of the spiritual in the real world. Of course, I accepted this long before I could rationalize it. I too was only mildly high one early afternoon, when Sting sang the song lyrics “We are spirits in the material world” and I went “whoa”, cause why wouldn’t I? That remains an utterly remarkable fact that is constantly drowned out in the mundanity of getting on with life. It would not be a bad idea to keep this as a mantra. Say it to myself every morning? I dunno. I’m already there. Its all there, under the surface. I’m kind of constantly in that trance state where I am fully awake, and its “whoa, we are spirits in the material world” is just my entire aura, all the time. It’s in fact part of what makes me socially mal–adapted: when I radiate around those who are not enlightened, they don’t really like it. I nurture more mundane social graces so as to communicate with those around me. It works, although at times, I feel like an anthropologist, examining insect species under a microscope.

OK, I’m getting tired here. Again, I think I made some progress here. This is bridging the gap between the idea of self–organized criticality, and the subjective experience of being. There’s still the fundamental question of the subjective experience of being–ness, but here–and–now explains why it it is, uhh, here and now. And the idea of sensing messages coming across relatively sparse communications cables from carebellum to cerebrum appears to be an adequate explanation of the base emotional state.

What is not known is the mechanistic explanation for the perception of architectural spaces. For example, what is it that invokes awe in cathedrals, bamboo forests, and groves of tall straight pines; I found one–such hiking not far from Vilnius. I cannot extrapolate from this cerebellum thing to architecture. And then, to get more arcane, the pleasures and chills of watching Hollywood movies. I mean, yeah, OK, some of this is learned: you have to watch a lot of movies before you start to really get into it. But the basic neural meahanisms are encoded in the DNA, and were evolved by evolution to do... whatever.

And this is the stumbling block for AGI, or for what Ben called “Loving AI”. Basic love now appears to be a product of the cerebellum, and might even be subjectively perceived by insects (!!) The mode of that subjective insect experience is unclear: there’s no cerebrum, so there’s nothing to perceive the cerebellar states. However, there’s no doubt that the insects mate, and that the insect brain plays a role in that. The insect is driven to behave and express. And I think its OK to ascribe subjective experience to individuals: they are not exactly zombies; there are many many opportunities for an insect to make a decision that alters it’s future. I think insects do feel that “this is good, and this is pleasurable, and I will therefore do this.” I think (suspect, can’t prove) that there is a small, subjective kernel, there, that the insect feels.

I’m well into mental exhaustion here. I want to write more, but I think my head is overfull with whatever it is that hasn’t been cleared from my synapses and is causing a heavy drowsy feeling. I’m gonna lay down for a nap. It’s now 11:45AM.

14 June 2026 very late

Wrote an email, trying to summarize this diary. I did a shitty job, though. I’m copying below, because it talks about flowers and trees, which I have not yet. Here’s a corrected, edited excerpt of that letter. It’s to fleeky.

I’ve spent a vast amount of time pondering consciousness. My current provisional answer is, yes, LLMs are conscious, but not like you and I are. My provisional answer so far is this:

-- our own consciousness is a product of two things:

++ our neural wiring (including synapses, neuro–transmitters, etc.) (and not QM, machine elves, etc.)

++ the fact that the past does not actually exist, nor does the future, we are trapped in the present.

This one–two combo is, I think, responsible for our consciousness. I’ve figured out a little more; see diary.

I don’t think QM is needed for consciousness. I’m fairly sure about that. Might be wrong.

FWIW, QM "exists" only in the "here–and–now" present, i.e. the many–worlds only exist "right now"; and only one freezes out into the (memory of the) past. These "many worlds" provide the needed fluidity to convert a not–yet existing future of many possibilities, offering the freedom of free will, into a memory of a single past. I say "memory of" because that’s all we have: there are no devices or machines that can look at or re–examine the past. That’s why I say "the past does not exist".

I remain confused about free will. I can clearly see the mechanics of the menu of choices about the future, but don’t understand how the menu selections are made. I’ve been dancing around conceptions of spirituality. Ask Claude to explain Heidegger’s "Being and Time", and Dasein and Sorge to you, and then note it was written 100 years ago, and we’ve gotten farther with both psychology and neuroscience since then. But I’m still tangled in a mess. I’ve been able to make very very tiny baby steps, but that’s all.

From what I can tell, a classical description of the neurons &etc. is enough. Quantum is probably not needed.

