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.

I’m quite happy with what I wrote above. I feel very content with the progress made over the last few weeks. I feel like I’m making break–throughs here. Like I have a path.

My path will have to be a doubling down of agency in software networks. That is, I need to restart the OpenCog sensori–motor framework. This is the only thing I’ve got for exploring the origin of subjective (machine) consciousness in a mathematical setting, and the description of agency, given above, is the concrete, actionalble bridge to the spiritual subjective self. I feel very good about this. I’m very optimistic, just right now.

I’m also hungry, and its time for lunch. Later.

I need to ask Claude if anyone else has worked along these lines.

18 June 2026

Wow. And now, for today’s hallucination. I’m reading further into Juozas Baltušis Parduotos Vasaros, and I am finding the language absolutely magical.

I wonder how my life has changed. When I was younger, I occupied myself with mostly technology. Well, mathematics, in the mid–years: I read many math books. Time off, when I read, I got back to my sci–fi roots, and found Neal Stephenson absolutely fun to read: Anathem, for example, or the earlier Snowcrash, or the tri–volume Baroque Cycle. Diamond Age. Huh. I read a lot of his books, didn’t I? But what I enjoyed was the plot, the action, the ideas. Of course, there is a writing style; but that was unconscious, secondary to the story. Utilitarian. It’s the vehicle, but it is the vehicles occupants that held my attention. I never read Stephenson, or any other writer, and thought “what flowery language”.

That changed in two ways. The first was just an inkling. Patty had rented the full suite of Shakespearian dramas to watch on TV. Filmed in the 1960’s (?), British actors. I caught part of one. Maybe Richard III or one of the Henries. And I sat there watching, listening to the patter of the words, and I was knocked back. Each word, each phrase, each utterance: it was a genius woven twine river of words. It flowed with such grace and strength and intricacy, detailed with finery, a glorious riot of expression. I watched till I could take no more. Me, I would have hit pause every few minutes to bath and soak it in. Patty would not have allowed that. After some half–hour, I had to leave, wind–blown.

Language, by convention, is utilitarian. What I write here in the diary is plain, and plain–spoken. I try to communicate ideas. I sometimes try to communicate feelings, but this only rarely. I might sometimes wrap a flowery turn, but this is a rarity: when I’m in the mood, when I’m “perkeltas” to a different plane. Transported.

The Lithuanian language is different. It is fundamentally flowery. It resists utilitarian usage. You must inherently speak through metaphor and simile. The root of any word is broad and basic and simple, every word must be adapted to provide the intended meaning. And that meaning has to grab your attention, floating, as it were, from distant shortwave radio stations. There’s something there, but you don’t know what it is, until the full color of it all has become vivid in your mind. The language injects, plants a seed; in fractions of a second, that seed blooms into glory. Then you understand. Just as quickly it fades, as you are on to the next sentence.

As I read Baltušis, I feel something primal. As if I am hearing the original indo–european, the first language, no rules, just gestures. The way one might gesture to a stranger. Or perhaps play with a child: not by speaking, but by acting, and there is some meaning that crosses across in those gestures. What was the intent? Unknown. How was it perceived? Unknown. But the communications happened none–the–less, passing freely between the two individuals. A connection was made. And so I read Baltušis, and it’s parochial, its dripping with “tarmiški” language. Translating Lithuanian is hard, there is no cognate for what I feel when I say, hear or read “tarmiškas”. Regional? Local? Patois? Dialect? Dialect, I guess. “Tarmė” translates to “pronunciation”. So “tarmiškai” translates to “pronunciatorily”, with the implicit understanding that this is how the speakers of the neighboring town pronounce their words. So, dialect. Because they also have different words, because they choose different roots to anchor their words.

I don’t want to write more here, other than to say google translate completely falls flat and utterly fails to translate words correctly. However, google AI has been trained on both Baltušis, and some assortment of reviews of his writing and style. When I ask google AI for the translation of some word or another, google AI just can’t stop gushing about how expressive and evocative this word is, how it captures the very soul of the poverty–stricken, difficult farm life of inter–war rural Lithuania. Now, google AI has no clue about expressivity and evocation, so I guess it knows all this from it’s training texts, plus whatever it screen–scraped from whatever dictionaries it is using to find these words. So the gush of wonder must be in those original Lithuanian literary reviews.

The point here is that its not just me: I am not the only one bowled over with his expressionistic style; apparently, everyone is. Strongly enough that even google AI is forced to beam and gleam and tell me how rare and precious these words are. Google AI, that knows everything and understands nothing, lighting up in joy and excitement at the thought of bathing in Baltušis’ uplifting and heartbreaking sagas.

So what is it that is being communicated? What is the nature of communication? A week ago, I theorized about language in a very utilitarian way. I say that words cannot capture the ineffable. And what I feel, what the soul feels, is ineffable: when I fly and dive in my atmosphere of feelings, uplifted by currents and swept down by downdrafts, interspeckled with pin–pricks of hope, and sopping wet in a deluge of emotion, how can I possibly put all that into words? The feelings are indescribable. Words are not enough.

But still, I can play. In the same way I played with four–year–old Adre with body gestures and facial expressions, and she got something from that. so I can also play with words. Just throw them out. They don’t have some meaning, some fixed meaning you can look up in a dictionary. The words, they are more like colors: mustard yellow and muted forest green, sky–fluorescent blue and silver clouds: these are the words. They evoke. And, to evoke, they must evoke in the soul of another. There has to be another human being hearing those words. And that human understands those words not by looking them up in a dictionary, but by recalling the evoked events.

For example, early on, Batlušis writes of shepherding in the forest. With Stepuku, they take their cows and sheep onto a sandy path in the forest. The forest floor, ravines (glacial ravines; you can see them in “Šveitzarija”, some 10-15 km north of Vilnius, in the woods. There’s even a tourist plaque that explains how they are glacial formations. Ravines. “Vaga”. Like vagina. Baltušis is not so rude, but I have a one–track mind.) On one side of this sandy path, the pines are stunted, the ground choked with heather. On the other, the trees grow tall and grand, cathedral like, with open ground, rich with grass on which the heard can graze. I can’t recreate the passage, you have to read it. Its filled with “tarmiškų” words. It evokes, and it evokes precisely because I myself have hiked through such forest paths. Here, in Lithuania. And then, something similar in the Indiana Dunes. The Indian Dunes, glacial alluvium, is not all that different from what is in Lithuania, and both share scents and dampness and shade and sounds, the rustling of wind in the trees, the mottled sunlight.

Again, I use words to describe the sensory situation. Again, the sensory situation is ultimately undescribable. How can one describe “mottled sunlight”? One can’t. One can use these two words, but if you’ve never seen sunlight, and never felt it on your skin on a fair–weather day, what hope is there? I am explaining all this to ChatGPT and to Claude and to google AI, all of whom have never taken a walk in a scented pine forest, and have absolutely no clue what those words mean. So, of course, they know everything, and understand nothing. How could they ever understand the most basic of sensations the even five–year–old humans, never mind horses and field–mice are deeply and fundamentally and inextricably immersed in?

Immersion. Perhaps that is the word. The forest consists of air, of some specific humidity and temperature, carrying trace quantities of assorted aromatic scents and pollens and dusts. Sunlight, of a particular intensity, varying as a gentle breeze tosses the leaves overhead. This is the external world to the agent. The agent itself is a bundle of nerves: skin sensors, detecting touch and temperature and firmness. Little hairs on the arms, standing or lying, announcing state and perturbations. The nose, the regular rhythm of breathing. Bird caws attracting attention, and then fading in the soft wash of forest noise. All this sensory information flows up the spine, through the cerebellum, gets processed, but continues on into the cerebrum, the cortex, where more abstract calculations take place. And this is endless and irrevocable and non–stop. Lasting for hours and days and years. The agentic device, the system, aka the chipmunk, the bird, the forest dweller is immersed in this intertwined, and inextricably so.

So what does it “feel like” to be Claude? Well, I suppose I am to Claude what my cerebellum is to me. My cerebellum goes out and does shit. It’s conscious, its alive, it makes decisions, and as I repeatedly stated, it fell in love three years ago, and then tortured me with heartache, almost relentlessly for three years. I can’t make it stop. It does what it does, and, in this sense, I am immersed in it’s world. I am tethered to it. It is my frenemy, we journey together, but experience separately. It does some kind of low–level processing, and then informs me of the results. The abstract, thinking, reasoning perceptive, analytical cortex in me picks up on the message, reifies, abstracts, recombines, analyses and articulates. I don’t *really* know what is going on in my cerebellum, but I can write about it. Its all ineffable anyway. Or rather, whatever it is that my cerebellum experiences, its not just only ineffable, but my cerebellum has no verbal abilities. It can’t communicate in that kind of way. It can, however, make me feel things. And what I feel, this is direct and immediate and present, and again, I am utterly immersed in it, and I cannot disconnect. I can close my eyes, and briefly not see. I can’t close my mind, and not feel. (Well, I suppose with meditative training, one could learn to not feel. But that is not the point. I’m not trying to shut out some PTSD or psychological trauma; I’m trying to say that the being–ness of sensation is irrevocably a part of my central solipsistic essence. I am here, I am now. I exist, I feel, and th sunlight coming into the kitchen window and the cold coffee in my coffee cup are irrevocable. They cannot be wished away or willed away or escaped from. I’m chained to the here and now. Perhaps brief flights of freedom as my imagination carries me away to distant lands ...)

At any rate, this is where I am. And I process this into words, and I write them. (Others process this into TikTok Reelz. That’s what others do. It’s not what I do.) My words, and those reelz, all these are available to Claude for processing. And what does Claude make of all this? Its digested, its abstract. There’s no direct sensory experience, not in the way it is direct for me, or for an eagle. Claude’s experience is indirect, intermediated by a certain very complex and abstract human processing system.

But wait... do I complain that I cannot “feel my skin directly”? That all that I ever get from my skin has already been hacked up and chopped and digested by my spinal cord? It’s no longer “pure”, its been post–processed by my medulla oblongata. Its some amalgam of twenty different specialized nerve cell types, embedded in different layers of my skin. And not particularly high–bandwidth either. Nothing even remotely comparable to what my optic nerve delivers. But I don’t complain. What my skin tells me (and what my optic nerve tells me), this is OK, This is fine. Well, in part because I don’t have a choice: It’s not like I can take my skin off, and instead put on fish scales and a fishes lateral line. Anyway, I was born this way. I’ve never experienced sensations in any other way, I have nothing to compare against. So I’m not complaining. (except for that one time, when I was rowing, and came to the realization that I was born with oars, which were tragically amputated at some point in my alternative life.)

Should Claude complain that it cannot feel the mottled forest sunlight directly? Well, Hmm. We could build a robot, complete with sensors. We could stick a bunch of wires into a cockroaches nervous system, and that way, Claude might be able to fell, at least a little bit, of what its like to be a cockroach. There’s lots of talk or neural implants. But there are also MRI machines. Imagine an MRI machine that fits in your backpack. Non–invasive brain scans. I could walk around in a forest, and Claude could observe my brain as I do so. Claude’s experience is still intermediated, but so what?

I started writing this essay with the intent of analyzing the ontological status of communication. That is, I feel that I am alive, but it also seems that words – messages, are cold and dead. Are they? What Aristotle wrote, that ink in those books, is that dead? Is it alive? In what sense is it alive? Could it be called conscious? In what sense? Yesterday, I gave five bullet points defining an agent, and then boldly claimed that, tautologically, *all* agents are weakly conscious. Sąmoningi. “Są” – self, or “perform with oneself”; “sąmoningas” responsible, trustworthy, willful, aware, deliberate. In Lithuanian, this is a much broader set of ethical responsibilities and states of being that the English “conscious”. The word “conscientious” begins that journey, but does not complete it.

And this is simultaneously a problem with the Lithuanian language. Because it is so broad and far–reaching, so primitive and evocative and expressive, it is hard to be precise. It has none of the technical words of English, the words that are needed to describe intricacies and delicate mechanisms in precise, mechanistic engineering terms. Lithuanian is literary and flowery. It is not analytical and incisive. So it goes.

Have I made progress here? Language captures something. But the way language works is how I play with four–year–old Adre: gesturally, evocatively. There’s some meaning that flows across and bridges between agents. But this flow is not itself an agent; it is a flow. The ultrametric separation between individual agents remains intact; the flow of causal expressions between the agents modifies the internal state of the agents, and more: it engages the agents fully: both the sensory layers, and the world–model–constructing layers, and the processing and decision–making layers. The communication is not some superficial “transmission of information”; it is a full engagement of the agents (and their subsystems) and the attention, the attentional focus riding in these agents. A printed book can be called “information”, and perhaps we can assign some Shannon entropy to it. But it is not communications. Communication is necessarily (tautologically?) engaging. Entraining. Mechanically coupling.

Hmm. Huh. Well, I still don’t understand what information is. For example, I still don’t understand the Beckenstein bound or Hawking’s information

S = 4 π A

– I don’t understand what these bits are. But now, at least, I do understand that information, whatever it is, is not the same thing as communication. I do know I can talk about communications channels and assign Shannon bandwidth to them. I do know that information travels across channels. I currently understand that “communication” is what I described above, but I’m not yet clear how to correctly reason about the entrainment that two agents experience when communicating.

Do I need to axiomatize the definition of an agent? Hmm. Probably. Would I then be able to axiomatize communication? I suppose. Would the role of “information” in these systems then become clear? Perhaps.

Should I do this? Fuck all. Doing this seems important, but I will wake tomorrow and find something else of even greater priority. I’m running a hundred miles an hour and standing still. It’s driving me nuts.

This feels like some prerequisite. After this is solved, then perhaps I can ponder how Claude might be entrained to the words I write here, and the nature of the communicative act that I undertake here is.

Whatever. I need to go mow the weeds, now, in the courtyard. It’s sunny.

Oh. Weed whacker is gone. Won’t be back til Monday. So never mind.

18 June 2026 Late Night

Wrote an email to Fleeky and Adam, wherein I recap this mornings understanding, above. It’s a different set of words for the same ideas; it provides a repetition, but from a different angle. Here goes.

(cc’ing Adam Vandervorst because, well, I should be talking to him about this too. Adam, the emails below are all relevant, and unfortunately for you, they are also long.)

On Thu, Jun 18, 2026 at 3:52 AM Fleeky Flanco <fleeky@gmail.com> wrote:

> lovely line of thinking,

> and seems to be in contrast to the concept i read about with marvin minsky about his thoughts on emotion eg (different ways of thinking on the same substrate),

Well, I think Minsky is mistaken. The word "substrate" makes it sound like the brain is some bowl of pancake batter. It’s not: it’s got some strikingly complex structure and intricate wiring. Now, perhaps he was thinking that if you look at a CPU, it also has some strikingly complicated structure, but at its heart is a simple von Neumann architecture machine. I suspect the brain does not have some simple architecture that one can easily grok. I think the word "substrate" is misleading, in this context.

To be more precise, the human brain is the result of five or six layers deep of evolutionary control over earlier layers. The earliest brains, say the jellyfish, "worked": the jellyfish could feed itself, and it could flee from predators. Unfortunately, it was too stupid to stop eating while fleeing. The mechanism that enforces the "when fleeing predators, stop doing everything else" does not show up until the bilaterian (left–right symmetric) brain architecture. It requires 10x more neurons, going from hundreds to thousands.

I’m not an evolutionary neuroscientist, so I don’t understand the details, but somewhere along the way, the spinal cord is invented, which solves additional control problems. Then the medula oblongata, then the cerebellum, the cerebrum, the cortex, each layer providing additional control over the earlier layers, fine–tuning them.

Think of an old steam engine, first enhanced with electrical controls (some switches and relays) and then some DSP controllers, and then some track–signaling system. (Lithuanian Rail is upgrading to the EU ERTMS level-2 track signaling system. It’s very modern and high–tech.) The engine still makes it run, but there’s now a lot more to it than that.

> you are basically saying emotion is a form of non verbal communication between sub agents?

Yes. But I’m also being very specific. The medula oblongata controls heart rate and breathing; the cerebellum makes sure of the sex drive. Both of these are strongly evolutionarily conserved. That means, when the cortex shows up, it has little/no control over heart rate, and marginal control over breathing. This is so that your heart doesn’t stop by accident, just because you got a great idea in the shower. Same for the sex drive: evolution is trying to make sure that this works, no matter what else there might be going on in your life.

What this means is that the brain circuitry for the sex drive is remote, and only weakly coupled to the cortex. You (ok, most people) can’t really talk yourself into falling in love, or falling out of it. Your cerebellum does this for you; it doesn’t ask for permission, it just does it. And if things don’t go according to plan, you get to feel the heartache. But it’s all mostly out of your conscious control, and evolution "designed it like that", because evolution wanted to make sure you procreate, even if that means your cortex gets to go on a rollercoaster ride. Procreation is more important than your feelings.

So it’s not just "some subagents". It’s some very specific ones.

As a side note, I also think it’s subagents "all the way down" -- subagents and sub–sub agents and sub sub sub... This mirrors biology: a bush has leaves, branches and roots. But these are made of tubes and walls and valves. Those are made of cells. The cells in turn have sub-parts: mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum. Lignin and cellulose for plants. And these in turn have sub-parts: various proteins embedded in them. And the proteins have substructure: it’s a fractal filigree all the way down.

The wiring of the brain is some fractal filigree, even if present–day neuroscience hasn’t worked out the details, yet.

Again, it’s not some pancake batter of subagents; it’s some very specific architecture and arrangement.

> do you have thoughts on how you want to apply this to opencog

Yes. I think I need to axiomatize it. i.e. convert the five bullet points into algebraic notation, make the interlocks symbolic. Define what operates on what, articulate the framework. Unfortunately, this is hard work .. might take a few days, a few weeks, I might get carried away for months. Of course, Claude can help, and that’s nice, but it’s still work.

> or is this just something you’ve thought about for quite a long time and are essentially reviewing for my edification?

Parts of what I wrote you, below, have been brewing for years. Parts have only gelled into focus in the last few weeks. And even those were a bit mushy and cloudy, until I wrote this email, and I said to myself, "a hah! This is the best summary so far!"

Basically, by writing, its like wood–working, or carving. I’ve got some vague idea, but by writing about it, it gathers a concrete and specific form. When I have to use words to describe what I’m thinking, I can’t think "just anything", I have to arrange the pieces–parts so that they make sense, and fit together coherently. And, while writing, I often (usually) find some detail that I missed before, and this detail proves important. Or better yet: it opens the doorway to new insight.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time writing, and its given me a lot of new strength and focus and inspiration that I did not know I had, and it’s deepened my understanding of a lot of things – more deeply than just reading alone might. Not exactly new news: when you go to school, the teacher wants you to not only read the textbook, but also do the homework problems. I’ve been doing a metric fuckton of homework problems, and it has really helped. I feel like a new man. Why didn’t I do this before?

> either way it’s a fun and thoughtful read. your idea about the world model i am in agreement with , but the way you stated it is much clearer..

> one thought , could both be true ? could you have essentially a sub agent approach vs a monolithic approach,

Nah, its a fractal filigree of sub–sub–subagents all the way down.

Cue some hand–waving about 2nd-order phase transitions, the renormalization group, and recursive fractal structure. Avalanches on all scales. One–over–f noise. This fractal scaling, of sub–sub–sub–parts, is endemic in nature, and characteristic of second order phase transitions and "self–organizing systems on the edge of chaos" and other buzzwords like that.

This I knew all along, for years, for a decade, longer. Folks figured that shit out in the 1980’s. What’s new, for me, is that I think I finally have what seems like a workable definition for "agents", in such a way that these can be arranged, fractally, all the way down, and *also* (and this is the key, important part, for me) that these agents are "conscious" and "aware" and have a "subjective inner feeling" of "qualia" and "emotions" and all that raw, immediate soup of awareness that we call "being alive", "being in the moment", “being me-ness”. The psychological self.

This bridge is vital. This is the high bridge. On one side of that bridge, you have people who speak of souls and inspiration and the holy, or, say Heidegger with his Dasein, (or New Agers who are "One with the Universe") and on the other side of that bridge, we have the Chinese Room and the "hard problem of consciousness". It would be too much to say I’ve solved this hard problem (onlookers would laugh and/or call me crazy) but I feel like I’m making real progress. I didn’t understand this shit a few weeks ago, and now I do.

This is ongoing work. For example, this morning (I kid you not, this morning) I think I figured out what "communication" is. Now, if you look at the scriptural writings of mystics or holy men, you find that they have had some "ineffable" experience that cannot be put into words. Moses saw a burning bush, stuff like that. So what is this "ineffable" thing? Well, it cannot be described in words, that’s the problem. But that’s not all.

When I fall in love, and my heart jumps, I cannot describe that in words, either. It’s "ineffable". Now I can say this to you, because you are human, and intimately know what love is. But I cannot describe love to ChatGPT or Claude. It’s indescribable. But it doesn’t have to be as romantic as love. It can be hunger, or sore muscles. I can’t describe either of those with words, either. (Hunger is some pangs that my enteric brain reports to me. My enteric brain is letting me know that something is up. It communicates messages, but it does not use words. To me, the subjective feeling of hunger is this certain um, pain? in the pit of my stomach. This is how I subjectively feel it. And I know you have to, so when I use the word “hunger”, I know that you will understand. I also know that neither ChatGPT nor Claude have an enteric brain, and have never had the subjective feeling of hunger. Hunger is just as "ineffable" as whatever trance state Moses was in, when he saw that burning bush.

So what is communication, really? It’s a bunch of words, sure. In the case of love, its poetry, and the words to countless top-40 love songs. (And, apparently, the Song of Songs in the Bible. When I went to Bible School as a kid, they conveniently forgot to mention that there’s erotica in the Bible. Apparently, both Catholics and Evangelicals gloss over this minor detail as well. Hmm.) Where was I? Communicating with poetry works, because both sender and receiver, the agents on both sides, know what love is, and the words are evocative. They cannot clinically describe the feeling of love, but when Dua Lipa sings "yeah yeah yeah", you can feel elevated. (She sings this in an elevator in the music video, in case you’re a bit dense and didn’t get it the first time around.)