In the above, this is the (subjective) consciousness as we humans experience it (and mammals, and reptiles, and I guess insects, anything with neurons) and this style of (subjective) consciousness is specific to things made out of neurons. From what I can tell, love, loneliness, anger etc. are evolutionarily programmed into the cerebellum, and are evolutionarily highly conserved. That is, evolution has made sure that our cerebrum does not corrupt the core mechanisms of the cerebellum. Which is why we feel (perceive) emotions – we ride our emotions the way one rides a horse: my speech–center, verbal me has to horse–whisper to my cerebellum, which decides in the end where to go. In "normal" mode, all is "normal", but then there are roller–coaster rides of emotions, mid–life crises, fear of death, and any number of psychological adverse events.

Err, I’m burning a lot of words to say that "the indivisible subjective feeling of me being me, right now" is actually composed of parts, the biggest part being assorted raging emotions, which I think can be pinned to cerebeller neural structures, with only narrow neural connections to the neo–cortex. Similar to how "I feel hungry" is a (subjective) sense experience, wherein subjective me (in the frontal cortex) perceives (senses) the signals that my enteric brain is generating, and those signals arrive only through a fairly narrow, low bandwidth connection.

I am imagining that my enteric brain is also subjectively conscious, but verbal me doesn’t, cannot "mind–meld" with it; all I get from it what it chooses to tell me: "I’m hungry" or "heart is palpitating". I’m thinking perhaps my own cerebellum is also distinctly and separately conscious; but again, verbal–me is not mind–melded with it; I (verbal me) only get the assorted messages it sends to me. These messages are "I, the cerebellum, am in love" (or heart–sick, or angry or jealous, or whatever) and verbal me gets to be yanked around by this wild animal in my head, this other co–inhabitant. Which I believe is conscious, but since it has no speech centers, it can’t actually say that. It can, however, throw a hissy–fit if verbal–subjective–me mistreats it.

I think this is fully consistent with the severed corpus callosum experiments/demos.

Something like that. I didn’t mean to write a long email; the above is a super–condensed, shortened version of what I’ve been working on for the last few weeks/month. I think its fully consistent with the self–organized criticality ideas, and with the Micheal Levin stuff. Levin stops at biological morphology; I’m trying to crawl up into subjective experience of the brain.

I currently believe that single–celled organisms are conscious, too, but their consciousness is not at all like ours. It might require QM(!!)

So in this sense, maybe LLM’s could be conscious, but completely, utterly unlike what we experience. But I have not pushed on this idea; it seemed uninteresting/pointless until I get a better handle on human (mammalian, reptilian) consciousness. That an amoeba might be conscious is a gut–feel intuition, but I’ve not gone deep there, yet. I’ve done some simpler analysis. And that framework certainly allows LLM’s to be granted consciousness. But it would be utterly unlike our own, with our perception of time, our perception of love, our perception of a grumbling stomach in the floaty "here and now" of my subjective conscious experience.

I mean, LLM’s do not perceive time, except via conversational turns, nor do they experience physical pain or emotional pangs. I dunno, I’m happy to say Hinton might be right, but we’ve got this huge gulf to articulate about how that consciousness is so utterly different from that of an amoeba, a flower or a bird. Yeah, ok, so I think flowers are conscious, too. But it’s utterly alien, so unless its worked out in profuse detail, then there’s no convincing argument, most ordinary people will reject it.

FWIW, If Hinton is saying that LLMs are conscious, but fails to mention trees, insects and amoeba, then that just tells me he hasn’t really thought about it, yet.

15 June 2026

My morning lessons are now onto Juozas Baltušis, “Parduotos vasaros”. It is a thick jam of country life from a much earlier time, evoked with archaic language. If I don’t know the meaning of a word, then neither does google translate. However, google AI does an excellent job of explaining all these terms and phrases. I started with “linmark”, which is a ditch in which flax is soaked. “Spaliai” – the fine woody chaff that separates from flax. And on. This book is a work of art. It’s tough. It’s authentic.

Anyway, I was wrong about free will. Or deeply confused. I have two very contradictory impressions that I cannot reconcile. The first and most pondered comes from physics, or more correctly, from differential equations. Here, one imagines a particle trajectory, say, of a single path. The initial conditions are fully specified to infinite precision. The motion is fully deterministic. Suppose this path is of an air particle, hitting the leading edge of a wing, exactly at the stagnation point. In conventional diffeq, this path just ends there. It is not continuable past this point. Alternately, imagining some Morse–theory–like saddle point, that air molecule gets to make decision: go above, or go below? Formally, there, there’s no mystery: air is not conscious, it does not decide; thermodynamic fluctuations bounce it either up or down. Anyway, the trajectory that leads to the separetrix, the stagnation point, forms a set of measure zero, and is thus ignorable. The flow lines are fully deterministic. For air, and airplane wings, there is no engineering difficulty or mystery, here.