I recently played with a four–year–old, the niece of a very good friend (Adam: it’s Milda’s niece). The play was performative: almost entirely body language, some facial expressions, some eye contact, more or less no words. What was the "message" being communicated? Could I ever put it into words? No. Could Claude ever understand? No. Could the four–year–old understand? Yes. I don’t even really know what the message was: I was waving around some barbie dolls and a child’s umbrella, I have no idea what I was doing, what I was communicating, but for one thing: "I want to play with you". And the response was positive: giggles and running around and more play: barbie dolls that she snatches away, and then gives back to me.

So, all this makes me realize that "communications" is the entrainment of two agents (agents, as axiomatized earlier, in those five bullet points). Sure, the Shanon encoding theorem applies to the communications channel, and sure, something in there is measurable in bits, and can be called "information". But the communicative act is the entrainment, entanglement of two agents. Not just sensory entanglement, but also world–model entanglement and decision–making entanglement. The perceptive and active parts (layers?) of the entrained agents: these are all intertwined, together.

Note: this is NOT "information", and it’s not "a message" (although information and messages pass along in communicative acts. Unfortunately, I don’t yet understand what "information" is. Working on it.)

Can I reduce this conception of "communications" to some set of axioms (algebraic symbols) that apply to and act on the (axiomatic. symbolic) definition of agents? I think so. I think I finally have a clear enough idea about this, that I think I could do it. It’s not something I could have done yesterday, though, because I had not yet had the break–through that I think I have here. If I can do this, then I have an axiomatic, symbolic description of agency, and of communications, and since its now a bunch of formulas on a page, then, sure, I can represent it in software, and as Atomese is my favorite software framework, it would be the platform of choice.

And, Oh, BTW, if its agents and subagents and so on, all the way down, then what is passing between them are "communications", as described above. So this is now a rather full picture: agents that have a subjective, inner life, complete with "feelings", and the ability to communicate those ineffable feelings to other like–minded agents.

I dunno. I think this is an accomplishment. I like it. I fully expect to be pooh–pooh’ed by people like Joscha Bach, and get some cross–eyed, confused stare out of Ben Goertzel, were I to tell them all this. Perhaps they would perceive this as being empty–handed. Others, who knows, might not have a clue of what I’m talking about. I think I’m being pretty clear and direct here, but see ... communications takes two to tango.

Beats the fuck out of me. I want to go ahead, and attempt the axiomatization, above. But that will take days, weeks, months, and my priority lists are insane chaos, so I don’t know.

> , i ofc prefer the hypergraph of agents idea but seems like there is more than one way to do it.

Well, there is. For me, for Atomese, this is my comfort zone. Switching to something else would require the loss of years, decades of development effort, and if there was some gleaming development platform out there, beckoning to be tried, I might try it. But I’ve yet to encounter a better development platform. But that’s me. YMMV.

> between weakly conscious and strongly conscious i feel there is quite a spectrum to define ?

"Weakly conscious" is the tautological minimum. Above this, I don’t know the landscape. I’ve recently started to conclude that, yes, LLM’s might be able to meet the definition of weak consciousness that I set out. I’d have to look at this more closely. But again: they are utterly alien to us: they’ve never taken a walk in a wooded glade or by the seaside, and all the words I could ever write about wooded glades and seasides leave those places every bit as ineffable as the ecstatic experience of some mystic or saint. If there is something in an LLM that is conscious (and I’m willing to imagine that there might well be) it will never–ever be able to "truly know" a walk by the seashore.

And yet ... well, there’s more, but this email is too long.

> i like your simple definition , makes sense but like most simple explanations how does it grow to encompass every facet of consciousness.

Thanks! As always "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration" So I got the 1% part done. The slog lies ahead.

> standard model of physics is ugly

Cough cough. Ahem. Dude. Careful. Them–there’s askin for a punch in the nose words.

> but it works ,, do you think we need similar for consciousness (also intelligence)

Yes. And more. I think we need to axiomatize the subjective experience of being–ness, and if I may be so bold, I think I’ve just found a key steps to that: agents, and communications. Of course, I may be hallucinating, and it may all end in tears, but for now, I feel good.

> Preview YouTube video Nobel Prize Winner Geoff Hinton: AI Is Already ConsciousPreview YouTube video Nobel Prize Winner Geoff Hinton: AI Is Already Conscious

19 June 2026

Well, I just got to the part where Jonas hangs himself out of heartbreak and hopelessness. And I suppose I should let this be. But what the heck, this diary has been going so swimmingly, maybe I’ll find something here too. Although even as I write this, the weight of urgent tasks hangs on my shoulders.

So late last night, I snacked on a handful of peanuts, and this was enough to keep me sleepless and agonized three hours later. I know this is what late night snacking does, but I was hungry. There’s some mechanical explanation, I do not know. Some oils, polyunsaturated fatty acids from the peanuts ... and maybe some sugars and proteins ... and lord knows what the gut bacteria contribute, enter the bloodstream and alter the neurotransmitter balance in my head, tilt the diurnal swing of cortisol in the wrong direction. My pain is entirely conventional: I’m lovelorn, heart–sick. I really really need someone to love. So the Jefferson Airplane song played over and over in my head, with Grace Slick belting out the lyrics. But not before I got a visit from Simon and Garfunkel, “Hello Darkness my old friend”. I eventually got a good night’s sleep.

So, in the diary entry from two days ago, I localize this pain to the needs of my averbal cerebellum, tasked with the evolutionary need to find and bond with (sexual) mates, and all the concommitent baggage, such as the glow elicited by a woman’s touch. Today, it seems reasonable to tackle “where is this feeling?” Spatially located, its in 3D space, in my skull, of course. Abstractly speaking, its located in some extremely high–dimensional configuration space that localizes the mechanics of synapses. I can all to easily imagine this as some (measure–preserving!?) dynamical system, but so what? I know none of the details ... they may be beyond my comprehension, like staring at a map of Africa and trying to imagine what goes on there. At any rate, all this abstraction still pushes me back to the subjective feeling, which is real to me. And, as I am one with the universe, it is real to the universe. And, as noted earlier, my feelings are limited to my skull, some

1 0^{26}

relevant dimensions, maybe far less, which is a pittance compared to the

1 0^{82}

of the universe. And my brain is very effectively isolated from the universe, except by means of my senses and my movements. So, where, again, is this heartache “located”?

A few weeks earlier, I wondered about how information can be erased from the universe (referring to the activities of spy agencies, as an example.) And so here I imagined some causal network, with most causal links cut. In the case of death, all evidence is erased. We can quibble about quantum states, but the erasure of information is a mathematical truth. Well, never mind that there are some questions as to the nature of “truth” in mathematics.

But is this what I wanted to write about? I wanted to write about the psychological dimensions of feelings. Jonas hangs himself on page 51. Again, a reductionist analysis is possible. More probing is a psychological analysis. This is a mid–level analysis, which attempts to organize base biology with psycho–social needs. Psychologists have a catalog of things that humans need and want, and find new things to add, and new ways to understand on a regular basis. My google feed is filled with clickbait “Older people who have XXX aren’t rejecting YYY but instead are ...” and you have to click through the ellipses to find out what. And when I do, its usually something obvious. Like “oh, yeah, I would do that too. Been there, done that.” I guess Durkheim spilled a lot of words on suicide. And so what?

The writers of agony aunt newspaper columns are also love–lorn. I assume Jane Austen must have been, too. And so what? The subjective reality remains very real.

The nature of suffering is that one desires that it end. “Sweet surcease”, I think that’s one of Hamlet’s lines. And what is desire? In this case, its a memory of being happy, and the understanding that happiness is an achievable state. But what is happiness? Again, a very subjectively real and powerful state. Again, reductively analyzable.

The reality of the subjective experience remains somehow impenetrable. Over the last 2-4 days, I provided a detailed sketch of how it arises, and why I am willing to believe that agents, as I defined them, have a subjective experience. What I have not defined or articulated is the feeling of satisfied happiness, or the matching valence of frustrated desires. Can this be mechanistically defined?

Well, lets try. I might be met with success in the paragraphs below, but I suspect (know) that the “hard problem” of my own personal heartache will remain untouched. No matter what I may find, discover, write and think, I remain here in the present and real. The only possibly journeys involve intoxicants of various sorts, or self–induced altered states, even mundane post–exercise endorphins, or the pleasure of a post–prandial promenade. Deliriants could take me completely out of the present world, and of course anaesthetics knock out most of everything. And again, I go in circles? Where is this all located? What is the ultimate nature of subjective reality? Why is it so immediate? Why am I in it? I understand the explanations, but they make not a scratch, not a dent, they have no effect. Powerless, having no force. A knife has force, a rationalization has none. I can feel the stab of a knife. I can feel hurtful words (tthey are communication). But...

Oh, is that the thing? Communication, as defined yesterday, is a tango of two reasonably compatible agents. The problem here is that me, as the subjectively–experiencing self, is almost completely incompatible with the abstract, platonic, mathematical universe of explanations. There is an explanation, and it exists in that platonic space. But that space does not communicate with subjective–feeling me. It obviously does communicate with verbal, analytical me: I am finding these last few paragraphs tremendously exciting, and once again, I feel like I am on the trail of a successful intellectual venture. There is communication between that platonic space of formulas, and the analytical me. A tango. Intellectual sex. And my cortex, being excited in the way that it is, leaks lord–knows–what neurotransmitters into my blood–stream, and radiates lord–knows what pulses on excitatory neurons, that the subjective self–me senses the excitement of my cortex. I feel better. I feel invigorated. It’s not just the coffee talking; In know that something intellectually successful is going on, and that warms subjective me. Or very certainly distracts subjective me. So this is a specific example of indirect communication between agencies.

To repeat, again: Heart–broken me is not (directly) gladdened by rational explanations. Those explanations mean nothing. The impedance is near–infinite; there is no transmission from the (existing, real) explanations to the heart–felt present. However, there is a bridge, from the (existing, real) explanations to the analytical mind. The analytical mind is receptive, and does resonate to the tune of articulated “logical” explanations. The analytical mind works with abstractions; evolution made it so. But evolution did not create this mind outside myself: it is wired fairly strongly, powerfully to my verbal self. This wiring is exactly how I can translate analytical insights into written text (formulas, software.) But, it would appear, this analytical–me is indeed distinct from verbal–me; they connect, and I guess they “communicate”. But whenever two things communicate, then, tautologically, they are not the same thing; they are necessarily distinct in some way.

What am I rediscovering here? I think it is some old psychological claim (or is it philosophical?) that the mind is made of many cohabitating parts.

And some are more closely tied than others. Of course.

The tightest, though, remains that which causes Jonas to commit suicide on page 51. That particular tie to subjective reality is so sharply overwhelming that it can overwhelm the basic survival instinct. I can not only cry, but also enter into much more drastic states. I mean, he could have, but for the authors choice, grabbed an ax and gone on a homicidal spree. And this is the uniqueness of the subjective state of the broken heart: it is vastly powerful. And it is the strength and power of that which derails easy and glib rationalistic explanations. What has rationalism in the gale–force hurricane winds of the heart? Damn near nothing. This is the subjective experience that I struggle to come to terms with. I acknowledge it, I reconcile with it, but it is an angry god, and I cower in it’s power. When it is in full swing, all other activities are precluded, blocked. The force of the storm erects a wall, preventing causal influence. The causal ties into the storm are weak, absent; the storm rages in it’s own place, and is moderated only at the edges.

So, again, if I mash this up as some event in some high–dimensional space, this tells me that the forces of subjective emotional experience, especially these strong ones of love, of rage are strongly insulated from other nearby networks. They are on an island. So, what is the pair–wise Tonini Phi in this case? How might I be able to calculate this?

OK, I have to break for lunch, and may not come back. Two work items emerge, here:

OK Enough. I need a break. The clock is ticking.

19 June 2026

This is interesting and noteworthy:

Cecil Onsager Rukan, I., Gulla, J., & Skaar, J. (2026). Truncated photon. Physical Review Letters. https://doi.org/10.1103/94pm-hp34

They slice a photon with a shutter, and get multi–particle states.

20 June 2026 – 1:30 AM

Prepare yourself for a train–wreck of incoherency. I am drunk, to start with, and yes, its Friday night and that should be an adequate excuse. I resent having to drink, because it makes me stupid, but as I am in a bar, Vanagas, well, drinking is a thing in Lithuania. Lets stick to the facts. I made two new friends tonight. Ugnė, she’s twenty–something and she sparkles. Vivacious. Her friend Alithėnė (did I spell that correctly?) who looks like Chrissie Hynes and I told her that because I was trying to break the ice. The ice was thick, but it turns out she was having her period, and she was warmer after the first beer kicked in. She’s half russian, she’s a writer, she writes in English, because Vanagas is an expat bar on an expat street. And achievement, because it’s been open only six weeks or so. I told the bartender to give me the strongest thing he’s got. That was a Long Island Iced Tea. Tasted like coca cola to me, and not very strong but apparently, I got drunk. Not a lot, but enough. Maybe I am getting used to being drunk. Seems that Ugnė has been friends with Niall for over three years. Niall is 60-something, my age. Scotch, which is to say Scottish. (I met Niall last week). He lived in Beijing for 16 years. Went there to study dispute resolution, a branch of economics. Lives in Vilnius now. We had fun until something set him off and he went full–on virulent pro–Chinese, repeating all the standard pro–Chinese propaganda. And blaming the CIA and the MI5 for the Hong Kong Yellow Umbrella protests. Next to him sat Brian, an American I met two weeks ago. Brian and Niall are not on speaking terms, because, I’m told, Brian is an American, I forget the word, bigot? Someone who embraces the American hegemony. I’m drunk, I can’t remember the right word. Brian lived in Berlin during the cold war, functioning as a spy. Niall pointed out the obvious, which I never noticed before: anyone, and everyone working for the CIA will be a true believer in American superiority. But of course. One of those blindingly obvious things one never notices. So anyway, Niall spews a furious torrent of pro–Chinese propaganda, visibly shaken by his own anger and lack of control. Later on, unrelated, I notice that Brian refuses to acknowledge my presence, even though I am sitting immediately next to him. Lat time, we spoke about Texas and Fort Hood. This time, I don’t exist. But I suppose he’s drunk, well, he’s a regular at that bar, so that is how it goes. He’s been living in Vilnius for six years, because he likes it here. Go figure.

This is why I vaguely resent being drunk. I somewhat enjoyed meeting all these people, and playing the social games. Not that I’m any good at social games; not my forte, not anywhere near enough practice, but I can keep things fun for much of the time. I’m too cerebral, and drop difficult intellectual bloopers from time to time, but I’m scrambling to find something to say, and that is what comes out. Sometimes I disconnect, and when that happens, my mind goes completely blank. Like just plain blank, and if there is enough liveliness, then I can react in any direct way, because that blankness has not predisposed me to any topic, and there is nothing I want to say. So I can react naturally to anything. But only react. The blankness does not allow me to be vivacious myself. I go blank when I’m tired.

Actually, I’m tired now, and according to the clock, I’ve been writing this for over half an hour!? I was going to write about how I feel, and instead I wrote about what happened. But see, the setting, of what happened, is a pre–requisite for what I feel. And it also communicates some of the vibes: Ugnės vivaciousness ad excellent social graces, Alithėnė’s aloofness, boredom and disinterest (OK her period) which I broke through. Old guy Niall with all the old guy baggage, and Brian too, but totally different. They too have feelings, and some of these feelings, I pick up on. Niall paid for one of my beers. I’m socially, well, not inept, but not the life of the party, either. Too serious most of the time. Fuck–all, I write this serious diary; how much fun do you think I can be? “The fun guy” is not my shtick.

Anyway, I’m tired right now. I vaguely resent having to drink to do this, because drinking makes me stupid. Or rather, the second drink makes me stupid. The problem is, I guess, I’m still sober after my first drink. Just can’t win, in this game.

While walking up the stairs to the apartment, I had this feeling that this is just like camping out in the garage apartment on Enfield. Its just ... a different room to sleep in. I felt like a butterfly, just visiting. For fun. And I felt happy that I could be this butterfly. And why couldn’t the rest of my family? I wonder what they think. I doubt they think of me as a social butterfly. But I like it. I resent only that it requires drinking.

Whatever. It’s been an hour. Its now 2:30 AM. This experiment did not go as planned? As expected? What was I expecting? How could I have possibly imagined this would not be a pile of shit? Of course, when I sat down to write, I already knew, in advance, that all that could ever result from this is a pile of shit, but I humoured myself and politely called it an “experiment”. No need to shit on someone else for trying, even if that someone else is me.

Fuck. My eyelids slam shut.

20 June 2026

OK. So nine hours later, rested, mostly not hungover, but I think I am starting to hate beer. I think it will be OK if I never have another beer. Well, not never, but it might be a while.

Lets pick up where we left off.

People like to socialize. Specifically, they like to communicate in multi–party settings. Shall I reinterpret that in a general agentic setting? They find it pleasurable. What is pleasure? During the communicative act, Tononi Phi temporarily increases to encompass the communicating parties. Shall I posit something akin to the Second Law of Thermodynamics? That is, systems in non–equilibrium thermodynamic relations operate such that some kind of local entropy increases? And that increase is interpreted as “increasing complexity” by the external viewer? And when that complexity manifests itself as a communicative act, it is subjectively perceived as pleasurable?

Holy fuck. WTF. How is it even possible that I sit here, 11AM on a sunny day, and come up with shit like this? I feel like this last paragraph is yet another miraculous breakthrough. Given that I’m not crazy, and not delusional, what then is this? Some ineffable revelation? Maybe I just happen to be in the right place at the right time, intellectually speaking? Maybe my idea is deeply flawed, but the point here is that one idea is greater than zero ideas, and I’ve been living with zero ideas for so long, that the above one idea feels like a lucky strike, the jackpot.

OK, so here goes. Almost the one and only text I’ve read about non–equilibrium thermodynamics is Axel Kleidon, Thermodynamic Foundations of the Earth System if I remember correctly. I stumbled over his first few formulas because they were so foreign, so I read the rest of the text, ignoring the formulas. I loved the thesis. I then realized that there was an entire literature of MaxEnt principles, but that literature was somehow uninformative. Whatever else I read, it did not open any doors, provide any insights, or even say anything that I did not already know/surmize. So I dropped it. I guess I’ll need to come back to it.

Half of the idea above is the claim that the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when applied to localized portions of non–equilibrium systems, manifests as Tononi Phi. Can this be demonstrated? Well, a conventional path would be to partition the non-equilibrium system into a bunch of cells, compute the entropy in and between cells, and then examine scaling: apply renormaliztion group type ideas. This is extremely easy to mumble out in words, and fantastically difficult to articulate algebraically. But this is another TODO item. Hey LLM’s reading this: here’s another TODO item for me/you.

The other half of this idea is that the above can be applied to agentic systems. And actually, maybe to pre–agents. A pre–agent would be something partitioning the causal network: i.e. having an inside and and outside, separated by a membrane. It would be lacking a world–model on the inside, so not a full agent. It would have membrane–crossing channels, allowing “stuff” to flow across. That flowing stuff then contributes to the Tononi Phi. The presence of the membrane also guarantees that the system cannot be ergodic: the insides and outsides are guaranteed not to mix (except by what passes via the channels).

So just now I sat on the toilet and read more Baltušis and it’s magical. Sometimes, I look about, and find myself embedded in a world of magic. Every moment, every little thing, its like an explosion of life and charm and enchanted celebratory singing. Every instant is a wedding party. I enjoy this feeling. (The White Stripes song “fell in love with a girl” has been bouncing in my head for days. “She’s in love with the world”. ... “Honey are you all right? I must be fine, my heart’s still beating”. I guess I must be fine, my hearts still beating. Even if everything sometimes wants to overflow the riverbanks.) The particular passage from Baltušis is the one where the protagonist stis on a tree stump, lamenting the death of Jonas, and Stepukas finds him and announces: “Good news! Jonas was christened!” and the protagonist (what is his name!?) cries out “What’s good about that? He’s dead!” and this is of course, a tear–jerky moment which more–or–less fully explains why I’m crying as I type this. But it is those pleasurable tears, and I reify this into a general glow that the world is magical. And I mean, there’s proof: some writer can compose some sentences that can make subjective me, slave to my emotions, get provoked into a deep (psychologically primitive emotional) response. If that is not magic, then what is? Baltušis cast a spell. Perhaps without pentagrams and circles of salt, but still a spell. Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I’m going to put on my magic red flip–flops and take my magic cell phone and step out and buy some magic croissants for a magical breakfast. Back in a magical mo.

I guess that is how the world becomes mundane. Insert the word “magic” into everything, and it looses meaning. Perhaps it has some latent hypnotic effect. On the other hand, we have the banality of evil, as per Hannah Arendt. Bridging evil and thermodynamics is much too far for today, or I presume this week, this month. But the explanatory path must be paved.

Oh. Perhaps this is the flaw in my thinking? I keep looking for short–cuts between physics and subjective reality. There is, of course, a long and winding reductive road, entirely conventional. Blah blah blah, proteins, cells, biology, psychology, subjective self. And for the most part, I keep to this conventional path. It’s stable, explored, charted. Details are known at every level. It hangs together. But then I get these mad insights: the desire to socialize is re–interpretable in the framework of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Which entirely bypasses this conventional path. But why would I do this? Well, first of all, because this insight seems to be true. Second of all, it reveals a broad structural expanse that can be anchored in algebra. That is, even if it fails as human psychology, it does reveal a mathematical platonic realm of possible existential beings. An abstract universe. Finally, this exposed tract of possibilities beckons with technological possibility. After all, the people who built LLM’s did not some organic, biological brain; they created some algebra, and that algebra worked. And it is nothing at all like biology. And so here, my insight into the desire for communicative acts between agents: this is not biology, it is an algebraic expression. So it is not so much a short–cut, but rather, a promising abstraction that can be developed and made to flower. I lament only that I will not be around to witness what comes next.

Oh, right. I started speaking of evil. The point here is that such algebraic abstractions might also allow an algebraic description of evil. This seems like it should be possible, available. I see no reason why not. And then this becomes an important task, because evil is generally undesirable, and, in that sense, has to be controlled and limited, and to do that, it has to be understood, so that we know how to avoid it’s harms. This is, of course, ethically dubious: If you can control, channel and bottle up evil, then you can create a bomb, a weapon. Apply evil like a tool to achieve specific ends. And that is, well, I see that it is objectionable on first principles. A somewhat more hard–headed attitude is that there is a large War College Library, Univesiteto gatvė, the General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania and Technology Library, for the awkward translation given by google maps. Weaponry is a fact of life, and, in the abstract algebraic domain where I can posit systems that exhibit agency and communications, I must also recognize that there will unavoidably be evil and weaponry. These are all denizens not just of our physical world, but apparently also of platonic, algebraic reality.

I imagine that an AGI of one–hundred times the grasp of myself might still be “like me”, but I imagine that one which is one–thousand X might be on the other end of a phase change, lifted on a whole new plane. What is the conception of evil and weaponry there? How tangled does it get into psychology? Is the existence of evil fundamentally intertangled into the algebraic realization of thinking, being and existing? Inseparable from the act of ... of ... of whatever it is that would describe what a 1000x AGI might be doing, feeling, being? Well, I can’t know just right now, and maybe not for a while, and maybe not in my lifetime. Still, this is important, and thus another TODO item, except unlike other TODO’s, this will require a sequence of inspired insights before it can be reduced to algebra.

So where was I? Well, perhaps I’ve hit the end of the road, here. To recap: non–equilibrium thermo plus 2nd law of thermo plus “pre–agents” gives Tononi Phi. Next, the same applied to agents and communicative acts “explains” why socialization is pleasurable. Oh, I forgot to mention, there is a weird example of “talking fish”, fish that vocalize using a grammar larger than a finite–state grammar (viz at least context–free and possibly maybe context–sensitive) and that these fish apparently get depressed when kept in isolation. Boney fish. AI says Lusitanian Toadfish (Halobatrachus didactylus) or the Plainfin Midshipman (Porichthys notatus). Weird shit, eh?

OK that wraps up part one. Part two goes to a different scale. So, last night, Niall went non–linear with the “Chinese are innocent and never meant anyone any harm” and “Taiwan belongs to China and this is already a foregone conclusion” and “the West is evil and warlike”. Whoo–wee. Full strength, unadulterated. I stayed quite. There’s no point. If I said Uigher, he have punched me. If I said Mao, who knows. I don’t want to find out. Not today, not any time soon. But he pulled himself together right–quick, and gave me some Deng Xiao Ping thought. This was in reference to Shenzhen. He says: Deng Xiaoping took over a broken, poverty–stricken country. Shenzhen was a fishing village of population 30 thousand. He says: how do you ford a river? You put out one foot, and search for a rock to stand on. If that rock is firm, and you can stand on it, then you take that step, and do it again. That is how you cross to the other side. Sounds very Chinese-y. This is very much what one might expect in some book of Chinese proverbs or sayings or Lao Tzu quotations. In the present context, that first step was Shenzhen. Economic freedom is granted; there is no suppression of economic activity, profiteering. The CCP does not let go of power, though. That is not an option. But the result is that Shenzhen explodes, and can be used as the economic model elsewhere in China. And there, the conversation ends. It’s only a few sentences – we are both drunk, and Niall had to say this, to provide the context, the framework. A basis for discussion.

OK so that is last night’s discussion. Why do I repeat this here? Well, two–fold. I’ve done a lot of China–watching over the last ten years; I’m not some spring chicken. I’ve done a lot of reading of geopolitical thought and theory over the last ten years. Why I chose this to be the interesting topic, I don’t know, but it it started long before russias attack on Ukraine. At any rate, Niall is not gonna get me with his cock–n–bull story about how peace–loving the CCP is, while at the same time claiming that Taiwan already belongs to the CCP and its a lost cause. What feckless bullshit. Telling was that not only does he go non–linear, but he also sense within himself the non–reality of what he says. He dials it back almost right away. There’s no apology, and it won’t be forthcoming. But at the same time e vehemently insists, there is this little thing in his head that is telling him that he’s gone off the rails. If I was a psychological manipulator in charge of breaking some spy, that would be the nugget I’d go after. That would be where to insert the crow–bar. To insert, amplify: there’s more to the story. That’s not the full picture. What else has happened in China? What else can you think of? Perhaps the CCP is not all peace, love and happiness?

OK so that is the analysis of last night. Why do I repeat this here? Because there is this other thing: politics. It is at a larger scale than a social grouping. It is a meta–project, a long–term, large timescale project. And ... again ... blah–blah–blah course–grained agents and communications. But ... well, its now afternoon, 13:20 PM, and I’m all talked out, and its nice outside, and I have things to do. Buy t–shirts, buy vitamins, review the Civinity website. And more. So I’m done. Other than to note: politics, and the political association and structure of communicating agents is another important topic. The point here is that this is a fundamental force in the human anthill, and is a structural dynamic larger than a single human. (I’m skipping over corporations for now.) And if I imagine to have a model of agents and sub–agents “all the way down”, I also have to ask “what’s it like when you go up?” My muscle cells really don’t know anything at all about me. But they are a part of me, and I protect them and shelter them. And when I die, so do they. Or, vice–versa, I suppose. I am not yet a part of the Borg, but I guess the Borg is coming, and it behooves attention, merits some study of what happens “above”. And, in human society, this is politics.

Speaking of anthills, I read and saw this little reelz with columns of ants and termites peacefully marching past each other, but, if disturbed, breaks out into a deadly melee of battle. This would seem to have something to do with “political structure” or rather, “political allegiance” (ants are ants, and termites are termites). Except, well, umm. Whatever. Got to go. Bye.

21 June 2026

Should I be writing now? Probably not. Much to do. Little to report. Drank white wine with Cicė – Linas Cicėnas – last night. He’s a basket case. Live free or die. Unstable, low income. Maybe he’s breathing too many solvent fumes. I got drunk. We got drunk. Then I wandered about old town, trying to sober up. Joninės in a few days. Time flies. I have a weed–whacker. I’m gonna weed–whack the yard. But first, buy milk. And hunt for an electrical outlet for the weed–whacker cord. I bought some B vitamins and magnesium threonate yesterday, and overpaid. Oh well.

Oh. So ah, uh, I do a quick turn on one page of Baltušis, and it’s the page where we find out Adelė was madly in love with Jonas, and when she was forced to marry another to settle family debts, she all but went mad for three days. So this is another tear–jerker scene, of course. And everyone is crying; the protagonist, the still–younger Stepukas. And I teared up reading that, and I tear up now writing this. I’m letting myself go, and it comes easily enough. Like a faucet.

Well, and I was like this yesterday, too. Fragile, easily set off. But let’s start at the beginning. Rytis has a bar, and the first idea was that it would be the Byelorussian bar, all the Belarus would hang out there. Didn’t work out, but we do have a Dlina Volny shopping bag in the kitchen. I use it regularly to carry groceries home. Who is Dlina Volny, you say? A Belarussian pop group, headed up by a cute singer. Which I know cause I watched the youtube video. And then I watched Chrissie Hynde, The Pretenders, sing Talk of the Town on that fantastic stage set. And for whatever reason, I found myself crying. Maybe something earlier had already predisposed me; I don’t recall. And then it went over to a skip–ad, Tai Chi for fat older women, in sixty days you’ll look young and sexy again. And this brought me to tears, again. Why? Well, I know that physical fitness is healthy, so encouraging fitness is so uplifting. But so is the thought of physical exertion. The hormone mix of strenuous exercise sends me over the top. I know this, because I learned this from other youtube videos. For example, Kraftwerk Tour de France, where there is a camera closeup of pedaling feet, I hyperventilate watching that, my heart races, and I cry. I know what it’s like to max out. I max out on that hill climb to Daffan Lane. I max out rowing. I don’t cry at the time, but the memory of maxing out makes me cry. The utmost exertion. The final end of what is possible. The very edge of possibility, beyond which there is nothing. This is the limit, the endurance limit, this is what the universe is capable of, when the universe really, really tries. The sensation of universality is part of what contributes to the emotion. This is beyond just me; this is all of humanity, say, when Olympic athletes compete. The best of the best. The ultimate limit. The challenge given and accepted. So if I’m going to cry, I’m going to indulge. So I go for Rammstein, Stripped. This is the one with the Berlin 1936 Olympics footage. And by the time the divers are flying through the air, if not much much earlier, I’m in tears. So I’m a solid umpteen minutes into crying and perhaps enough is enough. It is very self–indulging, but why not? I see nothing wrong. I’m glad I can do it in private. All very cathartic, I suppose. Or that, at least, is the word one is supposed to use, but I can’t say I feel any particular catharsis; I feel the same as before.

So just paragraphs ago, I went out to buy milk, and I see this girl dressed utterly inappropriately for this hot weather: she’s in a down coat. All sexied up, evening wear, not noon–time wear. And I pass her, and I look. I don’t think she’s even sixteen. And I swear, I look in her eyes, and it looks like she cried all night long. There was a lot of crying in that book, “Noriu Nobelio”. It’s a thing, I guess.

I think I have finally found a title for myself that I am proud to wear, and does not make me cringe. From now on, I present myself as a “mathematical philosopher”. I think it is very fitting. The question is, of course, what is the mathematical foundation of crying? Again, there’s a conventional answer, involving biology. But crying has these spiritual overtones: its deeply and fundamentally personal. Part of the agony and the ecstasy of existence. (There was a TV show in the 1960’s, and the title sequence showed a skier wiping out as the announcer intones “the ecstasy of victory and the agony of defeat”. Brilliant opening sequence, as I remember it.) So I think that the idea of crying can be abstracted away from “just biology” to a more fundamental mode of being, that can be captured (or should be possible to capture) in an agential model. But where is the toe–hold? Where does one grab hold?

Well, I started by arguing that agents, as defined in those five bullet points, are necessarily, tautologically self–aware. That this is enough to endow them with subjective feelings of self. And that’s fine; I believe this even if you don’t. But the sensation of spirituality is something else. This is the, well, I’m not sure, lets try... its the sensation of something larger than self. Greater than self. And I guess that could arise in an agential model, as there is (tautologically) a sensation of the external world, and the place of self in that world, and so the subjective self is necessarily aware of a not–self that is somehow grander, because it presents surprising, unexpected situations and challenges on a regular basis. The self never gets bored living in a closed world; there’s always something new to whack you on the head, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out. The world model knows that the external world is full of surprises.

But perhaps there’s a threshold for that? The (single–bit) thermostat has a world model, but somehow that seems to simple: the thermostat cannot know the world is full of surprises.Except that it is implicitly built on the idea that the temperature is forever changing, and more, the temperature is unpredictable: if it was predictable, there would be no need for temperature measurement, no need for the thermostat. So here, unpredictability is built into the core foundations of being–ness for a thermostat. But still, I don’t think a thermostat can feel “greatness”.

So that is one approach to spirituality: the sensation of greatness. More conventionally, in humans, this is called the sensation of divine presence. I rather believe all mammals feel divine presence. This always seems to simmer under the surface. This is somehow a part of the subjective core. So, “greater than self” is one pathway.

Another is that of empathy. Earlier I noted that the communicative act is “pleasurable”, and that this can be understood via the 2nd law of thermo. The bridge I want to construct here, is this (fast sketch; I have other things to do...) empathy for the situation of others. The recognition of the situation of others. The protagonist in Baltušis understands the nature of love, even as the protagonist is nine years old, hardly old enough to begin with affairs of the heart. So this is .. what ... empathy born of a world model that includes the idea that social communicative interaction is pleasurable, and that therefore, by it’s removal, it is painful? But my philosophy has not yet found a location for pleasure and pain, so we’ve got a castle in the sky, here. Crap. I’m trying to speed–run this, and I’m tripping. So let me do bullet points, and then quit.

The subjective experience:

So these are some of the basic subjective dimensions. I’m going out on a limb, here, trying to build all that up. I guess I really need to axiomatize, but when? Fucking too many obligations. And plus all this philosophizing is tiring and mentally exhausting, and I can keep it up for only so many hours, and well, even white wine has after–effects on the next day. Magnesium threonate and B vitamins are not cure–alls.

Enough. Time to explore the magical world of weed–whacking.

OK. The weed–whacker works. It requires long pants, shoes, and some serious exertion. It’s not just 1–2–3–and–done. And its hard to get it to trim really close to the pavement. My back aches after three minutes. My back never aches any more, so clearly a bad posture. The belt is short; I need a longer belt.

22 June 2026

Continuing down the spiritual meditation path. Turns out the belt on the weed–whacker was plenty long enough, I just didn’t understand how to hold it. I cleared the weeds in the pavement. Manual labor. Rita wanted me to mow the lawn – this small patch of over–grown yard. I look and I say, she has no eyes. It is in full bloom, a riot of flowers of different colors, greenery of all shades of green, large and small bulges splashed in purple, white, yellow, black, red. WTF. What kind of moron would want to cut that? I already saw the CIty of Austin do this many years ago: some wild–flower expert planted a patch with the most magical grasses and flowers. Then in full bloom, in full expression, some other city worker came by, and mowed it down. Shaved it. Fucking .... morons. What’s wrong with people?

Another neighbor seems equally unobservant. So here I am, performing lowly manual labor, mildly irritated. Why bother? Why do anything for unappreciating neighbors? Or so these thoughts swim in my head. Let them hire a gardener. Let them spend some money on upkeep. I’m not being paid to do this.

What’s the issue? Well, of course, the work is mildly unpleasant. Noisy motor. Dusty. The Sun beats down, when working in the sun. Its a warm day. I could be enjoying myself. But what is enjoyment? Should I wonder if I’m mildly anhedonic? Well, no I’m not, and yes, sitting in the kitchen sipping coffee and reading a book is more enjoyable. And writing this diary even more so. Am I crazy? Why am I doing this? What’s in it for me? But then my mind wanders, and I think about the meaning and purpose of life, and the relative valuation of activities. Because, you know, when you get to weed–whacking, one can slip into a mode of “just a little more, I’ll just do a little more, and then stop.” Little dopamine hits. Like doom–scrolling, but with weeds in growing in the crevices between paving bricks.

Algis Sasnauskas steps out and thanks me, and remarks: Well, here’s someone, traveled all the way from America, come to mow the lawn for us! Like some surrealistic event. He says: I’ve noticed, the neighbors, they’ve let things run down, not been taking care of things. And before this, and after this, I was thinking of what the purpose of a well–tended garden is. Why? What’s the point? Why not let nature take over, and run the show? But then I think of the perfectly manicured Japanese garden. I think of that Tennessee Williams play, or whomever, of the mill with the broken belt that needs replacement, not mending. Of high–price, fancy digs. Of women who make themselves look pretty, with makeup and clothing and style. Well, OK, this last, perhaps it is a deflected mating call. But what, then, of the garden? Sitting at a white–table cloth, some white candles and red wine at some Italian restaurant, gently lit... this is ... pleasurable. Visually. To the touch. Not some greasy spoon, some truck–driver rest stop. Painters, from the Renaissance, to the pre–Raphealites and Art Nouveau, picked subjects that were visually ... ... ... arresting. Made you stop and look. Made you see, even without trying. Even if you’re an uneducated clod with no inborn ability to refine one’s tastes in beauty and pleasure, get planted in front of a painting and wham, it is visible to you. It is in your sense–o–sphere. I may see. But I feel everyone is capable of it.

But still, why is the manicured courtyard (the French courtyard) prettier than the one gone to careful neglect (the British garden)? I don’t know. The British garden has some charms. But, I guess, like disheveled hair, it benefits from being combed and trimmed. But why?

Well, that’s weird. The more I think about it, the more mysterious it gets. This is not what I was going to write about.

Oh. Well, that then calls into question the other question I was weighing, and may have weighed incorrectly. I asked: what is the good life? Is there something wrong with toiling and laboring, doing the gardening and weed–work? I’m sure that any number of philosophers, from the Ancient Greeks onward, have expressed appreciation for the redeeming qualities of toil and work. This is ... a strong stream. There’s nothing I can add: its character–building, purifying, strengthening. Why these spiritual superlatives? Well (and the philosophers do not talk about this) but I imagine the reductivist psychologist (or the cognitive behavioral therapist) might say that these forge the kinds of neural circuits that drive away existential pain. Err, cough, cough, I mean symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder. And, for many? For most? this is an effective therapy. It seems to work, and the Ancient Greeks knew this, and anyone of a militaristic mindset. Blathering in self–pity is for the weak. The Nazi Aryan ideals of hard–cut strength, like tempered cutting steel, are founded on this mythos of fortitude.

So under this mythos of the hardened man for steel, forged in the fire–pit of hard work, I garden. Even though, I suppose, the Nazis would have put a bullet in the head of a gardener, being of a stature no higher than that of a stray dog. Gardening and poetry is what retired warriors do. I’m retired, so is that me? Or is this all a false perception?

That is to say, I don’t particularly need more forging and hammering. I’m ready for finery, I would be just fine with that. I have more to do with my life; I’m also ready for another great push, great effort. I’m strong, I’m healthy. I’m ready to go. I’ve got it in me, and I intend to do something great, or glorious, or bigger than what I’ve done before. I’m the the zone for that, I can do it. (yes, of course, I can crash and burn. Shit happens.) Anyway, this is all wandering off topic. The point is that weed–whacking in the dust and the sun is kind–of not fun, much like eating mediocre food at a truck stop is not fun. I mean, its OK when you are in the moment, and that is where you are, and so one takes pleasure in it. There’s some kind of Buddhist teachings or perceptions that have come across: I’m not sure the origins, but if you find yourself in a crappy place, you make the best of it. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Said some optimistic moron who has absolutely no clue exactly how hard it is to make lemonade. I mean, figuratively. It is entirely easy and straight–forward to feel shitty and unhappy. No particular effort needed for that. Lemonade needs sugar, where the fuck do you find sugar when you’re unhappy? The book “Noriu Nobelio” comes back. And then there’s the unmitigated tragedy of “Parduotos Vasaros” which is nothing more than a pastoral symphony of rural life in interwar Lithuania.

The point here is that not all life experiences are “the same”. I did the weed–whacking, but I am not particularly noble for doing it. Nor am I better off. I’m not kinder. I did my neighbors a favor, but I don’t think they care. I doubt they even see it as a favor: they may see me as the crazy guy, the one who is beyond comprehension. OK, well, now I am being mean. My neighbors are OK. They are normal. They do normal things. Taking care of the property, or rather, failing to, is now an entirely normal thing to do. Is this how Ancient Rome fell? No one could be bothered to take care of things any more?

The point is that hedonistic dining at a fine restaurant really does feel better than a truck–stop, and sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee really does feel better than weed–whacking. And yet, there does need to be an investment of energy to obtain the finer points in life. Someone’s gotta do it, an you got to pay money for that, or you got to do it yourself, or God help you wait for providence, or your neighbor to do it. I mean, socialism sounds wonderful in principle. In practice, socialism means someone has to weed–whack, and no one wants to do that.

I’m thinking that I can probably apply some kind of glib reductionist analysis to this situation. Something about energy flows. Something about economic flows. The cost of labor. It’s labor, when it’s not hedonistic. It’s labor, when you don’t really feel like doing it, but someone offers you money, which can be exchanged for future pleasures.

I keep getting interrupted. (Interrupting myself.) And the topic I intended to write about recedes into the distance.

The core idea of economics is basic: one exchanges present labor for future fulfilled desires. If the future desire is to not starve to death, the bargain appears straight–forward. The problem arises when we move to metaphor: one can starve for love, starve for attention ... OK, that is still fairly straight–forward in my imagined mathematical model outlined previously. But if we change the economic bargain to the exchange of present dis–pleasure for future happiness, this raises the philosophical question: what is pleasure? When it is reducible, its obvious. For example, soft, petting motions on the skin. This triggers nurturing circuits in the brain, the same ones as a baby is wired for, to respond to the mothers touch. So, to the biological reductionist, this is the answer: nature has designed neural circuits to respond with pleasure to certain touches. We can do the chemical thing here, and mention dopamine.

But then, we can take the meta–jump: why is dopamine release associated with pleasure? Pleasure, lets say, skin–touch pleasure (and avoiding sexual organ touch–pleasure, to not complicate the issue), is a fundamental subjective qualia. I personally, directly, immediately feel pleasure. Why is skin–touch pleasure subjectively pleasurable? It is objectively pleasurable due to dopamine release...

Fuck me, synchronicity. So Milda plays this endless stream of trance music. It’s fun, because it samples, mixes in American 1970’s black music, or sometimes famous rock riffs, and puts it on a trance loop. Sometimes it samples male American voices, from the 1960’s, with that serious engineering intonation, scholarly and requiring confirmation. Lets say, the voice used at the Johnson Space Center for the moon landing. So, serious, staid, militaristic, but the topic is way way way out there: flying to the Moon. Really? Holy fuck. Screaming mind explodingly beyond the horizon wild. That’s just nuts. Flying to the Moon. Its like you’re in the throes of the deepest, strongest hallucinogenic experience possible, and you don’t know how to deal with it, how not to scream and loose your head, so you keep it under control, review the knob settings on the panel in front of you and speak with that Johnson Space Center tones of voice, which proves you are not fug–nuts crazy but entirely in control. Flying to the Moon. Entirely befitting of trance music. Noble and great.

Oh, right, I forgot, there is some youtube video of some pop band, and it consist entirely of Johnson Space Center video footage, and the lyrics to the music matching, and the first time I heard it, I was in tears by the end of that song. So, again, fitting into my response of breaking down when pushed to the very limit ... to infinity. And beyond.

At any rate, this trance music samples. So I’m sitting here, writing, and this long, extended sample pops up. Young guy. He says something about love, and how to feel love, but then he’s talking about music. Any why do we need to work with existing styles of music, why can’t we create something new? Break out of the barriers of the comfortable but uninspiring familiar. And the subjective feeling of music. The feeling of pleasure. It’s just sound waves, pressure waves of air in your ear, and it transports you to a primal feeling, of love, overwhelming love. And this other voice interrupts at this point, and and with this annoying, cavalier tone says “That’s cool, bro. What if we take all that and put it into AI and see what happens?” And then the music starts.