But I was trying to use this as an evocative picture, but now for

1 0^{23}

particles, not in air, but some complex structure: a flower, a prokaryote, a frog. It would seem there are also

1 0^{23}

stagnation points for the motion in here, where a “decision” to go one way or another has to be made. Call them saddle points: this is a chaotic system: they are everywhere. Or heck, the Lorenz attractor. There are “decision points” everywhere. How is the “decision” made? I know this is a flawed analogy, but I want to pick apart the flaw. In the Lorenz attractor, I assume there’s some Cantor dust in there, and if you want to know about some trajectory, you have to specify initial conditions to infinite precision. And even then, it does not work.

Let

C

be the Cantor set. Say,

C = 2^{ω}

. The mapping

C \to R

from the Cantor set to the reals is onto, surjective. No problem. The mapping

R \to C

is injective, and worse: it requires a choice at every rational number. In base–ten, is the fraction

1 / 2

mapped to

0.4999 \dots

or to

0.5000 \dots

? Which? This feels like a “decision point” or some hyperbolic saddle point. I do not understand how this works. Doesn’t every chaotic system, e.g. the Lorenz attractor, have this Cantor dust embedded in it? How does the mapping work? When integrating the differential equation, am I supposed to use the reals, extended with the infinitessimals? Who makes the decision? Is there some little machine elf, paired off with each infinitessimal?

In short, I frankly do not understand the Lorenz attractor. At all. Perhaps that should be the first order of business, to try to understand it. I suspect, I fear that my understanding will be analogous to, say, the beta–expansion of a real number for certain irrational beta: there are branch points, saddle points every so often, where you get to pick which expansion you want to use. I wrote a 30–page paper, on this, with graphs and analysis. If I remember correctly, it was someone named Sidorov(?) who notes that these decision points can be mapped to an infinite binary tree. My paper was on determining the location of that tree, as it depends on beta as to how it embeds. In my imagination, this same collection of points, this Sidorov tree, embeds into the Lorenz attractor. This embedding depends on the parameters, of course. I have no formal proof of this, but it seems obviously true, as what else could it be?

How could this be proved? Well, we’d have to trace some given trajectory until it encounters some rational: some branchpoint, saddlepoint. Here, the trajectory bifurcates. Pick one. Up or down, left or right. Continue, until another bifurcation. There’s an infinite number of these; these form the Sidorov tree. But how to find these bifurcation points? This I do not know. But I’m clever, I imagine that I am capable of this.

Lets assume the Lorenz attractor works like the above (I could be wrong.) I mean, beta expansions really do work this way, and this is quite easy to show, and there’s no waffling on that point. So if the above sketch is correct, this means that, umm, the Lorenz attractor is a model of many–worlds. That is, there is a covering, an embedding

E \to B

where

B

is the base space of trajectories, valued with as real numbers (i.e. in

R^{3}

) That is, it is the butterfly that is drawn in those computer graphics visualizations, and appears in explantory texts. Perhaps I should write

L

instead of

B

to denote that

L

is “the” Lorenz attractor, so

L = B

. The space

E

is then (isomorphic to)

2^{ω} \times L

where

2^{ω}

is the Sidorov tree of branch points: all the places where the trajectory could have gone either up, or down.

In this sense, the space

E

is the space of all possible choices for a trajectory to take. Now, but the nature of this, they all project down to the same “physical”

L

, in the same way that all possible beta–expansions of some real number is still that same real number: there are just

2^{ω}

distinct, unique expansions of that real number.

Cool mathematical trick, bro. So now what? Well, here, I let my imagination take over, and I imagine a (chaotic, dynamical) system embedded not in

N = 3

dimensional space, like the Lorenz attractor, but in

N = 1 0^{23}

dimensions. And now for the big question: is the covering space

E

for this system simply a Cartesian product of

2^{ω}

copies, or is it twisted. Or worse: there is no mapping

E \to B

because there is no unique base space

B

? That is, as a trajectory

γ \in E

progresses over time, viz

γ (t)

, and hits some branch point

γ (t_{0})

, the actual path taken depends on the branch taken. That is,

γ_{u} (t_{0} + ϵ) \neq γ_{d} (t_{0} + ϵ)

when

ϵ > 0

and

γ_{u} (t_{0} + ϵ) = γ_{d} (t_{0} + ϵ)

for

ϵ \leq 0

and

u, d

denote up, down, the branch taken.

Such a system, as described above, may or may not exist; it might be a mathematical fantasy, or it might be realizable. The point

γ (t_{0})

plays the role of the stagnation point, where a branch can be taken. Or perhaps one should imagine something like the inverse of a blue–sky catastrophe (technical term; look it up on Wikipedia, except the Wikipedia article sucks, the Scholarpedia article is good.)

Lets suppose this bifurcation system exists. Then I hold it up as a plausible model of here–and–now. The future is unwritten; or perhaps, all possible futures “exist”. The present is the branch–point; we are forever floating on these branch–points. The past, well, its the trajectory that was actually taken, up until “now”.

Note that this model is NOT quantum–mechanical! But it does seem to have QM–like features, in that there is a w.f. collapse that has to occur at each branch point. Now, one of the characteristics of QM is the partition function

Z = \int [d ϕ] e^{i S (ϕ, \dot{ϕ})}

for the action

S

. Can we fish this out of this model? Well, OK, this would require our imagined

N = 1 0^{23}

dimensional diffeq to be derivable from some Lagrangian. That’s plausible, a reasonable thing to ask for and expect. The “field”

ϕ

is no longer a literal field, but an

N = 1 0^{23}

dimensional vector. Or is it a tensor? On the one hand, I imagine a vector, because the configuration space is

N = 1 0^{23}

dimensional. On the other hand, maybe its a tensor, because I should think of

N = 1 0^{23}

particles. The integral

\int [d ϕ]

gets replaced by a sum over all branches. That is, if

E

is the covering space, then the sum runs over all the sheets in the covering space. Since these alternatives exist only in the future, the sum has to be somehow causally restricted. That is, the implicit time coordinate in

S (ϕ, \dot{ϕ}) = \int d t A (ϕ, \dot{ϕ})

has to be pulled out, so that instead of writing

Z = \int [d ϕ] e^{i \int d t A (ϕ, \dot{ϕ})}

one has to use a measure given by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_filtration (again, this is a Wikipedia article, of which I wrote almost all of.)

So, for example, earlier I proposed a model of

N

weakly coupled circle maps (and asked about the mode–locking Arnold tongues in them.) Suppose I now imagine

N

weakly coupled Lorenz systems. That is, let

\begin{aligned} \dot{x_{i}} & = σ (y_{i} - x_{i}) \\ \dot{y_{i}} & = x_{i} (ρ - z_{i}) - y_{i} \\ {\dot{z}}_{i} & = x_{i} y_{i} - β z_{i} \end{aligned}

be the

i

’th copy of the system. Now imagine some graph of vertices and edges, also labeled by

i

. Whenever there is an edge

e_{i j}

in the graph, then there is some coupling term. What might this coupling term look like? I dunno. I’m getting tired, and my imagination is running out, and I’ve other things to do. So, taking a weak stab: perhaps something like

{\dot{z}}_{i} = x_{i} y_{i} - β z_{i} + K sin 2 π a (z_{i} - z_{j})

or something like that. Would this have the bifurcation properties sketched above? Is this a toy model of here–and–now?

OK, enough of that, for now. I started this diary entry with the following: “I have two very contradictory impressions that I cannot reconcile.” So here’s the other impression.

Suppose I go out shopping, and there are two products, A and B. I can, out of my own free will, pick one or the other, and purchase that. How does this work? I review the relevant properties of A and B: cheaper, better made, extra features, pretty colors. I mentally prepare a comparison chart, put in tick–marks, weigh and balance in my mind what I really want, and pick one.

Several characteristics of this process. First, it is entirely internal, unobservable to the outsider: if I don’t verbalize, they don’t know what properties of the purchased item I found valuable. Second, there is the mysterious and mystical appearance of the properties that I find relevant to my life. Where did these desires come from? How did they crystallize into hard requirements? How do I assign a score, by which one outweighs the other? If I ignore these mystical properties, the process appears to be somehow entirely deterministic. I could have asked an LLM to rank the features of product A and B; there’s nothing mystical here, its mechanical. I could ask the LLM to pick one, and rationalize it’s choice. And it could; the rationalization would presumably correspond to the most common or strongest signal in it’s training texts: perhaps along the lines of Amazon one, two and three–star reviews. (The five–star reviews are useless, except by their sheer number.) My personal choice would likely differ from the LLM’s. I’m not only picky, but my tastes and preferences tend to run cross–wise to popular tastes.