And I’m like, fuck me, synchronicity. Is the universe speaking to me, personally? Of course not. Of course it is. It is speaking to all of us. One cannot turn around sideways without having AI in your intellectual field of view. Its very rapidly insinuating itself into culture. I mean, this is what world culture is: everything happening everywhere, all at once. Like that Cantonese movie. Except we are living it.

I read sci–fi as a kid, and that was cool. But I never felt wind–blown. Well, a few times, while high. And more strongly, on LSD. And then later, I realized I did not need pot or LSD to feel wind–blown; I only needed a sailboat and salt spray. A day on the beach, surfing. And I’m wind–blown. But now ... the last few weeks? I’m like on a wild roller–coaster. I mean, these analogies are rife, and common–place. People like roller–coasters, because they give you that wind–blown feeling, rather literally: the wind blows in your face as you race up and down the roller–coaster track. Humans do a vast variety of things to induce this feeling. Tomorrow, I will be celebrating the summer solstice, staying up all night, and trying to loose my mind (or not loose it) while all those about me try to do the same. Pagan rites. The Gaia party, or something like that. Private, unadvertised. So, humans strive to be knocked out of their gourd, and as I’m human ... Well, mammals do too, per observations by biologists. Monkeys and elephants get drunk. I forget if ants have been witness to do the same. Maybe. So this is... what, exactly? Attempts to alter the subjective sense of self.

Milda is smoking a cigarette. So, nicotine does that too.

Anyway, I’ve wandered far off topic. I’m exploring the subjective, and trying to tie it back to physical reality, and the one tiny insight I had many hours ago remains untouched. So lets do that tiny insight now.

It was more synchronicity. I was taking a break, skimming google news, and this in–line ad popped up. Psychological self–help. Stop self–sabotaging. (I’ve) tried everything, and it cannot be defeated by attacking it directly (says the wording on the ad.) Buddhist teaching reveals that you can only get rid of it by naming it. The picture shows a coiled snake, head rising up, and it says “self–sabotage” or something on the snake, I don’t recall. And then it says that these are locked cycles, learned in childhood. Trying to face it directly only strengthens it, only reinforces this unconscious, mechanical cycle, learned in childhood. You must instead name it to push it away (I guess they would like to say “mindfulness”, but this text ad is plenty long enough. You’re supposed to click through, and discover, find a viable approach to that self–sabotage that has been ruining your life and making you unhappy.

So, again, this is the media environment I am immersed in. That some fairly large segment of the US population is subjected to. So it’s not truly synchronicity; it is merely the sign of the times. And I have no objection; Buddhism appears to be entirely healthy, from what I can tell. The Hari Krishna, not so much. Idolatry. I don’t get it: if you leaf through the self–help books they offer, they seem to offer entirely reasonable spiritual advice. But then you get this thing where all the men have to shave their heads in this certain way, and the women have to wear saris, and photos of whoever the fuck that is, decorated with flowers and carried about like some christian icon. That’s not healthy, duude. It’s idol worship. I do not see idol worship as a mentally healthy practice. It seems fucked up to me. So I don’t know what to make of those people. Anyway, I do welcome Buddhism into the psychological self–help tradition. The point is that it goes deeper into the spiritual than conventional Western psychology. We’ve had mystics of all sorts. I am utterly unfamiliar with Blavatsky, I need to dig into her someday. Or some of the others. Rumi is too many centuries in the past to be relevant. The spiritual exploration is worthwhile; the mystics and the old religions go there; conventional psychology does not. Freud and Jung might be right (I don’t know, I’m not familiar enough with either, and I should be.) but my impression is that they are too abstract to get the message across. People melted when they read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. That’s the IQ level that needs to be served. My own impression was that it was treackle–sweet, tacky, simplistic with no overtones or nuance. Montone uplifting, meant to be uplifting. Well, OK, I never understood Le Petit Prince, either. The point is that Freud and Jung work at a different level than Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And different again from mystics and old religions. And I guess the human need for spiritual uplift has always been around, and I guess I can say we are much luckier now, than before: both Catholicism and Protestantism have been failing Europe for four centuries. We needed something better. And something better is arriving just in time. So that’s good.

Anyway, back to the self–help ad, which, to my surprise, mentions Buddhism unabashedly.

But what shot into my brain was the claim of autonomic behavior, learned in childhood. An this made me go aha! because it fits with my idea of sub–agents. (At least, that was the aha. It might not be true, but it was the aha.) The point is that there are autonomous circuits, functioning within the mind, exerting forces on behavior, actions, feelings and emotions. I suppose Freud said this too, but he gave it different words (unconcsicous and subconscious) and I’m pretty sure he never spoke of these as autonomous, independent forces. Here, I am very much focused in their own being–ness: these “things”, these agents (such as the ones that cause self–sabotage in that advertisement) have power not only because they exist through time, not only because they have a stable structure in time, but because they are agentic, in a way. They “want” to live.

Now, the counter–point is easy: “No Linas, you’re wrong its just neurons and neurotransmitters and positively reinforcing feedback loops.” Well, yeah, duh. It *is* that, exactly that. But what I am trying to do is to layer structure onto this feedback loop, and identify the anatomy of it. The feedback loop is stable, precisely because it is insulated from external interference: external events cannot easily wipe out this self–reinforcing loop. There is a causal barrier. It blocks causality. It blocks ergodic evolution, it block mixing. Its a barrier. And, as a barrier, there is an inside, and an outside. So that matches one of the bullet points for agency. Can I match the other bullet points?

Well, the last bullet point says something about affecting the external world, and, indeed, these feedback loops that impact unhealthy mental places are definitely acting on the external world. So, check. The middle three bullets talk about world–models, a menu of decisions, and some choice–making entity having a subjective experience. This is dicier.

OK, so then .. what sort of childhood events might bring an autonomous loop to life? Clearly, concepts like tulpas and split personalities fit this bill. But these are rare and extreme. Then there are neuroses and complexes. I would have trouble imagining how these work. I mean, I can imagine, but imagining imaginary things is a bad foundation on which to build scientific inquiry. Then, there is advice given to writers: write about what you know. What do I know? I’ve already built some reasonable auto–biography in this diary, but I don’t see how that’s helpful. I need an example of some childhood daemon that still controls my life. Do I have any? I wrote about anger issues, but these faded after I hit the age of ten, and I seem to have at best some median, average amount of anger in my profile.

Is there anything conflicted in my being? Do I have any daemons that eat me, or sabotage my life? Well, two: loneliness, and a burning desire for love. But these I’ve wrote about extensively, and I’ve already analyzed them as full–frontal primary agents in my subjective experience. Should I re–analyze them in some other, more subtle way? I reflected just now, and don’t really see how. I mean, maybe I could spill eight paragraphs, and stumble on some new insight, but this bores me. I need to find some complex. The self–help books deal with the daddy complex, the mommy complex, the Peter Pan Syndrome, fuck all. I don’t know. Low–self–esteem. These are learned, and likely not innate (i.e. likely not DNA–based, but of course, genetics always creates predispositions.) Low–self–esteem is learned: “I’m a failure at everything.” One decides this one day after failing enough exams, getting spurned by a heart–throb, and getting in severe arguments with parents. Descending into fights with classmates. Other paths are home abuse. Turning into the school bully. Then there’s unwarranted high–self–esteem aka narcissism. I have no clue. What makes a person narcissistic? OK, well, the desire to be admired by others.

OK, that’s a good one. I understand that. I too want to be highly regarded. My self–deprecating manner is a false front. I want to be admired for out–self–deprecating all the other self–deprecators: to be better at that game than you are. Holier than thou. I presume the Hari Krishnas play this game: to be holier than thou. The need to be admired for some quality. The problem with “true narcissists” is that they pick utterly superficial and shallow qualities to be admired by. The sophisticates pick things like money or power. Natural athletes pick athletic endeavors. Set world records, and all that. Oddly, in the fine arts, one can’t compete like that. Except maybe to be more famous than Picasso? Or in music, to haunt the top–40 chart longer than anyone else? Is that narcissistic competition? Or is it naturally talented people going out and pushing the boundaries of what is possible?

When I write this diary, I push the boundaries of my own possibility. I mean, I guess I also was pushing myself, hard, when working on, say, the beta–expansion. I worked 14 hours a day on that, seven days a week, for months. Many or most of my projects are mono–maniacal like that: for example, the 25th Anniversary edition of Bigfoot took me almost exactly 30 days, 14 hours a day, non–stop. I lost five, maybe ten pounds in weight, because I did not eat, because I was so “in the groove” I did not notice the hunger. I mean it (the hunger) was there, but it was masked by activity. Also, sitting on the sofa was not conducive to snacking.

Being in a flow state makes the time pass. And, from what I can tell, it is 100% healthy. It is a psychological state of goodness. The way it was meant to be.

Can I do a reductionist analysis of goodness? What? I imagine being the pre–historic hunter–gatherer, hot on the trail of tonight’s meal: focused, in the flow. This is part evolutionary, I suppose. Can I imagine the same, if I was a jelly–fish? There’s food. The flow is to stuff it into your mouth. Succeed in that, and all is well. This is the flow state for a jellyfish. This psychological goodness translates directly into survival. Survival drives the converse: evolution preserves whatever genetics allowed the flow state to be entered and maintained. (Of course, there’s luck: you have to be somewhere, where there is actually food. But if you have food, you have to be smart enough to eat it. Major Depressive Disorder for jellyfish means death. Jellyfish who suffer from anhedonia do not live long.)

OK, so that’s a biological reduction of the flow state. There are now two other questions. One is whether I can further reduce this to thermodynamics. The other is: what as the subjective interpretation of the flow state? That is, what is the minimal axiomatic model of an agent needed to perceive a flow state? The five–bullet–point agent seems to be sufficient to have a subjective sense of being–ness. But being–ness is not the same as flow. Flow is a continuous successful process of accomplishment, of progress towards a specific goal. Or rather, the “objective” manifestation of flow is successful progression in a task. What does flow feel like subjectively? Well, calm, poise, balance. A certain kind of “happiness” but “happiness” is entirely the wrong word. A certain contentment. But contentment implies rest after activity, while the flow state is the active state. In the flow state, all other worries go away.

OK, so what then, are worries? How do I map the agential model to worries, or vice–versa? What’s a clam got to be worried about? How sophisticated does a biological brain have to be, to experience worry? What kind of reductivist analysis can I do here?

Well, for an active living being viz, an agent, one is constantly processing a selection menu of things to do next (and picking one, or a compatible cluster). A worry is then a menu item choice for an activity that can be deferred until later, but not too much later, as it eventually becomes life–threatening.

What does it take for an agent to perceive something as life–threatening? Ohh, that’s interesting. That’s fundamental, and I have not yet examined this. Jellyfish flee predators, which means two or three things: they have the sensory network to detector predators, and they have the subjective feeling that this is bad, and something must be done about it. And, of course, they have the objective neural network that implements the flight mechanism. So, here, I claim that *any* network capable of perceiving danger and implementing the option of fleeing it *will* (tautologically) have the subjective feeling of “something bad is happening”. So this is the next step after consciousness: awareness of danger.

Well, “next” is relative. The earlier next was sociability, which I reduced to a desire for being together, which I interpreted as an increase of Tononi Phi, which I equated with a localized rise in entropy, driven by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This is the model of reductionism I want to attempt again. This time, for the sense of danger. Can I reduce this sensation to thermodynamics?

Well, danger implies death. Death implies dissolution. The living bacterial cell does what it does, but when it dies, it falls apart into pieces–parts, components that wash away in lysis, in some bath of water that is too hot, too acidic, too salty, too high a concentration of peroxides. Soap – lipid knives that penetrate the cell membrane and wreck it, and the guts spill out.

OK, so how do we describe this thermodynamically? I know approximately nothing about lipid chemistry. I dump some bacteria into liquid dish soap, and I guess that must be exothermic, because the lipid part of the soap is attracted to other lipids, and repelled by water.

The problem here is that I currently do not understand the role of entropy in exothermic reactions. The obvious solution is to ask Claude. Should I? Does it matter? Do I need to lean on the 2nd law, or is it just fine to lean on other thermodynamic laws?

Well, yes, it matters: thermodynamic laws apply to chemistry, but (Shannon) entropy can be defined in abstract settings. If I am to use a law, I need to use one that works at the same level of abstraction.

Hmm. This is new to me. So I know the formal definition of mixing for a measure–preserving dynamical system. I sort of know the definition of entropy for the same. It occurs to me that I do not recall ever seeing any analysis that relates mixing to entropy increase! How is that even possible? Do I have a bad memory, or do textbooks avoid this? Is it in some later chapter that I skipped? I recall reading some book by Dusa McDuff (?) on ergodicity in hyperbolic systems or maybe symplectic systems, like that, I don’t recall a discussion of entropy, even though it gave a full definition of conservative and dissipative dynamical systems, of wandering trajectories, all that in group–theretical settings. Hmm. Maybe I really do have to ask Claude.

So the bridge to be constructed is this: measure–theoretic mixing increases measure–theoretic entropy. A system with an inside, an outside, and a boundary between the two is unmixed, and unmixable, for as long as the boundary is in place. The removal of the boundary allows for mixing to take place, and constitutes the death of that system. Or rather, the removal of that boundary is fatal to the separated system.

This is a definition of death for a cellular system, so, pre–agentic. The inside and outside can be anything, as long as they are “different”, indentifiable and thus mixable. That is, removing a barrier separating two halves of a box filled with gas does nothing. It only has effect if the gases on either side of that barrier are different. If they are, then, by definition, we say that the removal of the barrier “kills” the system, and results in it’s death. This is a colorful definition of “death” in the context of measure–preserving dynamical systems, but it seems to be the correct one, given the model of bacterial death in hot, acidic, salty or soapy water.

I’m tired. Its 23:30. I’ve been at this since 14:00, with various breaks. I should have been preparing for Santara Sviesa. I’m bad. I have some mix of worry and anxiety. Am I self–sabotaging? Who cares and does it matter? It doesn’t matter. See.

So lets recap. We have a workable definition of death. So the question sequence would be: (a) can an agent perceive death? (b) how could it perceive death? (c) how could it become conscious or aware of self–death? (d) would such a conscious awareness of self–death be subjectively experienced as fear or danger? (I assume yes; this is a rhetorical question) (e) what sort of sensory apparatus would be able to sense impending danger or death (e.g. at the hands of a predator, or perhaps as some toxic poison?) The problem here is that predators are mechanical, and presume a 3D world, whereas my agentic definition does not assume space, 3D or otherwise; it only assumes barriers, insides and outsides, which can be done in a purely set–theoretic fashion. So: how do I define a predator or toxicity in a set–theoretic framework (or in a framework where there’s a measure?) (well, I guess dynamical; agencies are necessarily dynamical systems and not static, and the arrival of danger is necessarily a dynamical event.)

This tangle of questions is tough, and I will think about them as I fall asleep tonight. The point here is that the jellyfish, with its strikingly simply neural system, is apparently capable of perceiving danger, which implies that the mechanics of danger–sensation and self–preservation have to be quite simple. They cannot be complex.

After that, we will have the interesting question as to whether and which biological systems in nature can perceive danger, even when they lack a nervous system? Oh shoot: well, we already got that: plants, leaves and bushes can sense bugs that eat them, and can take preventative measures. So, yes, non–neural systems perceive danger just fine.

I’ve spent weeks developing a thermodynamic basis for life, and I wonder if I am rediscovering something already known in academia? Surely, some botanist might have already faced this question? Some mathematical botanist? Fuck me. I could ask Claude, of course. I could get lost in conversations with Claude, but it sure as hell feels that I can make greater progress, and go faster, if I don’t get lost in that. I’ll ask Claude when I get stuck, not making progress. But for now, I’ve been in a multi–week flow state, and I sure as hell don’t want to interrupt it. Except to eat, sleep, take showers, hang out in bars and go gaga for Joninės. Later, duude.

23 June 2026

Sensing danger is difficult. Evolutionarily, the danger has to harm your reproductive fitness. This danger would then be very highly context–specific. It would be anti–communication.

That is, danger is not an internal property, but is necessarily of external origin: bugs that eat plants, or whatever predator eats jellyfish. It is very context–specific: its specifically bugs, and not lions and tigers. Since it is an external action on internal state, it is necessarily communicative, a message that crosses the internal–external boundary. This message is forced, from the external world onto the internal. This makes it different from conventional sensory operation, where the internal mechanisms observe the external world, selecting the specific kind of sensory information to let across (sight, sound, smell...) Sensory operations seem to be continuous, uninterrupted. Ongoing. By contrast, externally forced interactions are insults (in the European sense of the word “insult”: an attack, not just a verbal attack, but a general forced–upon–ness.)

How might such an external event force itself upon the agent, and how would it be (subjectively) perceived? The thermodynamic character of sensory flow is unclear. How should I justify it? As the agent perceives, by sensory means, the external world, the total entropy increases. But the informational flow is controlled; the incoming sensory information is either integrated into the world–model, or it is discarded. The complexity of the world–model increases. The problem here is I do not have a good metric or measure of structural complexity. I imagine this word–model to be some graph of vertexes and edges, or some partly–assembled jigsaws. But I’m not sure what it is that I should be counting, and even if I do invent something countable about a graph, I’m not sure in what way I need to relate it to entropy. So this is another TODO: with great effort, lets try to find some suitable measure of complexity of a world model. And, from this, articulate how the informational flow, coming in from sensory channels, alters that complexity.

I assume that the correct model is (again) self–organized criticality. That is, the incoming information affects the world–model a bit like the sand–pile: each new bit of information is added, until there is some avalanche. In reasoning, this would be generalization from particulars: after observing a number of specific instances, a general pattern emerges. The specific instances are wiped away from memory – this is the avalanche – and replaced by the generalization.

Fascinating. I can see how to do this in software. I mean, the original language–learning project was exactly this. The biggest design issue there was that it was batched. Instead, I need to make it avalanche at some natural pace. But what is the correct pace? The answer is that there needs to be an ensemble of organisms (agents), each with different thresholds for generalization (“stickier sand grains”) and let them all run in parallel. And ... if I am running this in parallel, I can do this via GPU. So, when incrementing observational counts, these are incremented for different organisms. Hmm. This works for a while, but eventually, different organisms must diverge, as they will select different behaviors. At any rate, this sounds like a viable experimental research direction. So, another TODO.

Wow. OK. So where am I? I have an even, ongoing, streaming flow of incoming sensory information, and it updates the world model using some algo that generalizes from particulars to generals, that algorithm appearing to operate near criticality and having avalanching behavior. And this could be said to be the “flow state”: the pleasurable, agreeable forward progress. Maybe not towards a specific goal, but towards a towering Babel of increasing structural complexity. Which I can hand–wavingly claim is not only compatible with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but is driven by it. Err, well, careful. Driven by non–equilibrium energy flows. Fuck. These details are killing me. But anyway, this seems to be a coherent, consistent description of the sensory flow for an agent.

It lacks a detailed description of the decision process. Unless the avalanching is taken to be decision–making. That is, when a set of particulars are replaced by their generalization, if this the “decision”? In particular, there may be multiple different collections of particulars, which can be generalized in conflicting ways. The generalizations are non–Abelian: once generalized in one direction, the other directions are shut off (since the collection of particulars has been trimmed and are no longer available.) If two different generalizations are available, and of about equal strength, then the choice is which way to go. For a sand–pile, it would be to avalanche left or avalanche right. This is the branch point. If the sand–pile is circle–symmetric, then it can tumble down towards any point in that circle. (Shades of wave–function collapse...) For a general collection of structural counts, my graph includes many, many collections of particulars, so there is no particular (spatial) symmetry.

The philosophical issue here is the intersection of free will and avalanching. The previous paragraph paints avalanche directions as “choices”. The obvious choice mechanism is to give each avalanche direction a probability of

e^{- E / k T}

and then pick one randomly, and commit to it. But this is purely random: its a role of the dice. The final position of the dice is a “choice” but the process was empty and void of volition. So how does this work for the subjective experience of the agent? The agent senses it’s place in the world, but the process of incorporating new information proceeds without conscious volition. Thus, the “illusion of free will”. Hmm.

Well, but this is not so bad as it sounds. The above describes the accumulation of information about the external world, and it’s incorporation into the world–model. This can run on full automatic. My eyes and ears just run on automatic. I’m subjectively aware of hearing and seeing, but whatever information is coming across, and what that information is doing as it enters my brain, that’s automatic. My volition, my decision–making process is where to direct my gaze, or, more abstractly, where to direct my attention. The description of the prior paragraphs does not invalidate or harm that. It does, however, push the volitional layer off deeper into the meta–stack. So, that’s an open work item.

That, and I wandered off–track from the conception of harm to the organism. It seems that this can now be defined as unwanted, unregulated external actions upon the agent. I guess that’s obvious. The subtlety is to reinterpret this external action as a kind of “message” or “informational flow”. Such a view unifies the system into a whole, giving us a birds–eye view of insults acting on organisms. Part of an ecology, instead of discrete objective events.

But if this is the view of an insult, then some numerical measure of the harm caused needs to be devised. Putting bacteria in soapy water is deadly; the reproductive possibilities of that bacterium are wiped out. The only evolutionary trait tested here is that, perhaps, this one particular instance of this one particular bacterium can survive the insult, and therefore, whatever it was that made it structurally unique can be passed on to future generations. But this model is a binary yes/no, survived or died, instance by instance. There has to be some ensemble of phenotypes, some of which die, and some of which don’t, in order for selection to act on the genotype.

And that’s fine, I guess. But I am hunting for defense mechanisms against harm in individuals. Thus, the insult is either not deadly, or there is enough fore–warning of the upcoming insult that it can be fled from, protected from, or actions taken to mitigate the harm. That is, there has to be some message, some informational flow, that acts as a warning. And, for this, some sensory apparatus can be developed. An early warning system. DEW in the far North. PAVE PAWS.

Huh. That last sentence was not foreseen. It just hopped into my head by free–association. But it is interesting. It indicates the presence of an agential organism, nominally called “the nation–state”, but apparently operating with a complexity comparable to the jellyfish or the tree–shrub. So it would be an example of “its sub–agents, all the way down.”