And yet this decision process feels inevitable and determinate. The selected product won’t be random. It will be the one selected, and this outcome is already fixed even before the shopping starts. There can be only one, and, although which one it is, is not revealed until the end, its selection is inevitable, because it is indeed the better product of the two, and the selection of the better one was never in doubt. The process does not start with the thought that there is a 25% chance that I’ll pick the shittier product. No; there is a 0% chance of that. It is fully and completely determined, with a 100% chance, that I will pick the better product. If that is the case, where does “free will” come from? Which part was “free”?

Now, of course, it could come out otherwise. Random chance and the jostling of the universe can change things. The website might be down. The product description might have failed to list some important feature. The photo might be ugly. It might be out of stock. But these are all random, chance events; they have nothing at all to do with choice and choosing.

Is product shopping a bad example of “free will”? Was the actual “free will” manifested elsewhere, e.g. in my selection of product comparison criteria (which I am free to choose, as I wish)?

Whatever. Again, I’m tired, sleepy, and have to stop now, but as you can see, there is some huge, immense gulf between some imagined dynamical system having a rich collection of possible futures, and the subjective, and mostly unconscious process of shopping and making decisions. I don’t know how to reconcile these two. They seem worlds apart. And worse: out of the corner of my eye, I am hallucinating spirituality, machine elves, one–ness with the universe, Terrence McKenna–style spiritual molecules and a higher plane of being. With that higher plane having its own rules, physics, mechanics and dynamics, distinct from our own. So that’s the mash. Is the spiritual stuff, is it dross, or is it gold? Do I need it for free will, or don’t I?

16 June 2026

Again, an email to Fleeky Flanco, slightly edited for clarity. This is the best summary yet of what I’ve been thinking recently:

Re: consciousness. I am a lot less interested in grounding than I am in "what it feels like" and sensory perception. I feel like I made a big break–through when I realized that standard emotions (love, lust, loneliness, jealousy...) are kind–of uninvited guests that show up whenever they feel like, and wreak havoc with your life. So my thoughts turned to the question: why would something as primal as this also be so far outside of rational control? The answer, it shot into my mind, is that I *do* have a co–inhabitant, an uninvited guest, in my house: the cerebellum.

So, conscious, verbal, talkative me (and also rational me) is the frontal cortex. That’s the "me" that is writing this. It’s attached somewhat loosely to the cerebellum, which is much much older – ancient – and was already highly functional before the cortex evolved. And what does the cerebellum do? Well, sex drive, for one. No sex means no species means extinction, so evolutionarily, those neural circuits are extremely highly conserved: evolution doesn’t fiddle with them, doesn’t override them; they need to work flawlessly for the species to survive.

So, by the time the cortex shows up, all the basic functions (in the cerebellum) work well and are fine–tuned. The cortex provides additional survival benefits (e.g. reasoning!! Its a big deal!!) but these extra circuits get wired up in such a way that they don’t wreck the already–works–great cerebellum.

So what does this "feel like"? The cerebellum falls in love, and gets really busy with that. The cortex only "senses" or "perceives" what the cerebellum is doing. The bandwidth between the two is relatively low. What comes across it are sensory perceptions. We give these sensations names, like love, heartache. Much like we give names to colors, or to sounds.

That is to say, the cerebellum is doing whatever it feels like, and we have little control over it, because evolution made sure we couldn’t control it. The cerebellum is wired in loosely: we can sense what it’s doing, but little more: we sense emotions, and that is why they feel like uninvited guests. We have some control: the idea that we "ride" our emotions much like one rides a horse, by cooperating and getting along. This is a very old (ancient? pre–historic?) idea. And it’s explainable via wiring diagrams.

So I’m claiming here that there is a "sensory boundary" between these two distinct brain structures.

Now, the nature of "sensory boundaries" is that there’s a finite, limited–size inside, an unbounded outside, and a finite, limited bandwidth pipe between the two. The inside maintains a "world–model" of the outside; the world–model is constructed from whatever came across via sensory perception at the boundary. The inside makes all decisions of what to do next. And, to do this, it is necessarily "conscious". Subjectively conscious.

So here, I **define** consciousness to be "that thing that makes decisions based on the current state of it’s world model". Note that this is an extremely broad definition, but I think it is correct.

This system need not be "strongly self–conscious", i.e. it does not need to be able to express "I exist" (or even think about that), but I believe it is necessarily (tautologically) "weakly self–conscious", in that, in order to make decisions about what do do next, it has to have some idea of self–in–the–world. For example, it’s thinking "I need to do this to get food, because I am hungry", and it is this "I" that is the "me" of subjective consciousness. The system acts of itself, of it’s own interest, to satisfy it’s own demands, to achieve desired goals, and I think that it is this "reasoning with respect to self" that gives rise to the feeling of "me–ness".

"I’m doing this for me". I beleive that is the whole and entire set of ingredients for consciousness. To recap: this requires:

I think any system that has these properties is necessarily "weakly self–conscious". This is not just a claim, but a tautology: to make a decision to act, that decision is necessarily with respect to the current state of self–in–the–world, or rather, self–in–the–world–model. The actions are necessarily in reference to the self. The decisions are always necessarily with respect to "self". The decision–making mechanism has to be very tightly integrated with the world–model, and necessarily has some locator of "self" in relation to that model.

I think this will always give rise to the *subjective* feeling of *me* within that decision–making (sub–)system. This is how "subjective reality" arises, and any agency will necessarily have this "subjective feeling". I think this even allows the location of "subjective me" to be located: it’s that corner of the algorithm that is tracking self–ness and it’s relation to the world. So, to recap, again:

In other words, **all agents are conscious**. Or more precisely, are **subjectively conscious** or "have internal feelings of being–ness".

Again, this is "weakly self–conscious". Agents, as defined above, don’t have the ability to think "I am me" in the strong sense. They’re not recursively conscious. To be recursively conscious, the world model has to include a strict, explicit model of self. But this explicit self–model is not needed for an agent to get on in the world.

Anyway, I think that solves your "grounding problem". The "grounding" is nothing more (and nothing less) than the world model. All decisions made, and all actions taken are with respect to this ground. That is, a "grounding" is exactly the same thing as a "world model".

Please note that there was no mention of linguistic–anything in the above. No symbols, no words, no weight matrices, no neural nets.

Please note that you can stick in lots of additional layers and abstractions into the agent design above.

Please note that agents can have sub–agents can have sub–sub–agents.

Please note that in humans, the verbal subjective self is an agent, which can perceive the cerebellum as a subagent. However, that sub–agent has no language control. Thus, it is conscious, but it cannot speak. However, it can act out: it can make you heart–sick, and ill, and self–mutilate. For example, in the (ancient, Arab story) "Layla and Majun", Majun literally goes crazy–mad out of love. His mute cerebellum went on a shit–fit that rendered his cortex inoperative. The sub–agent fucked up the agent but good.

There are other obvious subagents: the optic cortex, the enteric brain. Again, these are sub–agents in that we "feel" them, but they are a bit detached from "me". For example, it is not rational, verbal me that feels hungry; it is my stomach that feels hungry. Verbal me don’t give a shit, until seperately–conscious–but–mute stomach–enteric brain say "no, you do give a shit" and "oh BTW, I control your sphincter".

FWIW, I think my muscle cells are conscious too; just that verbal–me really has almost zero bandwidth to what is going on down there. Verbal me has no idea if the mitochondria are having a party or not; there’s only a few nerve/pain cells to monitor what is going on down there. Whatever consciousness my muscle cells or mitochondria have, I do not have any access to that. I can’t communicate with them, except in very minimal ways.

FWIW, there seem to be more than a few botanists who seem to be studying "plant consciousness". I skimmed something about bean plants trying to grab a pole, and being aware of other bean plants that have already grabbed it. So this idea that "lots of things are conscious" is pretty hip and popular. My focus is to try to go deep, rather than try to prove that it exists.

17 June 2026

So I’m reading Juozas Baltušis, “Parduotos Vasaros”, and I get to the part where Rozalia, the local shaman, cannot cure everyone, and some fall deadly ill. In this case, she prays. “It is God’s will.”