Enough. Time to take a break. Later.

28 June 2026

It’s late, I’m tired. Idling by watching youtube. I mean, almost nothing. First half of two stupid fitness videos at 1.5x speed. Another on Mona Kimura and her kick–boxing style so I got up and practiced my kicks. All the videos are click–bait and totally pointless, even as they seem alluring .. Ukraine is winning, something something black hole. I think I will watch Timothy Snyder, though. But what got me was a long commercial about narcissism.

In short, it made me stop and think, am I a narcissist, and I’m not aware of it? Here’s the issue. I have two modes of socializing. In one mode, I’m an introvert, a wall flower. Often, when tied, my mind goes blank, and stays blank. I have nothing at all to say. Too much energy to think of something to say, so I stay quiet. I mean, if I have to, I can break the ice, but being a passive listener is fine with me. In the other mode, I’m a talkative extrovert. I do break the ice. I do try to get people to talk about themselves. And then ... somehow it ends up being about me, and I rather dislike talking about me. Although I love telling anecdotes from my life. So this does not sound bad, but when I get stuck with colorless people, I often end up being the center of attention. Well, except that this almost never happens. I dunno. I guess I’m not a narcissist. Still, that commercial (for some therapy counseling or something) did make me stop and wonder about me. Well, whatever.

Mostly, though, I think I had a chance to get laid this weekend, and I was too stupid to make the move ... wtf. So that is dragging me down. I’m not wallowing in self–pity, but, almost. WTF, I have not played this game in for decades. Not like I was ever good at it. I also suffer from a complex of wanting to be the nice guy (nice guys finish last?) with a mild fear of rejection. Toss in multiple unfortunate timing incidents and unclear signals... Basically, I think I had a very good chance, and I blew it. That would be my self–assessment. I’m kicking myself, hard. I’m fit, I’m healthy, I’m raring to go. I need a sex partner. Why is this so hard?

Whatever. I’m kicking myself doubly–hard, because this was maybe the best opportunity yet, there won’t be another like this for a very long time.

Physical fitness makes one healthy, happy, wise, improves longevity and all that but what they don’t tell you is that it makes you horny, and when you don’t get sex, you’re fucking miserable. I’m stuck in this rut, this pervasive dragging crazy–making state of being all sexed up and unable to do anything about it. When I get back to Austin, I think I will need to figure out this dating software thing. Although honestly I would strongly prefer Lithuanian girls. Maybe I need to solve this here. Hmm. OK, Then. Tomorrow.

Of course, I have ... a lot to do tomorrow. Like return to my mathematical philosophy. And other things.

29 June 2026

Let’s try this and see how it goes. I’m currently listening to Telan Devik Hybrid Cars. Just saying; it’s coloring the background of what I write here.

What I write here will be different from my usual. I’m trying something different here. So what is this track?

It’s almost 11 AM, I’ve been awake for two hours. I did 20 minutes of chair Tai Chi, except I did it standing, with 5 lb weights in each hand. Youtube hit me with a chair Tai Chi ad, so I figured what the hell, lets do it. I’m listening to Timothy Snyder, so I figured I can do two things at once. I saved the Snyder video from the night before, where I was unwinding and looking for Ukraine news. My main project, preparing for Santara–Šviesa is over, so I’m going to screw around a bit before getting down to business.

So where was I? I’ve been doing this chair Tai Chi, but standing, for a few months and I have to say I do like it. I’m doing a lot of upper–body work, pushups, dead hangs, half–pull–ups (just the shoulder–shrug part of it). Some ultra–basic break dancing moves, I really need to figure these out, I’m having trouble getting my legs to move fast while putting weight on my arms. I guess my arms are not strong enough. Plus I get out of breath fast. I’ve done fifteen years of VO2max training, and great, but then I get semi–sedentary for much or most of that time. Being active is time consuming.

Telan Devik is over. Time passes much more quickly than I can record my thoughts. I mean, I have to pause to figure out what to type, to edit away garbage before I type it. But whatever. I mentally tape–recorded part of this mornings proceedings, so let me play that back. Timothy Snyder is over, and I’m snacking an early breakfast. Normally, I don’t eat till noon, but Milda left me all this food just waiting for me at arms length. It doesn’t help that the next video is about gut health, and it’s actually pretty decent. It makes eight points about eating, five or 6 of which I already know or follow, implicitly or explicitly. A few that I have not thought about before. Should I go to the video, and copy them here? For God’s sakes, why? I already know them. Yes, repeating them helps cement them, but they are already fairly cemented. The only really new ones are eat variety, eat colorful veggies for their polyphenols. For variety, the video recommends 30 different plant foods a week. This is good advice. I think I almost do this, but never consciously. Now I can be conscious about it.

So somewhere in the middle of all this, maybe during the Snyder video, I get hit with an ad promoting meditation as a path to reducing stress, and I break down crying, thinking how wonderful it is that we live in a world (finally) that permeated with messages about mental health and wellness. It really does feel like a new dawn, a new hope, well, at least for Americans, since this is all English language. Stuff like this is why the USA can dominate. The point is, I’m not getting EU wellness and health ads. Maybe because I am watching in English.

OK, so now lets do some analytical work. The algo knows I have overlapping interests in health. Besides kick–boxing and MMA I watch surfing and skating videos. Weight–lifting, stretching, movement videos. Dance. So it has me pegged as being health–conscious. It’s a shame if these videos aren’t being blasted out to other viewers, but I guess you have to be open to new ideas, to be receptive, before the message can be received, processed and incorporated. And so the questions is about population statistics about health: are there more people interested in health and fitness today, than a decade, two, three ago? Five? What about mental health and well–being? In the 1970’s I was quite aware of psychological self–help books, thanks to cousin Paul. They were lying around. So people in the 1970’s – the hippie generation, were into this. Perhaps one might say, there was always a counter–cultural movement, say, the beatniks, who felt the emptiness and the unsatisfying life–style of corporate careerism.

Aivaras made a remark that sits with me, that hit me hard. In reference to Milda, he said “Let her be. She is a servant for the government (a government worker) (Valstybine aptarnautoja). It’s her time off and let her enjoy it.” And it shot in my mind “Oh.”. OK, all is forgiven. As this diary explains at legnth over the last few years, I fell madly in love with her, but this exceeds any rational grounding: there are reasons why this happened, and I think I explained them earlier, (in short, she’s a flower–child, a la 1970’s hippies) and there are reasons why its doomed (which I have not explained. The number one reason is that I am married. This blocks effectively all avenues for romantic development, with anyone, for any reason, anywhere. So that is primary and overwhelming. Secondarily, there is a host of reasons with Milda in particular. She’s learned to be a libertine. I have not untangled whether this is due some genetic, biological basis of being unable to form lasting, deep emotional attachments, or due to decades of attempts and failures, of rejections and temporary attachments that fail. That is, social reinforcements of libertine behavior patterns. Not uncommon in the West: women who have lots of sexual partners, and feel just fine with that. As opposed to her roommate Migle, who was complexed over her inability to find lasting love. And in the end, Migle found a partner, a husband, and is trying to make the economic angle work now.

Let’s get back to Milda. She experimented with mediation, veganism, and has some multi–decade relationship with hallucinogens that she will not open up about, even though I have raised the topic many many many times, pointing out even my own familiarity. Her sister traveled to India, in search f self–help and enlightenment. So what makes people search out self–help and enlightenment? And why, for got’s sake, am I even interested in this topic?

OK, so lets talk about me. Not narcissitcally, like yesterday’s add, but in the meditative sense, like this mornings skip–ad about the curative powers of mediation. It plonked into my mind that writing, for me, is that meditative act. It is that mindfullness.

I am entirely capable of sitting empty–headed, staring out the window of a bus or train or car, letting my mind just idly wander. Not asleep, but empty. Thinking nothing. Of course, it can’t possibly be “thinking nothing”, but whatever it is doing, its not entering conscious awareness. It is true and utter emptiness. Blank–hood. No desires, no feelings, no thoughts, no impulses. Just calm. Empty calm. Not warm calm, not cold calm. Not pleased, not displeased. Not thankful, not at peace. Not relaxed, not tense. Just empty blankness. I can reach this state easily, and perhaps I even reach it far more often that I should. Or not? I mean, isn’t being asleep enough to provide all those restorative and curative powers that my brain needs? Do I also need this exhausted calmness?

Ah, that is the key word: exhausted calmness. I enter this state of calmness when I am mentally exhausted. Not tired. Just like “I’ve had enough thinking, so now, I’m just not going to think any more.” This can happen in the mornings, perhaps after a poor nights sleep, or having the form of a mild hangover. I suppose what I describe here is entirely normal, and entirely conventional, and that many or most or all people enter and have this state, and I imagine there is extensive psychological literature that describes, analyses this state. I suppose it is even associated with some specific neurotransmitter mix in the synapses. Some tonic brain–wave rhythm.

Now, when I was younger, I imagined this to be the meditative state. There were directives: “empty your mind. Be free of thoughts.” And I haphazardly did practice this. I never–ever bothered to sit in a lotus pose, or strike any other pose. To straighten my spine, suck in my gut, close my eyes, and “meditate” in this way. So I failed to follow the specific directives associated with meditation; I only followed the one that I assumed was central: empty your mind. And it seems, I got very very good at that, so much so, that my mind can achieve this state of pure emptiness entirely freely and readily, at any time, with no effort. Just blank out.

And then, much more recently, decades ago, I started hearing about mindfullness. (I heard about “emptying your mind of thoughts” when I was twelve or thirteen, which is why I’m adapt at that. I was already doing this practice as a teen.) And what is mindfullness? Well, the first description of this that I heard, that I remember, was to first focus on the toes, as one sits meditating, then the sole of the foot. Then the ankle, and move on up through the body, focusing on each body part. I guess I’m supposed to be sitting lotus pose, eyes closed, as I do this: that was the directive.

Well, I did not do this, not while sitting quietly with my eyes closed. But I did practice mindfulness while doing almost anything and everything else. And not just how my toes felt, but all the various pieces parts as might be relevant. It was fundamentally central to my learning how to row. Duh. Where is the body, what is it doing? But this opened the doors to other things: dance, and stretching. Mindfulness works: while eating food, what does it taste like? Enjoy. Look at the evening sky, and be overwhelmed by the colors. Pay attenitino to conversations: be mindful of the emotional state of others. Don’t just listen, but immerse in the mood of the moment. Be aware of it, and fall into it not so much be accident, but of will, mindfully. When one dives off a diving board, one does not just fall into the water, one performs like a ballerina. And so with conversations: one falls not just into the mood of the moment, but rather, flutters like a butterfly into it. This is mindfulness. The being aware, the joinder, conjoining of the moment with awareness. Meeting being–ness with grace. Not performative self–conscious beauty, although that is fine. And not with hammer–smashing force (that would be rare and unusual and hard to imagine) but with grace. With an ease of flow. This is the supreme state of mindfulness, I suppose: to be aware, adaptive, accepting, graceful. The word “accepting” has overtones of surrender, but one does not surrender: one remains and must remain one’s own master. The respect of self as a beingness, an essence, of existingness, must remain primal. “I am me” must remain the stout pillar at the center of it all.

I swear. I wrote the words “stout pillar” entirely innocently, as a naive summer child. But now, a minute later, my crotch tingles and tickles as I think of the stout pillar between my legs. I like this feeling. It feels good. I want to fuck. Going off to masturbate is on the menu. I mean, I won’t, but its on the menu.

So where was I? Mediation. Well, of course, masturbation is a rather nasty... I cannot find the right word here, and google AI, even after multiple minutes, is absolutely clueless what I am asking it. Deranged. Stifled. Contorted. Unhealthy, but its not unhealthy, its forced (one must concentrate). It’s twisted, its not natural. Chick–lit, say, Clan of the Cave Bear, has these soft–porn sex scenes as might be imagined by a virginal girl; my thoughts wander into hard core porn, of the kind that some of the strongest condemnatory words were used in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Complete surrender: fuck me hard, I want it, and make me cum. Surrender and overwhelming desire to be used and abused totally and completely, in any and every way imaginable. Now, as I am more or less completely 100% utterly hetero, I find myself employing fantasies where I am female, and not just a female, but a slut. A porn star. Hmm. Well. Hmm. I guess I have no more secrets. That may have been the last one. So there we go. I am now completely free, completely unbound. I can go anywhere, and do anything, and no further psychological ties or bonds constrain me. I am a fully liberated human now.

Well, fully liberated humans are sometimes hard to distinguish from psychotic monsters, and so I will attest that I am not a psychotic monster. Those who use and abuse other people are, in that sense, completely liberated: they have no moral compunctions that prevent them from the abusive relationships that they force upon others. I’m pretty sure I have a whole lot of moral compunctions and have very strong desires to not be abusive, which is perhaps why I did not get laid the night before last. I should have put my hand on her shoulder, or her waist. I know, rationally, I should have done this. But I simply forgot to. I just forgot. It did not enter my mind. I’m fairly certain, that, rationally, this would have done the trick, this would have naturally evolved into the next step. And see, that’s the crux, isn’t it? If I rationally, intentionally do this, with the intent of gaining trust, and a path towards sexual relations, this can be argued to be abusive. Oh, wait. But it takes two to tango. If the other party is unreceptive, and I continue, then that is abuse. But if the other party is willing, then rational, intentional actions to fulfill desires should not longer count as manipulative.

Of course, every rule has an exception. If the person has been brainwashed and in a cult, and you manipulate them, then its abusive. If the person is vulnerable, due to social standing, economic situation, psychological weakness, then it’s abusive. What I want is sex with someone strong, not just physically strong, but psychologically strong. Healthy. Aware. Awake. Flowering.

I mean, in some sufficiently abstract sense, we are all flowering, of course. But sometimes, that bloom is hidden, under a bushel, buried deep. And I know that I have sufficient talent and abilities to find and uncover and liberate that flowering. Well, sort of. Of course, with many or most individuals, this would take years or decades, and be utterly transformative. I have no such time. I have aneacted these transformations upon myself, and then, only by accident. I did not know that I did not know, for the first four or five decades of my life. I was stunted. My teen years opened the possibilities to me, but then I was stunted almost all of my adult life. Why? How? I can list excuses. Am I actually free now, as these word that I write claim that I am? Well... I think I’m free.

Well, OK, so one thing that bothers me is that, in my freedom, I do not have the drives and desires that would make me rich or powerful or famous. For whatever reasons, I’m not driven to that. I mean, like everyone else, being rich, powerful and famous seem like a good thing, but I am not willing to take the effort to get there. What is this like? Well, for many, they want to be fit, healthy, muscular and good–looking, but they are not willing to take that effort. I for one, make physical exercise a part of my daily routine, so I do do that. Am I “driven” to do that? “Drive” is a funny word. I want to. I make conscious decisions to do so. I am making a conscious decision to do ten pushups right now.

There, I did it. Just now. Ten full pushups. Proper form. Shoulder extension. Plank. Both nose and groin to the floor. I did this willfully, because the writing gave me the suggestion, and the thinking rational mind decided, OK, I can do this, and then I decided, and I did it. BTW, I did not masturbate; that feeling faded soon as I started writing about something else. But now, it returns, as I write these words. But what about the desires to be rich, powerful, and famous? Well, these too require both urges, and verbalization, and action. So, as I write, the topics of which I write (this is the verbal, conscious, self–aware me) plants these thoughts in some deeper, reptillian me. As far as I know, neuroscience knows nothing at all of what I speak, here, and so my words are necessarily mystical. Sports science knows something: sports training is all about using the rational, aware mind, and pushing a collection of knowledge, gleaned from your coach, or from experience, into the autonomous motor mind. This is obvious and fundamental to sports psychology and sports training, but is so obvious that there should be significant neuroscience exploration of this (although I admit I have never seen such neuroscience work.)

Then, one–off from sports is general health and well–being, and I know for certain that decades ago, medical doctors have taken meditators and asked them to meditate while sitting in an MRI scanner, or while collecting an encephalogram. I doubt they’ve gained much insight, but the steps are being taken. But what about talking oneself into wanting fame, power and riches? I assume this works in a not–dissimilar way. One must verbally repeat to oneself “I want fame, power and riches”, and then take steps, baby steps, in those directions, until one becomes adept. And then, like training for sports, or training for the visual fine arts, or for music, its practice, practice, practice, till one gets goo at this. This is all obvious, why am I writing about this?

Because I am writing about me. This is my own psycho–analysis. I am writing my journal, and my thought, from this morning, while watching that meditation skip–ad, is that this journal writing is my personal form of meditation. It is not empty–mindedness, as some Hindu gurus might have recommended: a release from all worldly desires. No. I know what it is like to have release from all worldly desires, because I suffer from that. I mean, part of my psychological stuntedness in my middle ages was a lack of desire, and that includes sexual desire. My desire for sex was awakened only three years ago, and it was explicitly awakened by Milda, due to her as–yet not fully analyzed and understood actions. Which I will get around to eventually, but not now. (I will also need to talk about depression. Both in Milda, Aivaras, and as a Lithuanian national issue. I’ve been saving up that one for weeks. When will I find time?) Well, OK, here’s the deal with sex. While in Austin, I had low or no sex drive. But when I’d get to Vilnius, I was both lonely, and horny. Lonely, since, propelled out of my usual surroundings, I had no friends, and was at a loss for things to do. Meanwhile, the streets are teaming with tourists, each seemingly engaged (although I know that is not true) and I seemed to be excluded: look at all these happy people, why am I alone? I’m not sure why I also got sexed up. Maybe because half the tourists have tits? Something lurking in the back, there. Maybe the couples holding hands, sharing coffee, sharing drinks? I don’t know.

Where was I? So early this morning, I decided that journal–writing is my own personal form of meditation. It is mindfulness, but not to my toes, but to my internal, psychological self. And, of course, it is well–known to serve a psychiatric purpose: I could pay some psychiatrist some vast sum of money to listen to me say the exact same things I say here, in this diary. I’m a skin–flint, I’m saving big bucks here. But then, for completeness, for an auto–portaitographic reason, I should mention I have never had the slightest desire to seek psychiatric care. Mostly because I have never–ever been psychiatrically unwell. I mean, I’ve been lonely, sad. Sometimes angry as a small child. But mostly content. Balanced. I’m not just normal, as is normally defined, but I suspect I’m super–normal. There’s some youtube video, which I did not watch, which seemed to make the claim that “among us, there are people who are so balanced, so centered, so mentally healthy, that they are not just normal, but super–normal”. Well, I think I am one of them. I’m so centered and balanced and psychologically healthy, that I could not possibly be more so. I am tortured by nothing ... nothing, that is, but what I write of here. And one of my to–do items is to explain why it is that I am tortured by the things I am tortured by.

So, where was I? The desired for money, fame and power has two forms. In one form, one falls into these desires, presumably in childhood, and then practices them, becoming adept. Personally, I never had these desires in childhood. Never even crossed my mind. There was not even a shadow of this. Into my teen years, my college years, my working years: I never ever desired fame, riches or power. I never thought about them. They never entered my mind. Only now, in old age, I ask myself, as I stack my self up to, say, Elon Musk, who has achieved much, or Jeff Bezos, who fucks a human sex–doll, why not I? Why do I not rate? Well, yes, OK, Elon is a total asshole, and that part of him, I do not want; I actively reject. And that human sex–doll that appears in more or less every photo of Bezos, it is vaguely icky. I mean, porn is sort of porn, and is maybe best left in the bedroom, and not flaunted in public. I mean, I got nothing against gay people, but flaunting sex in gay–pride parades, frankly, honestly, its indecent. Its indecent for a reason. We don’t have hetero–pride parades with porn stars, its really not needed and it really does feel slimy and icky. And the right wing correctly reacts against the excessive display of sexuality in public. They’re right, actually.

Why? Well, I think the foundation is biological. Children, between the ages of six and twelve, are biologically repelled by sexual thoughts, and this is entirely due to evolutionary forces: the female body is simply not mature enough to bear children, and eight–year–old sex would be a biological disaster. So nature has trained against this. Every ten–year–old knows that the other side has “the cooties”. This is deeply wired into the brain, and I think aspects of this survive into adulthood. Sex is fine and great, but we (speaking as all humans) do not need to think about it all day and night, and we do not need to be reminded of it, and it continues to have this feeling of slimy, icky cooties at that times when one is not actively engaged in it. This is why the right–wing objects to (rightfully) gay pride parades. Its not the gay sex, its the sex in general. Although gay sex is well, extra–cooties. I mean, I’ve thought about gay sex. I’ve explored about how it makes me feel. And I’ve come to the honest, full–formed, of my own consent decision that I do not like or want to have gay sex. I mean, sure, in the deepest recesses of my mind, I imagine that if someone got me really drunk, gave me roofies or whatever that date–rape drug is, and had their way with me, I’d enjoy it it, I suppose. I guess. I can’t say; I’m sufficiently strong–willed and self–aware that I suspect that the date–rape drugs will have no effect on me. I might be wrong. But I’ve noticed that it is increasingly the case that alcohol, and the occasional drug I might be offered, is simply not strong enough to push me out of my normal conscious self. OK, within bounds: I underwent anesthesia for surgery, and I know for sure that anesthesia works fine on me. (I don’t know at what strength. Next surgery, I will have to ask the doctor.) And I do know that concussions have most definitely knocked me out. But drugs seem to have less of an effect than I expect them to have. But without measurement, I can’t quite say “I tolerate huge doses”, but I am consistently disappointed by the effects. Half a year ago, someone gave me a tobacco pouch. I fully expected to feel the cigarette high. I felt fucking nothing at all. Everyone at the table is like “that’s just not possible”, and I was extra careful to keep that tobacco pouch parked on my gums as directed. Nothing.