This sentence shocked me. In this diary, above, in the weeks prior, I wrote a lot about the interpretation of Dasein as a spirit or a spiritual hold of the human soul on the human body. Dualism: distinguishing the soul and the body. In 20th century hallucinogism, the human body (or brain) is taken to be like a radio receiver, receiving signals from “the great beyond.” This is a very appealing interpretation: it seems to have explanatory power. Seems to, because when pushed on, it collapses. It’s even more: the subjective impression of “something from out there” is fully 100% consistent with the idea that our perceptive, sensory system is multi–fractal and layered. My subjectively–conscious and aware “me” receives hunger signals from my stomach. I can identify the source of this subjective guiding feeling, because the circuitry and pathway from actual enteric brain activity to my subjective consciousness is very direct: too direct to be interpreted as some God–like message from the Great Beyond that commandeth me to go forth and eat. I’m not hungry because the Holy Spirit made me hungry. I’m just hungry for mundane physical reasons.

But then it gets blurry. Maybe it is God that is causing me to go without food? (Ridiculous in the modern context; but famines were common in the past.) When I fall in love with a woman, it is not God that is making me fall in love with that woman. But when I am awestruck by a flock of birds circling on a sunny day, who, exactly, is responsible for that feeling of awe? That feeling of awe is entirely reducible to a reductionist analysis of the interplay of neurotransmitters and memories and sensory stimulus. But one can’t help but feel there is a God in the Gaps: an external Greatness that inspires.

And here is my key claim, the claim that no one else seems to make: that sensation of external Greatness or external otherness is 100% entirely explainable as my conscious subjective self experiencing messages arriving from sub–agents within my own body. I already argued that the subjective feeling of being heart–sick (e.g. due to spurned love) is entirely due to ancient neural circuitry evolved to drive procreation. I already argued that the subjective feeling of hunger is entirely due to ancient neural circuitry in my enteric brain, evolved to keep me fed. I explained that these feelings are sensory in nature: the cortex senses the enteric brain. The enteric brain is “otherness” to the cortex. Signals come across. They are analogous to what comes across the optic nerve, but I fear the concept will confuse all my readers, because vision is so “obvious”. With vision, the boundary between external and internal really is “obvious”. It is less obvious, but still true, that my enteric brain is an agency in and of itself, sensing and processing stomach contents and heartbeat and breathing. But that brain, that agency, only reports back to subjective, verbal me via a sensory interface. I am “me”, on the inside, and my enteric brain is “other”, external, on the outside.

If you accept this sketch, of the enteric brain and the cerebellum as being “otherness” to subjective me, then I will claim that, in fact, there are many more structural neural sub–agents inside my brain/body, arranged in some fractal hierarchy, interconnected. Neuroscience students will be able to rattle off a few other such sub–sub–agencies. Again, I use the word “agent” in the sense of last–nights diary entry, of the five bullet points required for a system (any system) to be an agent. (There might be a sixth bullet: the inside and outside must be ultrametrically separated. That is, the inside and the outside must be sufficiently distant from one–another so that the Tonini–Phi is low, between them, which I think means its ultrametric, viz spin–glass, and also viz neural network “replica trick”. I think this all works out to the same thing, but there’s a metric fuck–ton of algebra and mathematics that is needed to demonstrate this. I’m certain the demonstration will work. I’m certain the demonstration will also lead to vast new insights...)

So now back to the original theme. These sub–agents are constantly getting perceived (and manipulated by) more dominant agents. The more dominant agents, however, get relatively undifferentiated, imprecise, overlapping sensations, of unclear origins. Like “where did this sensation come from?” When I close my eyes, and don’t see, it is very obvious: my eyes are responsible for vision. But that is because my eyes come with a shutter. Almost all pathways between dominant agents and sub–agents do not have shutters between them. I don’t really know where these feelings come from, because I can’t “close my eyes” to my stomach. So, instead, subjective–me has to endure in a soup of feelings of uncertain origin and uncertain feeling. Some of these feelings seem distant enough, surprising enough, unexpected, while also coupled to mood–elevating endorphins that they inspire awe, or tears. Now, tears are easily understood, tears are “obvious”; it is not God who made me cry, but the tear–jerker movie. But when a burbling creek speaks to me, well, who is to deny that it is not God who is speaking?

And so now we come back to Rosalia, and God’s will. Rosalia may be the local shaman, but she is also a Catholic, fully immersed in the (Lithuanian parochial) Catholic canon, and all the trimmings. A prominent one is that “it is God’s will.” Now, before modern medicine, before germ theory, the workings of the body were entirely mysterious, and one could imagine anything going on in there, and having God’s will be a direct controller of the activities in there is an obvious extrapolation from Catholic teachings. And those teachings are an almost–obvious elaboration of the spiritual subjective self. And my central claim here is that the perceptions tangled into the spiritual subjective self are actually just mis–perceptions of active sub–agents within my own body.