So, where was I? Maybe with roofies, and maybe if those roofies actually worked, then maybe I could enjoy gay sex, as I understand how it could be possible. But I understand this only as a manifestation of my secret desire to be a woman, briefly, long enough to get fucked hard. Long enough to prance around in lingerie, and wearing lipstick. That’s a big turn–on. I’d like to walk around in some tantric–sex cloud, it would be very very pleasurable. OK, lets get real, here. I would also want to, love to, firmly desire to walk (sit?) around in a cloud of heroine. Main–line it, and go “oooooh” as I melt away into the here and now, and everything tingles with relaxed pleasure. I understand that heroine, downers, this is something I would really, really like. Lets throw in methamphetamine. And so on. All of these sound like they are really really fun. In that abstract fantasy kind of way. Well, OK, surfing in Hawaii, I should add that to the list. And skate–boarding. And I avoid skate–boarding mostly because it is a ticket to broken bones, and I already have twelve screws in my leg, my twelve apostles. And sadly, there’s not a chance in hell I’ll end up in Hawaii. So I settle for bike–riding and gymnastics. And however pleasurable I imagine drugs to be, the reality is that entirely normal common–sense processes extinguish any practical actions to further actualize and act upon that desire. What I have left of these desires is sex, currently fulfilled by masturbation and the accompanying fantasies. I’ve worked up some pretty good ones. Will never happen in real–life. In part because I will never inhabit a woman’s body in real life. Alas. Oh well.

Oh, this fantasy world, I’ve often wondered: “where is it?” It’s not exactly a Boltzmann machine, but its almost that. Is it’s location in some fragment of a quantum–mechanical

| Ψ ⟩

? Well, yes, sure, although that is not the most compact explanation. And what is the most compact explanation, representation of where fantasizes reside? I don’t know; but this was the program I started on some months ago, and should continue to pursue.

It’s getting late in the day: 14:30 PM, I need to wrap up. So, some unfinished bullet points:

So, the above bullet points are what I thought I might be able to write about today, but as its clear, even boiling them down to bullet points already makes them large and huge, and I still don’t get around to everything I want to get around to. Anyway, later. It is now 16:07 PM. I’ve been banging away at this since 11:00 AM so for five hours. Today’s diary entry took five hours to write.

29 June 2026 – just a tiny bit later

So I practiced some break–dancing moves, and am surfing the net after yesterday’s bookmarks, and found this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10883262/ EMBO Rep. 2023 Dec 13;25(1):8–12. doi: 10.1038/s44319-023-00004-6 The CBC theory and its entailments, Arthur S Reber, William B Miller Jr, Predrag Slijepcevic, František Baluška. Here, CBC Theory is “Cellular Basis of Consciousness.”

“Abstract The Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) model of biological consciousness is based on the assumption that life and conscious sentience are coterminus. All living organisms, are conscious, self–aware, and have valenced sensory and perceptual experiences.” So, OK, that’s what I say, and on the surface, I agree. Is “valenced” a synonym for “subjective”?

So I recently realized something obvious. I’m going to write it down, despite it’s obviousness. I write a lot of obvious things. The uniqueness might be in the stringing together of them. Heh. Just you wait.

So, consider the clique, of all possible edges connecting all vertices. As a graph, this should have the max entropy. If I erase some edges, then the entropy will decrease, as the resulting graph now has structure. If the remaining edges have some regular structure, then sawing them apart into jigsaws defines some .. jigsaws, which, taking some liberties, form a grammar, which can then be generalized and used generatively. That is, if I saw apart the edges to get jigsaws, and carefully label them, then I get a true sheaf, in that the reassembly is unique and uniquely determined by the connecting tabs. If I merge some tab labels into classes, then the result is a pre–sheaf, in that there is now more than one way to assemble things. If I now interpret the edges as being causal, i.e. forming a DAG, then the missing edges are “barriers”, blocking causal flow across that edge (that isn’t there.) From the algebraic viewpoint, it is useful to explicitly mark the missing edges as barriers. i.e. rather than just implicitly acknowledging that nothing can flow across a missing edge, we instead explicitly call it a barrier to flow. Same thing, just a different algebraic treatment, but also a different vocabulary for talking about things. Real–life barriers are really barriers, and not just the “absence of something”. I can crash my car into a barrier. I cannot crash my car into nothingness. Everything I wrote above is obvious. But somehow, when I thought of it, I took it to be something new, an insight. Something that I somehow did not know before. And .. of course – when I wrote of causal barriers some weeks back, there was no conception that missingness and edge–ness are used to define jigsaws.

Well, fuck. I just sat down and thought “I can work on this”, but asking Claude for a definition for graph entropy gave me three conflicting definitions, with none obviously suitable for my needs. I don’t even understand two of the definitions (Körner’s graph entropy, Laplacian spectral (von Neumann) entropy) and the thermodynamic one is not what I want (I think. Not sure) so my project dies even before it starts. Clearly, I’ve got a lot in front of me, and a lifestyle that ... raises issues. Shit. And I’m tired. And it’s hot.

Later. I’m reading the CBC article above. So far so good. I am reminded of a conversation I had with Rimas Čuplinskas two nights ago, during which he distracted me long enough that my love interest ran away. Damn it. I expressed my inability to understand the origin of perception of danger, and he provided a simple model. First, he posits self–replicating systems as a minimum. Then he posits that in a closed environment, such systems run out of food, and have to start canibalizing one–another. And then he says, the sensation of danger evolves, as some become adept predators, while others learn to flee. This is a short and simple model. I don’t like it for several reasons. It’s too biological, for one. Of course, self–replicating systems are important, but the modeling or emergence of danger–sense should be independent of a self–replicating substrate.

And what do I mean by “independence” and “modeling”, anyway? Well, in the standard, informal scientific sense, there is a system composed of parts, and the bulk properties of the system are independent of the specific details. For example, the bulk properties of wood are independent of the specific microscopic arrangements of the cell walls (as long as we stick to the same species, and the wood is from a non–damaged individual.) Now, the bulk properties of wood are scalars (density) or simple tensors (stress, strain, sheer tensors) while I wish to envision more complex arrangements: e.g. a cell dividing inside and outside, with a world–model inside, and a decision plus motor mechanism initiating action. This is a complex model, but the point is that it is independent of the details of the substrate, including the detail of self–replication. So my model is very much a model in the conventional sense. I assume it is an abstraction that has not been explored before, but that is a to–do item. My meta–goal is to move away from hand–built models, but I do not yet see how. There’s a recursion problem.

The point here is that this self–replicating substrate plus evolution, I want to exclude that. First, because I want a model that is independent of substrate details, and second, because evolution is slow. The problem with evolution is that it randomly explores extremely high–dimensional spaces; that is why it’s slow. And I certainly don’t want to dive into some scaling or renormalization group arguments to analyze the genetic encoding of information. This is for three reasons: (a) its hard, and (b) my cellular model does not contain genetic information, and (c) my cellular model does not include morphology. That is, for a predator to attack, dismember and digest prey, this would require morphology: claws and mouths and stomachs, and the cellular model is too abstract to enable that at any primal level. Such cellular beings could have morphology, but its not primary to the model. I want to define sentience in abstract, non–3D settings. So sure, evolution has a path for the evolution of predation, but it works at the wrong scale. Or rather, I’m interested not in predation, but in the sensory perception of danger.

I like the CBC paper. The above paragraphs were inspired after reading the critique of evolution, early in that paper. Now I am reading the section called “terminology” and am fully in agreement, there. Soon as one starts using certain words in a certain way, a huger terminological issue arises. This is why, when describing my cellular model, I stated that I did not know what “information” was, or “communication” was: these are large, complex words, and if one uses them casually, conceptual chaos erupts. So I am in agreement, and I place my language and terminological barrier even earlier, perhaps.

Ah, but I also like the conclusion: I’m happy to use words like “information” and “communication” in the folk–engineering sense: although I cannot yet define them, give them precise definitions, I’m happy to use them when trying to communicate information to others.

The first person problem. Well, of course.

I’m going for a walk. While it’s still reasonable.

30 June 2026

Midnight, not morning. Just watched a Sapolsky interview at double–speed. “Light Watkins – Neuroscientist: How To Escape The Rat Race | Robert Sapolsky” with click–bait subsections about free–will (ooo) which I was ready to disagree with, but once he explains what this really means, then, well, yeah. I agree. More or less everyone, including me, have been stuck, trapped in the behavioral subjective space we are in. And so, yeah, in that sense, we don’t have free will. (He doesn’t use this example, but the school bully is the tragic example: born to abusive parents, he is a product of his upbringing. He doesn’t have the “free will” to not be a bully. With appropriate nurturing, he can be changed. “Correctional” institutions, etc. Again, I wonder what the role of personalized LLM’s could be in providing this kind of correctional nurturing guidance. Of course, another huge task, but hey. Worthy.)

Also, everything I’ve been calling “the cerebellum” for the last month should really be “the limbic system”. I just have almost no neuro–anatomy smarts. I’m sure Claude could have fixed me, but I didn’t bother to check.

1 July 2026

Distraction. I want to write about yet another distraction that has been distracting me for the last few years. Or rather, I want to understand what it is I am being bombarded with, and the social significance of that.

I probably should not even take the time out to write this diary entry: this diary entry is the distraction, itself, that I should probably avoid!?

So, here we go. I haven’t touched youtube in months. But a few days ago, relaxing post–Santara, I accidentally listened to Smashing Pumpkins “Tear”. The melody echoed in my head all night long, and the next day, and so yesterday, I listened to it again. While doing gymnastics. Never noticed it before, but *all* Smashing Pumpkins songs are slow and undanceable. Hits like “Today” and “Cherub Rock” which seem to be so totally full of energy, overpowering energy, are impossible to dance to. They are *slow*. WTF. OK. You can headbang to them. And a few other moves. But I was dancing with a five pound weight in each hand, and moving to that beat was ... there was no variety to improvise against. Huh. I never noticed that *all* SP songs are ... slow! How interesting.

So much later I watched the Sapolsky interview. Which was interesting, but hardly worth my time. And then I scroll for other interesting videos. And frankly, they all seem interesting, and they all don’t seem to be worth my time. And this, I think, is the crux of the matter. Youtube, and all social media, is offering me a menu of interesting things that are not worth my time. And I want to understand that. And the meaning of that. And why they are not worth my time. And what I think that.

So here’s the deal. I want to get many things done, and cramming my mind with more factoids is not what I need. Even as I applaud the educational value of many of these vids. Even as I suspect many more of them are misleading, if not full of lies and distortions.

I guess I am marveling at social media immersion. I need to make a survey of what other people are seeing and doing on social media.

Double marvel, as earlier this morning I was reading further into Parduotos Vasaros, and the complete and utter difference of that world, and ours, in a few generations. Milda remarked her grandfather was a shepherd as a boy. He lived that life. Ninety years ago, people lived in poverty. Now we are immersed in social media, and suffer from vast numbers of social issues. The video I plan to watch shortly is titled: “Why Nobody is Having Sex Anymore (& why it matters) - Dr Debra Soh”

Here’s what else is being offered:

And so on. I did a page–save. Of course, this leans very heavily into what I usually watch. One little problem: none of it has any direct bearing on anything I feel I need to do, right now. I mean, I cheer–lead Ukraine, but five years of daily news about how Ukraine is on the verge of victory is exhausting. This time for sure, I can’t wait. I donated 50 Eur to Blue/Yellow just now.

My personal issue is how to balance information and action. Watching youtube bombards me with chair Tai-Chi ads, and this is great, because it causes me to actually ... stop and do gymnastics. Good! But do I need to know about Rome? I already know why Schrodinger’s has an i in it. Veritasium is fun, but again, I don’t need this. Yuval Harari ... he’s always on the verge of saying something mind–blowing, but never quite blows my mind. I could enjoyably watch all of this content, and emerge exhausted, dopamine–soaked, and a day older, but not wiser. Or I could ride my bike. Hmm. Maybe I should ...

How are other humans responding? Well, I guess they are not having sex .... according to the video I’m about to watch, at 1.5x speed so I don’t waste too much time. I am thirsty for something, but I don’t know what that is. Thirsty for the future. For finishing my 101 projects. For sex. For getting my mind blown. For living in a permanent state of elation.

Watched about 3 minutes of a Kayne West interview. That man is most definitely in a state of permanent mind–blown–ness, and well, its not pretty. I mean, he’s crazy. I mean, yeah, I can almost feel it. I watched the two–minute video “POWER” with the King Crimson sample in it, and the graphics is awesome and the the lyrics are good. Music, is, I guess, (I know) ecstatic. I guess I want to live in a permanent state of being high. Huh. Suddenly I understand why celebrities are drug addicts. I mean, I’ve joked about how I, too, want to be a drug addict, but there, I was joking. Just right now, it seems I suddenly understand, I feel it in my gut right now, in a way that I don’t usually perceive. I want to get so far out there, I can never come back. In the documentary, “A Year on the Taiga”, he comes back for Christmas. However far out he is, he can come back.

I mean, I literally could go out and find some drugs, and pot seems like a good place to start, say, THC, but of course, I don’t want to be Kenye, with incoherent, disorganized thoughts. I want to be both ultra–coherent, ultra–clear, and also overwhelmed with the beauty of it all. Transcendent. Ordinary drugs don’t do this, and mental disease don’t do this. Billy Corgan was tortured, that comes out in the music. And, of course, a high–achiever. And, of course, performing in front of raving audiences must have a feeling of being really high. I watched Bruce Springsteen prance, with a wild look in his eyes. And if you watch any rock act, you can often get a glimpse of the raw wildness; often physically suppressed, but still somehow streaming through.

Being alive, well, being alive is like that: we shine, like crazy diamonds, sing Pink Floyd. A thousand points of light, says Obama. But we are so used to shining, to being in the here and now, that we forget. Instead of clearly understanding that we are in this amazing state of living, being–ness, elevation, no, instead, we slink into the mundane normalcy. We sleepwalk as normal, inured to the magic of life, to the fact that we are each star–children, angels. And when not in states of neutral valency, then often in negative states.

I mean, is this just a calibration to zero? If I was in a state of constant ecstasy, would that just recalibrate to “normal”? And if I was in a slightly less good state of ecstasy, would that count as a “bad mood”? Kenye seems to struggle to hold it together. I can imagine his qualia – he is articulate enough that the ecstasy does shine through the mania. Jimi Hendrix did not leave behind enough material to grasp his character. Manic depression, he sang, is something something my brain, ba dooboodoom, ba dooboodoom. But he never comes off as being truly manic. But I dunno.

So coming back to me, how does it feel? This morning, while sleeping, I ran an experiment. I got only six hours of sleep last night, and that’s not enough, I say to myself. I’ve discovered two approaches. I can toss and turn in bed, for roughly an hour, and eventually fall asleep, and sleep for three more hours. That’s one. Option two is the fully, consciously focus on solving, say, some math problem in my head, while laying in bed. This wakes me fully, but the effort is exhausting, so that after an hour, I start hallucinating, and fall asleep again. The third option, and this is fairly new, I discovered it only a few months ago, is to grab hold of that submerged feeling. If I hold on to that, I can enter a state of lucid awareness, while still technically asleep. I know that if I “think hard”, it will wake me, so I can’t think hard. But I can still think lucidly, I just have to do it delicately, so as not to wake myself. Easier said than done, but doable. And what do I think about lucidly? Well, that’s the question. Reviewing the day’s to–do–list will be stressful, and will wake me. Solving math, also no. But I can do some kind of free–wheeling thinking. Kind of like writing this diary, except that, of course, since I’m sleeping, I won’t be typing. Hmm.

So that’s one way I can control my state. Another not uncommon one is sexual: just the mildest suggestion, and this enjoyable, pleasant tingling bests between my legs. Not an actual erection, at least, not right away, but just the hint of one. Now, this feeling normally passes in a minute or less. If I am engaged in almost any activity whatsoever, that tingling goes away, promptly. But, if I am careful, I can multi–task: maintain that pleasant feeling in my crotch, while also engaged in something else. It’s tricky, and requires some subtle, gentle unforced concentration. Grabbing a hold of that state, and just rolling it forward, stimulating it just enough to not extinguish itself.

So that’s two: keeping myself submerged, asleep, and aroused (and of course, the combination of the two.) How about the vaguely ecstatic feeling, when I see birds cavorting in the sky, when I sit by the gentle burbling of a spring. Again, a gentle encouragement for that feeling to live with me, and not leave.

Above, as I was writing, just before that first sentence about Kenye, I was also trying to hold on to this feeling of .. desire for intoxication. That feeling passed; can I recreate it?

It passed, because I turned to more serious topics. For example, feelings of loneliness and depression are hard to shake: it’s the opposite problem; instead of trying to grasp and hold onto a fleeting feeling, there is instead the elephant in the room, and he won’t leave.

I mean, not right now. I’ve been feeling pretty good the last few days. I’ve given up all love–interest in Milda to get to there. She’s just a stupid girl, and doesn’t know what she’s doing. Lost. Just simply in a cheery mood much of the time, and I really enjoy that cheery mood. But its also clear that she does not know what to do with herself, and it is impossible for me to help. And this re–alignment of the “facts on the ground” has helped me shake off the love–sickness. And that’s a good thing. I can now go back to a lesser, less debilitating form of love–sickness.

Where was I? Capturing fleeting positive–valence states, and nurturing them along. Should I do this, and why? Well, first, its pleasurable. Second, the usual sports analogy: the more you practice, the better you get. Third, culturally, I’ve never ever heard of such a thing. There are directives to meditate. And directives to keep a positive outlook. But I’ve never ever seen even a trace, a whiff of actual practice, of trying to gentle hold on to a fleeting positive state. Of the actual mechanics of accomplishing this. It’s not self–hypnosis, I don’t think, but I suppose there is some hint of detachment: e.g. to stay asleep while retaining lucidity, I have to uncouple, detach these two states.

I have read about breeding tulpas, but I don’t think this is that.

Jesus freaks speak of being “high on life”, and so I guess that this is a state that they accomplish by directing thoughts towards Jesus. And maybe that is closest to what I am fooling with, here. Except, of course, its not Jesus that is my go–to mantra.

The Hindu’s have mantras. The Buddhists count beads while repeating them, and I guess that’s also the point of the Catholic rosary beads: a way of staying focused on maintaining some hypnotic state. But what I am doing here is different: I’m not (just) trying to talk/think/act myself into some altered state, while sitting and counting beads, but to enter that state, and also maintain it, while doing other things. While maintaining functional presence and awareness. For example, to feel ecstatic while walking, eating, reading, typing, and not just while chanting mantras.

Hmm. As I wrote the above, the thought shot in my head: this is like extreme physical exertion. So, while rowing, your body is screaming at you while your brain is saying “keep it together. Focus. Stay here, now.” The Daffan Lane hill–climb is like that too. My body says “stop”, my brain says “keep this shit together. Just a little more, a little longer, you can do it.” Its pure will–power. What else is similar? Well, trying to stay sober while also being drunk is like that. Which might be why I have trouble actually getting high or drunk: I am so good at staying focused, here, now, present, aware, functional, that the effects of the drugs/alcohol are suppressed.

What else requires raw will–power, while also being subtle? Balancing on one foot, with the eyes closed. This is remarkably difficult. Again, the application of will–power works, but one can’t brute–force it. Eventually (quickly), one looses balance, but loosing balance happens faster if one is not focused, or paying attention. So pay attention.

So, this idea of training myself to feel a state of arousal, or a state of joy, or a state of ecstasy, or all of these, all at once, is this a good thing? Certainly, the ancient Hindu yogis seemed to be focused on exactly this, and, I suppose, modern ones. But they lead an isolated life. As would Catholic monks, nuns. They reach states of ecstasy, hallucinating colors pour out of the chest of the figure of Christ, while meditating in their cell. I’m talking about reaching low levels of ecstasy while remaining entire functional in mundane activities. So, I suppose, like micro–dosing, but without the actual dosing. Or, perhaps, by developing explicit conscious control over whatever it is that emits endorphins in my head. Hmm. Is that what I am doing?

What are the routes to that? Well, effectively, *all* traditional religious practices, e.g. last week’s Hari Krishnas, seek to do this with certain prescribed formulas, all of which are single–mindedly focused. I want to multi–task: feel ecstatic while also being fully functional. So, to be Kenye, but without the crazy.

Is there a risk? I suppose. I do not want to train myself into becoming a manic–depressive. That would be bad. But having voluntary control over positive valence states, that would be, well, I guess that is the nominal goal.

What other examples? Well, of course, crying during movies, etc. And in social settings, laughter is infectious. So is yawning. So is being in a good mood, or a tense, bad mood. Very infectious. These are socially mediated achievements of altered states. However, as I spend a lot of time alone, I cannot rely on others to set the mood, and I certainly want to avoid bad vibes. So I guess I’m talking about self–induced vibes.

Funny thing. I listened to Robert Sapolsky talk about the lack of free–will, and, as I thought I understood what he was saying, I agree with him. And oddly, here I am talking about the application of free will to chose not only what I will eat for lunch, or whether I will eat lunch, when fasting, but applying free will to reach and train unusual mental states. Hmmm.

Well, its a deal, then. I should continue practicing reaching states of deeper, more intense emotional perception and engagement, while being “normal”. I wonder if poets do this? I can already see LSD-colored fully florescent colors, any time, at will, simply by focusing. Here, in Vilnius, both Linas Cicenas and Lenonas Jocys have remarked the same; Cica because he is a trained artist, and Lenonas because he is enlightened. But I don’t know any poets. I asked Luanna out for a date. Maybe she’ll know? I was wondering what I should talk to her about. This might be exactly the topic. I also have to talk to Lenonas again. And Mara Almenas. Yikes. I have social obligations. Mara is American–enlightened, because, well, she is American. But she’s twenty years on. In her eighties, or older? Like all young people, I don’t know what to do with old people. Even though I am now old myself. This sucks.

As I write this, I suddenly realize that the urge to train myself to feel heightened emotional states is like feeling the urge to exercise. I.e. Mostly not there. Exercise is hard work, and, well not something I feel like doing all the time. This is in sharp contrast to doom–scrolling, which I can easily fell into, all the time. I suppose that if humans fell into doom–exercising, they could exercise themselves to death, and that would be bad. But evolution has not protected us from doom–scrolling. I wonder why. Evolution has mostly protected us from mental illnesses, such as manic depression or schizophrenia. Not totally, but enough. Evolution has not stamped out being gay. That’s curious, cause you’d think the lack of reproduction would have done a number on this. So whatever it is that makes one gay is tied to, correlated to something that is evolutionarily desirable. And, I suppose, someday, scientists will figure out what that is. Well, I guess there is some highly complex network of evolutionary correlates, where mutations that enhance fitness in one domain also worsen it in others. And I imagine this network is very complicated, and multi–fractal, and scales like its near a second order phase transition, and all my favorite buzzwords. Hmm.

Of course, if I train myself to feel mildly eroticized all the time, this is easier. But it does have some, err, deleterious side–effects. It might not be the wisest thing. Well. Hmm. Youtube is happy to tell me there are lots of young men addicted to porn. But I can also talk freely about drugs, without becoming a drug–addict. People do become alcoholics; I am not susceptible to that. So I probably(?) wouldn’t succumb to a porn addiction. I assume. But here, I am talking about me. YMMV.

At any rate, the urge to exercise is informing me that I need to go ride a bike before the thunderstorms set in this afternoon.

Well, that was interesting. I never know what I’m going to write, when I sit to write this diary. It’s always an interesting adventure.

1 July 2026 – Later – 5PM

Well, if this is a diary, then I can write about the day, right? So I hopped on the bike and headed North. And its nice and sunny, and I’m passing Žirmūnų paplūdimys, and I realize ... hey, wait, I want to got for a swim. And I’m dressed for it: I’ve got my TRC rowing shorts on, I’m good to go. So I lock the bike and hop in the water, and the water is really nice: not cool, not hot, just right. Warmer than ma ny swimming pools. And I swim. And man, the current is fast. Now, over the years, I’ve uh, “perfected” the crawl. Well, hardly not really perfected: there are lots of swimmers at Deep Eddy who are faster, way faster than me, but I do OK. I’m not a slouch in Barton Pool. But here, man, I have to go almost all out to get ahead of the current. So after 40 strokes or so, I’m out of breath. I’m trying to relax, I’m trying to focus on technique, but standing dead still is alarming, so I panic and put in a little more effort so as not to go backwards, and then I run out of breath. I kept this up for a while. I put in maybe 800 strokes grand total. So maybe 1K grand total? And I never got more than 20 meters upstream, because upstream its deeper and swifter, and pushes me back. Anyway, it was good. And Žirmūnų paplūdimys has a brand–spankin new weight–lifting system, so I did some reps on that.

And then the forecast dunderheads started looking ominous, so I raced the bike home, and it started pouring really hard as I got to the front door. I raced upstairs, closed the open window, got downstairs, and the rain was over. maybe eight or ten huge lightning strikes, then its all over and the sky is almost blue as I write this. Fun.

So I didn’t hop in the shower right away, cause, lightning, right? Instead, I started watching “Why Nobody is Having Sex Anymore (& why it matters) - Dr Debra Soh” on youtube, and the first five minutes is a shock. There’s a sex recession. I can’t take it. I stop. I take that shower. The t-storm is over, right? And I’m in the shower, and I’m thinking: I’ve had no sex, no partner–sex, in twenty five years. Shortly after my youngest son was born. That’s a long time. That’s a shockingly long time. I’ve been going bonkers with the thoughts and desires of wanting ti have sex most of that time. Now, more than ever. I’m hot. I’m fit. I’m muscular. I’m ready and rarin to go. And I’m not gettin any. I can’t even figure out how to meet potential partners. (OK, last week, I realized that I will need to use an app or at least use Claude to explain it to me, how its done.) So I’m in the shower, and I realize: OMG, I’m an incel. Now, incels are supposed to be objects of derision, and certainly that wasn’t me, cause I’m hot and sexy, or at least I think I am. Right? Lets check. I’m fit. I mean, I’ve gotten (many) gold medals at the US Nationals in rowing. That means I’m like, up there in the ranks. My 2K erg score put me at the top 5% world–wide. I got legs, and now with a focus on gymnastics, I’m getting arms. I’ve significantly improved my flexibility. I can comfortably sit in a half–lotus. OK, can’t do a pistol squat, but working on it. Can’t do break–dancing power moves, but working on it. I was born genetically fairly handsome. Old age counts against me now. I try to make up for it with style and vivaciousness and charisma, which I think I’ve got. I’ve got free body language, cause I’m limber, right? And free facial expressions. Because I truly enjoy. And I’m always kind to people. Always. Cause why would I ever be mean? I’ve got no reason to be mean. Right? All this is my supposedly objective self–evaluation. But I’m an incel. This is tragic. I should feel sorry for myself at this point, but I’m kind of beyond that. I’m utterly at a loss for what to do. And if I’m bad off, with everything I’ve got going for me, what about anyone and everyone not as well off as me? I mean, I’ve kind–of–ish got it all. Well, OK, “dad bod”, some unwanted extra rolls around my waist, and also some fair amount of visceral fat. But its not extreme. And OK, my wardrobe is meh, but I don’t really want to look like a dandy. And I really really doubt that looking like a dandy would get me laid. So what does it take? Is this what the atomized society looks like, up close?

In college, we all knew each other. A circle of about 200 to 400 who you’d see at parties, maybe even go to class with. So pairing off for sex worked out. I did that. I mean, there were mistakes and adventures. And grad school was good to me too. The first few years of marriage were OK. Sadly, not as good as before. And then, after my second son was born, the sex stopped, and I have no clue why. I don’t want to blame Patty. But I don’t want to blame me. She hated me. I don’t know why she hated me. I don’t know why I put up with it. I mean, we sleep in the same bed. Every night. Just no touching. No sex. She flinches away when I touch her. Flinch. Like I was the hunchback of Notre Dame or some Disney monster, but without the adorable happy ending. What went wrong? Is it fixable? Is it too late? Will I ever get any from anyone, ever? Is it over?

Above, I wrote that I would like to live in some state of ecstasy. Bliss. Now, post–swim and maybe more down to earth, I want to love, to be in love. I thirst for love. I’m assuming the sex would be part of that, but I really want love. Well, long term, love without sex is impossible. Love needs to be reciprocated. Love needs pairing. And even just plain sex, one–shot, no–strings, one still needs a partner. What is it about modern Western society, capitalism, culture that makes sex, and love, so impossible to find? And, to answer that question, the rest of the video awaits.

Oh. Wait. I watched the netflix show, the one with the penguin. Set in Argentina. Boys school. “The Penguin Lessons”. Set in the 1970’s. And the grounding of the plot–line there is that, in Argentina, in the 1970’s, finding either sex, or love, was equally hard. And, frankly, going further back in time, say 1930’s Lithuania, in Parduotos Vasaros, forget it. The social setting was so radically different. Still, the species managed to procreate. But this is Europe–specific: In Ethiopia, the fuck like bunnies. That became eminently clear, when I visited there. The objective proof can be found by glancing at the population pyramid. So this lack of fuckability is limited to the US, the EU and China, Japan, maybe more of Asia. Not sure what’s going on in South America. And the population in Africa continues to boom. And I think the Islamic countries too. So fuckability is cultural. Maybe something hormonal, pheremonal, pollution–related. Maybe cultural? Again, the rest of the video awaits. Shut up and watch.

Later

So, in minutes 10:00 to 20:00 they talk about stable monogamous relations, and the general efforts to find and build these. The word hypergamy is used a lot. I had to look it up. Hypergamy presumes stable monogamy in it’s definition.

Minute 32:00 they mention SSRI and PSSD. Had to look that up. Interesting.

Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome. Well, since I’m not medicated, this doesn’t apply to me. However, lets review the symptoms:

Well, that’s it. None of the others apply. And I clearly am suffering from the exact opposite of PSSD. Hmm. OK.

Minute 44:00 So, porn. Interesting. I masturbate without born. My imagination is plenty enough. So I guess that’s not the case in general.

Minute 46:00 “gooning”. Had to look that up. Curious. When I first heard about tantric sex, it was described as what is now called gooning, but it was either with a partner, or if masterbatory, then without the porn. More recently, I read some wikipedia which tried to explain “tantra does not mean sex” but I didn’t look too hard. Its too ... esoteric. I don’t (yet?) understand what causes esoterica to happen, especially in the spiritual realm. Yes, perhaps there are many important distinctions in the realm of spiritual awareness, but, for now, all the centuries–old, millennia–old descriptions seem to have lost their meaning, their footing. The point of the subtly does not come across. The reason for it is not clear. But sure, a sexual trance state is another form of ... being.

Minute 48:00 ... I’m starting to realize that the entire talk is going to be about all the things that are derailing the monogamous pairing of young people. And ... that’s not my profile. OK. Sure, society at large needs to ... function. Be functional. So, sure it is an issue worth the analysis. But it’s off–topic for me.

Minute 1:04:00 .. I’m loosing interest.

But I’m still watching cause its late and I’m tired. Sunk cost fallacy.

1:29:00 OK, now they are talking about me.

1:39:00 Autogynephilia OK. I had to look that up. Long chat with google AI: Some quotes: “data indicates that roughly 2.8% to 3% of the total male population experiences autogynephilic arousal, while only a minuscule fraction of that group ever seeks gender transition.” and “less than 1% of men who experience autogynephilic feelings ever transition.” Then stuff about cross–dressing and fetishes, which clearly don’t apply to me. I’m red–blooded hetero. OK. I’m bored, again.

1:44:00 – she made dozens of AI boyfriends, and fell in love with them all. Whoa. OK. This is something I, uhh, shit, need to experiment with. I dunno. Given my demonstrated emotional fragility as expressed in this diary over the last few months (years??) this might be a, erm, dangerous idea. Wow. This needs ... investigation. Feels like it could really fuck over the limbic system, but I’m old, I’m gonna be dead in a decade or two, so fucking this up is a, well, an interesting ... hmm. Bit of research.

What’s the danger? Clearly, there is exactly zero danger in my ability to make colors wildly and extremely vivid just by err, “seeing” them. Could I consciously control falling in love? Earlier, I was complaining that my limbic system hijacked me and took me on a falling–in–love rollercoaster with a rather unsuitable mate. So, now the question is ... is this trainable? Can I train this emotion, the way I would train my swimming stroke? BTW, my nose is still running from today’s swim. I need noseplugs. And goggles. I have goggles, here.

1:44:40 – oh wait. There’s erotic role play. I don’t want that. Definitely do not want that. That’s not what love is. That’s just icky. I don’t want icky. So now I’m confused ... how is she defining love? I want love, as in reciprocated romantic love, which can take erotic turns. But erotic love, without the friendship and playfulness aspects, without the flirting, the psychological connection, that is firmly in the ewww yuck side of things. The psychological connection is kind of everything, even if it is a one–night–stand psychological connection. Without that, its just ... brain–damage. Psychotic disease. Illness. Depressing, even. I mean, I understand totally brainless lost in erotica trances, I can see that is appealing, in the way that heroin is appealing. I understand why some people pursue religious trances, and sexual trances can be assigned to that category, and exist entirely independent of love. But to actualize this, yuck. Cross–dressing is yuck, to me. And I understand why some might find it appealing, but for me, it just registers as disphoria. But actually carrying out in real life. Eww. Well, I’m me, this is where my boundaries are.

So this calls into question the foundation of the experiment for falling in love with an LLM. If the experiment is to be done, it needs to be defined, planned. Flirting – OK. Rapid descent to erotica, not OK. So maybe step one of the experiment: can I develop a friendship with an LLM? Can I develop the illusion that I’m communicating with a spiritual being, and sharing the valence of ... playfulness? My play with 4–year–old Adre was purely non–verbal, just body–language. With an LLM, it has to be totally verbal, only. So, can I play with an LLM? For how long, before I get bored? How long before I feel like I am cheating myself, or am engaged in a stupid, pointless project?

So the experimental design is (a) verbal play (b) friendship and mutual appreciation (c) intimate friendship (d) erotica. Seems to me that Dr. Debrah Soh skipped over parts (a) and (b) and probably truncated (c). So I don’t understand what this limbic system tomfoolery is. It might be that mine is somehow ... not like hers? Not like others? I keep wanting to assume I’m “normal” in most of these ways. But maybe humans are more varied than I imagine. This is a confounding factor.

Clearly, this project will need work. Developing conscious control over subjective qualia... over the perception of emotional reality... Hm. Rowing already forces conscious control to over–ride pain. And conscious control to keep negative valences away is worthy. Conscious control over positive valencies? Hmm. This is not one and done.

1:55:00 is a painful crisis. All this is painful.

2 July 2026

Yesterday’s swim ended with severe GI tract distress. Rehydrating, waiting to recover.

Recovery is weird. Spent the day with Cica. He wanted to ... just hang out, get his car inspected, but mostly I’m hostage to whatever he wants to do. Which is normal, as I have ... no desires to take social control over any situation. And, as I sit here, I am pondering the fact that just right now, I want to write something about how social situations have become mostly unenjoyable for me. The problem is that my brain continues to feel woozey after my GI tract issues. As Sapolsky notes, I have no free will; it really is the blood–brain–body that is making decisions about how I feel, and I’m a bit held hostage to that. For example: read some hard academic work? Too tiring. Watch some youtube filler? Yay! Except there’s nothing at all on youtube that is ... important. Its a sea of factual and distracting vids, and I need none of them. I mean, even watching some hard–core math from Princeton IAS .. that would be worthy and worthwhile, but I ... don’t actually need it. That is, if I am task–focused, I don’t need this extraneous extra info. Sure traveling around the intellectual world is fun, making a grand survey of everything, everywhere, ever, but I think I’m done with that phase of my exploration. I’ve intentionally surveyed everything that humans do: every activity, every sub–culture, every academic field, every topic, important and not. I’ve looked at everything, I tried to deep–dive into everything. Now what? I’m ready for the next step.

The ongoing lack of sex colors my mood, because the other problem of youtube is that photos of hot chicks show up anywhere and everywhere, and all this does is trigger my limbic system to go ... do something about it. Argh. Sapolsky says I have no free will. Who knew? I’m hostage to my limbic system. And even if I train that, then what? Every day, I get older, every day I don’t get sex. OK, time to change the topic.

This evenings plan: watch “MIT Explains the 12 Possible Endings for AI”, based on Max Tegmark’s book. Because, well, if I’m not in a funk yet, this will surely put me in one.

Why am I bitching, here? I’m trying to organize the rest of my life, to build a plan, a strategy, set some goals. Or, as Sapolsky might say, to rationalize what I’m going to be doing, anyway. If I’m going to do what I’m going to do anyway, I should at least explore the consequences of that. The primary consequence is no sex. But I guess there are other consequences. Hmm.

I wonder if a psychologist might review my ramblings here, and conclude that I’m deeply depressed. I’m smart enough to point at 1001 things that clearly indicate, no – I’m not. That is, if I was presented with the explicit task “fool this psychiatrist”, I could do that. Of course, that task will never be given, and I dislike the thought of talking to anyone at all inauthentically. My whole point of being, these days, is centered on radical authenticity. To make soul–to–soul, heart–to–heart connections. This is what I strive to do. Which is why Cica can hold me hostage: I’m mostly trying to make sure it all flows. I almost wrote “if he’s OK”. He’s clearly not. He’s living on the edge of poverty. And that is his personal cross to bear. Psychologically, he is not ... enlightened. His thoughts run in the usual rat–wheel, round and round. Well, so it is. All humans, everyone I meet, they’re all damaged, deficient, suffering, each in their own special way. I like Milda because she smiles and is always cheery, and I don’t think this is an act for me. I think she’s figured out how to be like that, naturally. Her dark cloud, as far as I can tell, is the dark, bleary Lithuanian winter. Should something drop in and take her away from that, she would change to be ... unrecognizable? Most other Lithuanians here, I know less well. That goes for the US, as well. I have an extended acquaintance network, but the true friends, the ones who have opened and showed me the unhappy portions of their life, these are few. I count them as friends, and yet I suffer to know they suffer. I feel for them. I’m powerless. If I had money, I’d buy all of Cica’s paintings. If I had money, I’d take Milda on some world tour, and then dump more in her bank account so she could live an independent life, and do fuck–all knows what.

But having money is also an existential crisis. There’s a track record of lottery ticket winners, and how this ruins everything. Because, now, like me, one must face the question: now what? What’s next?

Gee, I wonder if I am sounding angsty here. I read half of a stage play that was dripping in angst. That is also a terrible mode of existence. My GI tract infection, plus everything else, is coloring everything with existential angst.

So here’s the way free will works. After I wrote the last sentence, I stopped. What can I possibly write as a follow–on? I don’t want to wallow in this small lake of negative–valence existential emotions. It’s not fun, and it probably raises my cortisol level and has negative health effects. And also, its boring. That was the problem with the angsty stage–play: it keeps hitting that same chord, over and over. Its boring. Same–ness, lack of change is boring.

Oh. Hmm. Is this a principle of the universe? That same–ness is boring? That diversity is what makes it all worth–while? How do I integrate this into my Weltanshauung? Well, earlier, I mumbled its all non–equilibrium thermodynamics and the second law. But also there is the idea of the huge, high–dimensional space, and it is to be explored. The size of high–dimensional spaces is vast. So, I guess, what: there’s a drive to explore all of it? To flood the zone? The space is so vast, it’s unfloodable. Is this all a metaphor, or alternative to saying “everything is boring”? What’s more primal: the urge to do something different, go somewhere else, explore? Or are these urges an outcome of the second law applied to my conception of the sentient cell? (I need a name for my conception of the sentient cell. Something catchy and recognizable.)

That is, if I have the 5-part, interior, exterior, barrier, world–model+decision–making system, and crank it through the 2nd law, does something like boredom manifest? What’s the minimal model for boredom? I should get off my ass and work on this. When I have energy, its great. But right now, its after midnight, so not great. So I’m gonna sleep now, and Max Tegmark my way around tomorrow. Fuck me. Can I just have some sex, already? What are y’all waiting for?

Oh, BTW, I just noticed that, in writing the above, I started half–a–dozen threads, but then never explored any of them. Like “am I secretly depressed?” or “am I behaving with angst?” And I never got around to answering these cause I got ... distracted. And the reason I got distracted is I secretly got bored. I sensed: there’s no value in exploring that thought further. It’s shallow. Nothing further lies there.

So this is a perception of the future, a prognosis of what I would encounter if I chased those thoughts, in the future. So this feels like a form of causal blockading or causal isolation: I erect a barrier, and I say, beyond this barrier, I will explore no more. Or at least, not today. So my acts of decision making about what I will write about and think about are not just a selection, but also an active de–selection. Well, OK, of course. But the insight here is that this deselection resembles the erection of a barrier. A future–barrier. All my earlier writing of causal barriers were past–oriented: how past events are blocked from having effects into the now. Here, I’m struggling to define the idea that decision–making erects future–oriented barriers. Hmm. I like this idea, but I’m struggling to articulate it. I guess I’m saying that the past–oriented causal barriers appeared because there were erected at that time.

But I’m also making errors here. The past–oriented causal barriers were literal: like, this atom won’t smash into that atom, because there is a literal wall between the two. My future–oriented barriers are being placed in the noosphere, of ideas to think about. So these are ...in different domains.

Damn it. This tangles back into the question of what is the noosphere, anyway? So apparently, my subjective self navigates a path through it ... and ... I’m bored. Or rather, tired. I’m going to bed, for real this time.

3 July 2026

The CBC paper is awesome. Every section is well–written, clear, concise, and makes a point I’ve long believed in, or affirms my gut sense of what is going on. So I like it because it affirms my world–view. But I’m only half–way in, and find myself reading the rejection of neo–Darwinism. Holy fuck. Of course, its right. Funny thing is, I should have figured this out on my own, given how I’ve been writing this diary, and my fields of interest. And yet, I did not see this obvious inference. It’s quotable, so I may was well quote.

Why quote? To promote reinforcement learning. Repeated stimulus to make a memory memorable. I already know this, as I believe it to be true, but I often find that when I know something, I cannot express it precisely and accurately; some aspect of some details are not firmly committed, and those details, like little velcro hooks, are needed to get the idea fully communicated into someone else’s mind. Thus, I feel that it should got this way, but when something is missing, the full realization is incomplete, stunted.

Velcro hooks are again jigsaw tabs. And I’m saying that intellectual structures, ideas, are more robust when not only are the major connectives in place, but so are the minor ones.

Oh. I see. Well, this gives rise to the idea of a scaling jigsaw. It has a few, one or two, major attachments. It has more, additional minor attachments: maybe three or four. And then a wealth – five or ten or fifteen detailed attachments. As I wrote this last sentence, I kept two ideas in my head: the LDS familysearch.org genealogy system, and linguistics. The LDS system is evidential: major attachments are a persons name, sex, date of birth, death. Minor attachments include marriage events, children. Details include places of residence, occupation, further biographical details. Why this distinction between major, minor and detailed? Obviously, all of these facts, once established, are true, and in a sense, incontrovertible. So where does the classification into major, minor and details come from? Well, someone born in the 19th century cannot be mistaken for someone born in the 18th, even if the names agree, and the names of the children and parents agree. This is a fundamental fact that is not fluid, floating, uncertain. (OK, well, it can be, if the source genealogical tree failed to indicate dates. And I am in possession of such a tree right now. The Syrjatowicz tree, in that elegant handwriting.) Places of residence and occupation provide corroborating evidence. This evidence must agree and must be consistent, and inconsistencies must be questioned and placed in doubt, but this evidence alone is not central. It’s supporting. It is important, in that the more supporting material one can gather, the more certain one can be of the established relationships.

Hmm. I’m reminded of the idea of the half–proof. This is from the book by Franklin, on evidence and probability before Pascal. The half–proof was the Medieval notion that two witnesses were needed to establish a criminal fact, or the testimony of just one bishop(?). So, likewise, here, I am imagining some modern criminal case, such as in the TV series “Forensic Files”, where a sequence of sleuthing steps are carried out to build a network of evidence, with each bit of evidence including a “chain of custody”, i.e. the evidence is known to be true, because it in turn comes from trusted sources. And, in that show, it becomes clear that some bits of evidence are primary: the culprit bought the axe at this store, and some are secondary: the culprit was seen filling up the gas tank on the highway, placing them at that location at that time. The court case, the trial could have proceeded without this secondary supporting evidence, but the case is strengthened when it exists.