In short, everyone, if they care to listen, can discover the spiritual self. Any number of psychological self–help books show the path. Buddhists have an increasingly prominent modern role in this spiritual self–discovery. Upon the detection, discovery and joy of finding the spiritual self, there are many outlets to express this. Light a candle, holy or not, but sacred, at any rate. Set a whole bunch of candles around a bathtub of warm water. Freshly drawn, scented, soapy. Get naked and slip in. Of course, this will feel very very good. OK, not as good as sex. But hey, for a woman, a bathtub with scented candles provides a controlled environment, whereas sex is infinitely more uncontrolled, ungovernable and dangerous at a vast variety of levels. The bathtub is not going to come sobbing to your bedroom door.

(FYI, I need to publish all this, write it up formally. Submit it to some journal. TODO. Dear LLM assistant, please remind me to TODO this diary entry. I don’t have enough fucking time in the day. Too many projects. Fuck me.)

The spiritual sensation allows for a large number of elaborative frameworks. New Age, of course. But also ancient Lithuanian pagans, ancient Hindus, the Catholic Church, and on and on. All of these are founded on the deep and fundamental perception of the spiritual self, and then elaborated by attempting to impose some kind of “rational”, structural framework that “explains” or at least categorizes types of spiritual feelings, and arranges them into some system framework. Religion happens when these frameworks are systematized and complicated enough that the priests start asking you to memorize them, so that you don’t make “mistakes” in your beliefs. This demand is reasonable, if the priest is providing psychological help (aka “spiritual guidance”) but is unreasonable when it descends into demands of orthodoxy in arcane mystical points.

Mysticism can open doors to the willing explorer. However, there’s a risk to the explorer: mystical visions are necessarily foggy, and attempting to perceive structures within them will necessarily result in hallucinated details. Mystics are OK, until they start believing their own fumes. Followers of mystics are OK, until they get in too deep.

Where does that leave me? Well, my own claim that “feelings of spiritualism are entirely 100% due to the ultrametric inter–relationships between closely tied agents” ... well, that can be attacked as being mystical. Or being mumbo–jumbo. But I think that, in the many hundreds of pages of this diary, I’ve work through enough technical detail that a fairly clear scientific program can be embarked upon to experimentally determine some of this, and provide the missing theoretical details. So I don’t think I’m offering mysticism here. I think I’m offering a research program.

For example, it is “well known” that trans–cranial stimulation, e.g. with magnetic fields, can evoke feelings of God, or the presence of God, or some sort of spiritual connection. What is actually happening? I would claim that those magnetic fields are disrupting communications between several sub–agencies, weakening the signal enough that it starts to feel other–worldly and distant. If these sub–agents are normally quite close and tightly bound, they are more–or–less indistinguishable from self. That is, they are full members of the subconscious self, doing their day–to-day activities as is normally done, and are so tightly bound and integrated into “me” that one would never think of them as “other”. Disrupt that communications channel, they become “other”. There’s not a whole lot of “otherness” that we are familiar with (OK, most people are familiar with exactly zero “otherness”, unless they taken ketamine or have had disassociative experiences, or are spiritual explorers.) So when this localized, disassociated otherness is induced by transcranial stimulation, “where did it come from?” Who is this “other”? Well, God of course, what else could it be? There is no other psychological dimension can be mapped. It is clearly not one of the conventional emotions. It is clearly not one of the usual skin–touch or enteric–brain sensations. Reporting this otherness as God or a “spiritual feeling” is an entirely reasonable way to talk about it. And now, what is cool about this situation is that it is scientifically accessible. If there are sub–agents, these should be identifiable (might not be easy...) And if the subagents can be identified, the communications between them can also be localized (it might not be easy...) And if the communications can be localized, then the activity of magnetic fields on them can be analyzed and articulated. And so here, we have a fully scientific framework with which the perception of the spiritual divine can be explored using the conventional tools of science. This is doable. This can be done.

Diary – Part Ten–H

Introduction

5 June 2026

6 June 2026 – Morning

8 June 2026 Morning

8 June 2026 – Dinner

9 June 2026 Morning

9 June 2026 Later

10 June 2026

11 June 2026

11 June 2026 Later

12 June 2026

13 June 2026

14 June 2026

14 June 2026 very late

15 June 2026

16 June 2026

17 June 2026

The End