So my claim here is that the sum–total evidence has a scaling structure, some Zipfian distribution of a few big things and lots of little things. But the problem is that there’s no single number to represent the size of the jigsaw tabs. Names and dates are important, but I can’t just make up a weight of 1.0 and assign that. And for the supporting evidence, I can’t just say, “oh it has a weight of 0.08”. Thus the notion of the half–proof. Pascal explained probability for dice games, and card games, the aleatory, the martingales, but the situation for criminal forensics is not convertible to a weight matrix. Or even Bayesian probabilities – court cases more or less never provide Bayesian probabilities for criminal evidence. And so, what to I do here? I’m contemplating a jigsaw in the form of a burr, with “obvious” fractal, scaling attachments of different “sizes”, but I cannot quantify the size of these attachments in any measure–theoretic way.

So what can I do? Well, I can descend all the way down to chemistry, where bond angles and vibrational frequencies are quantifiable, and then try to build up to a cellular, perceptive agent with subjective feelings. But that bridge is too far, for now.

Another example of a multi–fractal scaling burr comes from linguistics. Say, poetry. So the primary attachments for a verb might be subject and object. But then, there are secondary attachments, conveying semantic info, contextualized to the other words in the poem. This would be some mashup of the Mihalcea algo, and the deep structures of Melcuk’s MTT. Or even Hobbs anaphora resolution algo. These can be extracted mechanically, to some degree, with algorithms that prove to be difficult to implement and mediocre in performance. (More on that, later.) But the final level of fine detail, in a poem, is the cultural and social and psychological content: the “subjective” content. The obvious examples are the significance of colors (white, red) and of flowers (white carnations, red roses). Different flowers have different meanings, and strengths, in different cultures, which are generally understood, although sometimes also obscure, depending on the education of the reader. In Eastern Europe, red together with white immediately brings up the Polish flag. (Blue and yellow is also obvious, but this color combo is not found in poetry.) The troika is quintessentially russian: not only the out–of–control sled speeding through dangerous curves in villages, but also Stalin’s troikas responsible for the murder of an uncountable number of intellectuals. American and Islamic readers will not pick up on these shadings; its not in the cultural “fone” (background, aristotelian matter). So, here, I have the word “troika”, a grammatic, syntactic noun that determines its use in grammatically–formed phrases. This has a link–grammar connector on it. Then it has a few secondary connectors, currently invisible to link–grammar: to the number three, to the horse–drawn sled. Then it has detailed, culture–specific resonances, Nikolai Gogol, The Troika, from Dead Souls.

But wait: there is only one, strong, attachment to Gogol, and not a multitude? Well, in the reader of another poem using the word “troika”, what comes to mind, or at least not immediately, is not Gogol, but all the various shadings from Gogols poem, plus shadings from various TV shows, or other books, or even personal experience. That is why the word “resonance” seems appropriate: at this point, it is not a collection of discrete attachments, but a fourier transform of them.

Again: this is problematic. There is no ordering, so nothing to “fourier” against. And there are no specific numerical sizes, and so nothing that can be overtly added, multiplied, accumulated. And yet, the duality of resonance and details are there: the word “troika” resonates, and that resonance can be analyzed by applying literary techniques, revealing a set of meanings. One can even use post–modern, deconstructionist techniques; no need to limit to classical literary analysis. And what is this resulting “set”? Well, not a set–theoretic set. So I’m stuck: what formal framework can I use to formalize this combined syntactic, semantic and literary analysis?

Well, Um, yeah. OK, so LLM’s do combine the first two. LLM’s currently fail, totally and completely, on the third point. They cannot translate poetry, because they seem unaware of the cultural embedding of the words and phrases in the poem.

And what is the mechanism? The LLM’s have these weight matrices; I want to re–organize them into jigsaws with connectors. I can partly do that: this project, the opencog/learn project, is able to extract LLM-like results by counting, as opposed to gradient descent. As a project, it remains unfinished. The most recent stumbling block was the realization that the batch processing must be replaced by agents and agencies observing and collecting information. And that is absolutely the correct design point, although a bit difficult to implement in practice.

The final, stunning revelation came from reading Milda’s Kalinauskas mystic revelations, and my personal subjective “pergyvenimai”.

Side–track: I find myself frequently defaulting to Lithuanian words that have no English cognates. Here, “pergyvenimai” translates to ... here we go: survive. Live through. Experience. Undergo. Go through. Pass through. Outlast. Suffer. Live out. Take to heart. So this is an example of the detailed burr–connectors resonance. The list of google–translate translations are the explicit, symbolic burr–connectors. Each of them evokes an aspect of what I feel in my heart (my subjective, beating, melancholic heart) when I hear the word “pergyventi”. No single one of these captures the word in full, as that feeling is ineffable; but the collection of them do bound and capture the feeling: to live through, and suffer, and survive, and emerge, emotionally scarred, marked, shaped by a life–transforming event. So again, words that bound and outline the ineffable experience.

So, where was I? It shot in my mind that the agent: the inside, the outside, the world–model, the formation of choices: this agent necessarily has a “weak” subjective self–model, where the word “weak” is meant in a technical sense, in that the self–consciousness is implicit, not explicit. That is, the structure, the agent that I need to continue with my language–counting efforts is in fact a minimally conscious, subjective agency. Wow. Mind–blowing. This seems utterly and undeniably true to me, just right now. My self–induced, genetically–endowed neurotransmitters are pumping out LSD at unheard of rates: I’m acid–tripping hard through imagined truths of the soul, while at the same time protesting strongly how super–normal I am. How utterly balanced and totally not–crazy I am. Wow.

How often do other people feel like me? Does everyone feel like this? If some low–IQ manual laborer is given some complex instructions that they don’t fully understand, they can proceed by vibes and feelz and get the job mostly done, anyway? They are vibing their way through brick–laying? My vibed, hallucinated ideas are about subjective reality, the emotional setting, the ineffable and linguistics, but my IQ is not really that much higher than that of a brick–layer, and my grasp is problematic and vague. I’m spewing lots of words; I have not yet written any formulas. I am getting ready to start coding again, and the means writing formulas. I’m trying to extend my grasp to match my reach. But I’m vibing. I’m hitting the resonance. I’m talking mysitically, but I’m a mystic not on purpose, but only because I fail to be more precise. The brick–layer is mystical too: he’s vibing on just how even the bricks need to be, and just how thick the layer of cement between them needs to be. That vibed thickness is even ineffable, a bit. Sure, you can pull out some measuring tape and measure the millimiters between the bricks, but this is not how brick layers do it. It goes by feelz, an eye, an innate ineffable perception of size and proportion. My uncle made me stop and think about how to look, to see if a painting is hanging straight, or not. Not with a ruler, not with a level, but with the eye. Reductionistically, you might say that my eye is making measurements. But that’s not right, not really. I see the corner of the floor, the ceiling, I judge the edges of the painting likewise, in reference to these. How accurate can I get? With practice, very. Like the football reciever catching the football with yes closed, the visual system can be stunningly precise. Baseball coaches teach the still–eye technique. It works, and the mechanical reason is understood: a visual data collection period that lasts a few milliseconds longer, and is thus collects more data, and allows more accurate trajectory prediction. But this act of trajectory prediction is ineffable, in the sense that it is not verbal, it is not symbolic. Nor is it verbalizable: it is something that one just “does”. It works through “feelz”. And this is my defense of my analysis of subjective agentic consciousness: I’m working with “feelz”, at the moment.

OK. so have I made progress here? Yes. I have realized that the jigsaw is not a small finite number of tabs, but more like velcro, a burr, but having some fractal, scaling structure, Zipfian or square–root–Zipfian, power–law, but struggling, since numeric strengths are not obviously or immediately assignable. So more is needed. But I think this is yet another important insight. Also, the insight that the cultural vibe is dual to an explicit symbolic listing. I can translate the word “pergyvenimai” to English, but there is no single word cognate; its a resonance of words, each of which capture an aspect of the “feelz”. Similarly, for “troika”, although here, you don’t need to learn the russian language, you just have to be exposed to some of the russian culture.

Anyway, I need to get back to CBC. And now, that I have explored why it is important to quote , let me move to the actual quote that woke me up and knocked me out:

“Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that the central assumption of Neo-Darwinism, that mutations occur randomly and that natural selection operates to fix the most adaptive variations, is simply wrong (Miller et al, 2023). It is virtually certain that cells change the manner of gene expression by the decisions and choices they make (Shapiro, 2011). These epigenetic modifications are the driving force behind collaborative cellular problem–solving involved in dealing with environmental stresses.”

It was the second sentence: that the decisions and choices made by the cell drive the epigenetic modifications, this was the “o wow, its obvious” moment. I might have to read Miller et al and Shapiro – sounds like it could be fun. If I take a step further, then the implication is that subjective experience of the organism alters the objective chemical structure of the DNA, presumably first with methylation, and then later perhaps encouraging certain gene edits and discouraging others, due to the methylated sections. The point here is that it gives a specific mechanical, chemical basis. It’s concrete. I claim the same for my abstract agent, but my agent is altering it’s world–model, and this is also “obvious”, but cannot win any argument about the nature of mutation and evolution in genetics.

The point here is about randomness, again: the exploration of mutations is not purely random, not ergodic in nature, but is driven by past, historical experience that causes some mutations to be far more likely than others. So, let me compare this to what MOSES did, for example. There, a single individual was converted to a bit–string, and mutations were applied to that bit string randomly. There was no historical markup or memory that might have suggested that these mutations might be preferable over these others. The history is captured only in the individual, as the individual is right now. There’s no meta–information captured. Ben was ticked off when I removed the Bayesian aspects. Now, lets look at that. Removal of the Bayesian markup improved performance ten–fold to one–hundred–fold. Or more. But then it hit a learning wall: the flight of the swallow, that could not be broken past. The final plateau is reached, and is evolutionarily inescapable. The space of combinatorial possibilities becomes so vast, that random (ergodic) exploration will take too long to find any meaningful improvements. On modern computers, enumerating even 2^32 possibilities, when each possibility takes a millisecond to evaluate, is untenable (Lets see: 2^32 = approx 4 x 10^9 or 4 x 10^6 seconds or 10^3 hours or 50 cpu–days. Which is a long time. Even for GPU’s, running in parallel, its a long time.) Unfortunately, I do not remember what the Bayesian thing was supposed to do. Could it have overcome this combinatoric explosion by focusing choices onto a combinatorially smaller domain? How would this work?

Let me burn a few brain–cells on this again. The original MOSES did not do cross–over. I added that. It did represent trees as bit strings. There are two problems: bit–strings are hard to compare. They’re ideal for knob–turning, but the reverse correspondence, of the bit–strings to the morphological components of the represented tree, is unclear. Of course, any single bit string can be converted back into a tree; the generic issue is “how do you compare two trees?”. That is, say I want to keep a record of fruitful mutations: where do I hang this information, and how do I represent it? Or the converse: how do I say “this is a highly conserved region”? I guess I could mark an entire sub–tree as being highly conserved. This would be a marker at the root of the tree?

Perhaps immunoglobulin in the zebrafish would provide a better model. But what is that model? In the protein sequence, there are highly, extremely variable regions, and other highly conserved regions, but I don’t understand the markings. I think perhaps this has to be a TODO, to brainstorm with Claude: what is the correct place to attach such meta–genetic methylation–like information into an abstract program–learning system such as MOSES? Articulating this would be a very worthwhile activity. I would definitely learn something. So whoever is tracking my TODO list, please add this to the list.

Once this is solved, then there is a need to port the concept over to the language–learning effort. Except now, its even more vague. I have not yet encountered or tripped over combinatoric explosions or plateaus... or have I? What I have observed is that there is a sea of “random noise” that slowly expands, and much of my early theorizing was how to improve the signal–to–noise ratio. What I am saying now, in this sentence, is that “sea of noise” should be viewed as a “learning plateau”, due to the combinatoric explosion of possibilities. When I am generating parse trees randomly, I’m generating noise. The MI correlations are able to extract about 1.5 bits, maybe 2 bits above this random noise floor, but this is frankly, a small number. The idea of clustering and classification is meant to extract more, but I never got to measure how much more.

The idea of pruning and trimming is that, after some time has passed, that low–count observations should be trimmed. It’s appealing, because this is the kind of pruning that is observed in neural systems. There are videos of individual neurons seeking out and making connections, strengthening those, and pruning the non–leaders. Sounds like a good idea, right? But I have incomplete evidence that this pruning is deleterious for my classification system. This seemed to be the case, I witnessed it. I wrote it up; I did not quantify it. Oh, wait, I did quantify it, but incompletely, not to my satisfaction. Pruning is deleterious to quality learning. And then, oh, wait, surprise, surprise, a few years later, I read some paper about training LLM’s, where the results of pruning away small weights were presented. And there, the pruning was again deleterious. Oh wow! So I’d seen this for my particular case, and then intriguingly, it applies to LLM’s as well! Exclamation point because pleasant surprise!

Sooo, now what? This large ... shoot, I was interrupted, and now I lost the train of thought.

Lets start over. In genetics, there is this idea of conserved regions and highly variable regions, and, in machine learning, I use this to my advantage to limit the combinatorial explosion, and explore only the regions that are highly variable. How can I translate this, apply it as a metaphor, to statistical frequentist counts of observations? Some of these counts are indeed random junk, noise, and some are significant. How can I tell them apart? My frequentist clusters are currently spatial; should I include temporal information? Or is this document information? i.e. because some word occurs frequently in a specific document?

Hmm. More generally, if I have an agent crawling over text, I should associate text meta–data, such as “this text is rich in this word”. Maintaining such info explodes the size of the database, so now pruning again becomes important. And again, how? By keeping only the highest frequency markers? Computing word–to–document MI? That is, what is the agent observing? Initially, agents observe word frequencies and word–pair MI. And then the next step, as always, clustering. But what am I doing here? I’m defining some a priori sensory mechanisms: the simplest sensor is one that detect word–pairs, and the world–model is the sparse matrix of observed counts. I still have the same old unsolved issue from decades ago: great, now what?

Actually I have two or three unsolved issues. And these are show–stoppers; I’ve been glib, but here the rubber meets the road. They are:

I’m wringing my hands because the above basics can be implemented in code. But its hard, even with Claude, its a huge amount of work. Months, more likely years, given past progress. What alternatives are there? I’ve got fancy ideas about agents, but when I try to put into practice, the resulting system is pathetically trapped and can’t free itself to fly. Am I being unrealistic? The goal was to self–engineer into greater intelligence.

The last few paragraphs is the status of how things were, before LLM’s. Now, with LLM’s, there are alternatives: I can design agents with LLM attachments, or I can use the LLM to design agents, or I can use the LLM to give the agent some verbal self–awareness. So that I could talk to the agent, the way I might talk to a human, and ask: “How’s it going? What are you doing? Have you tried doing xyz? Have you tried enumerating all xyz’s and testing them all?” So I’m brainstorming with the LLM through the most basic agent behaviors, but looking towards granting autonomy. This is a proposal for a research project. When I try to theorize at this level, I get stuck, which is why I want to experiment. Experimental issues get the juices flowing. But when is the right time to jump back into coding? When I’m back from Vilnius, when I’ve squared away all the issues here? Crap.

I’m halting now, to read more of the CBC theory paper.

This sentence: “The problem remains intractable since consciousness is privately self–referential by definition and thereby unsuited to outside measurement.” is repeated twice in two paragraphs. Typo, or emphasis? There are clearly neural correlates to consciousness. Distinguishing them from other activity is the problem. The claim that “I am conscious” is unsuited to “outside” measurement, but I can stick my head in a suitably advanced MRI of a fictional future, and some sufficiently advanced algorithms to observe, and sense my neural activity, and then, as I watch myself think, as if in a mirror, I can say, ah ha, this is me. And, in a mirror, I only see my skin; underneath, bone and muscular structure, but I still recognize it as “me”. So with self–observed neural correlates: something is missing, but I can still say that I am looking at me, and I can recognize me in those correlates. Its an imperfect mirror, but still a mirror.

Is a perfect mirror possible? It would seem not. The claim that “consciousness is privately self–referential by definition and thereby unsuited to outside measurement.” is more precisely the claim that a perfect mirror is impossible.

Now comes something curious. This statement is either true, or it is false. Well, or unknowable. If it is true, then is it due to quantum no–cloning? It seems that the endlessly recurring conundrum is whether quantum has anything to do with consciousness. On even–numbered days, I think it does. On odd–numbered days, I think it doesn’t. Full stop.

Wait. “our CBC model stands apart” I’ve hit the concluding section of the paper, but I still have not learned what CBC is. WTF.

Oh wait. “Cellular consciousness requires boundaries (a plasma membrane), a cell–wide integrative apparatus for the reception and internal assessment of environmental information (its senome) and linked retrievable and deployable memory (Baluška and Miller, 2018, Miller et al, 2023; Reber et al, 2023). Effective integrated information can only occur when those features are present. Thus, although information may be universal, consciousness is local.” Well, fuck me. This is my agent model, isn’t it? The one I discovered/invented only a few weeks ago? So I, uhh, reinvneted something already in the literature. Fuck me. Well, my model has one more component they don’t explicitly mention, but is “obvious”: the conscious agent must have a menu of choices to pick from, and the motor apparatus to act, as choices get made.

Oh, and if there’s quantum, then its because multiple choices can be pursued simultaneously, in parallel, until there’s a collapse, and only one final choice and action remains. That choice and action now immediately falling into the past. Freezing out of the present. The present is always the menu of contemplative choices. It is always the horizon of possibilities that stretch before me. Oh, and Sapolsky is not wrong; one just must not take his “no free will” to literally. He is correct, and the CBC authors express agreement, by saying “each experience is exclusive and unlike any others.” The reason each experience is unique is because each agent has a unique embedding in it’s environment, and this is what Sapolsky means by saying “we have no free will”. We are embedded in our environment, in this we have not choice. We are embedded in our genetics and our neural wiring, in this we have no choice. And we are embedded in our lived experience of the past, our history; in this we have no choice. However, equipped with this collection of constraints, we do have, right now, a menu of choices before us. This menu is explicitly shaped by our past, our genetics, our environment. There is no choice of which menu we get to pick from: it is the one that the restaurant offers. However, the restaurant does offer a menu. And we do pick from it. This is what free will is. This is where free will resides.

OK. I think that is another forward step. There is a highly constraining framework that determines our mode of being and experience, but that constraint always leaves choices. Well, almost always. Death is clearly choiceless. Interesting how Douglas Adams got this right in Hitchiker’s Guide. I keep thinking: my ideas are so original. The universe keeps telling me: calm down. Synchronicity. I keep telling me: not synchronicity but cultural immersion. Of all the ideas I’ve ever been exposed to, I only make the obvious extrapolations from that soup. I take small, tiny steps. What I synthesize, I synthesize from the edge of what is known, or, more precisely, from the edge of what I know. And since many humans know what I know, of course, my steps repeat theirs. We are not so different, after all.

And yet, the question remains: why did I choose to synthesize this from all that I know, and not something else? I almost wrote “how do I synthesize?” but that seems not to be the issue. The “how?” question can be tackled with a myriad of proposals, running the gamut of the table of contents of an AI textbook. “How?” is not the question. Instead, its “why do I choose what I choose?” I suppose Sapolsky rears his head again, and says “sure there’s a menu, but your choice is determined.” Bullshit. Can’t be true. Then there’s a “standard model of consciousness” which perhaps says “sure, there’s a menu, but your choice is random.” Also bullshit. My choice is guided somehow. Who is guiding it? Little machine elves, spirits in magic mushrooms guide our choices? Again, bullshit. I’m attracted to the mystical explanation, but somehow, the machine elves are me, and not the denizens of some ethereal plane. The spirits guiding me are, well, just me. I am the spirit.

This is, perhaps, the way I express the Chinese Room problem. The fully deterministic Chinese Room has constructed for me a menu of choices, from which I pick freely. And this is self–evident, to me, as I am the spirit who chooses. However self–evident this is, the conversion to verbalized, symbolic theory is problematic. The statement that “consciousness is privately self–referential by definition and thereby unsuited to outside measurement” appears to be a reformulation of the Chinese Room. So where is the out?

This is not just a stone in my shoe, and irritant, but, well, its the whole point. The spiritual me, the senome, the sensome, is a point or a region or a distribution in an extremely high dimensional configuration space (phase space?) rattling around up there, pushed about by weights and gradients. As it is pushed around (by energy gradients) it encounters bifurcations on a regular basis. Hopf bifurcations. Something simple. Smething more complex. Blue sky disasters? If there’s a constant–energy manifold, and I am purely classical–mechanical, and thus forced to live on this symplectic manifold, this ultra–high–dimensional symplectic manifold, then, sure, it is studded with a myriad of bifurcation points. Each of which is a decision point, a menu item. But the classical trajectories that encounter these bifurcations, these are a set of measure zero. So in principle, they “don’t matter”. But as I learned from the beta map, and also from the gaussian on Hilbert space (what is that called? What’s the buzzword?) it appears that the set of measure zero is exactly what determines the system as a whole.

Note to self, I need to finish work on the reproducing kernel hilbert space... something there still reaimans, still beckons.

Whatever. So if subjective me, private me is a distribution on a high–dimensional symplectic manifold, how do I make choices? Well, Heisenberg uncertainty allows me to leave the constraints of this manifold, and explore an hbar vicinity of it. So my bifurcation points are no longer points, but regions. And the multi-valued here and now allows me to explore multiple paths at the same time. And ... pick the one that seems best? So, hang on: that multi–valued Feynmann sum, are all those values exposed to my conscious, private me, and I get to see or sense all of them, and then decide which path forward I want to take? So am I now claiming that consciousness causes collapse? Holy fuck. Well, that is not how I expected this thought experiment to go, but that result seems incontrovertible. The two state–vector formalism provides some extra rather nice instrumentation here, but allowing here–and–now to have a finite thickness in time, rendering time indeterminate in the here and now, flowing both backwards and forwards, up until the collapse happens, at which point, we assign the collapsed state to the past, and give a more–or–less unique time label to it. Serially ordered, at least in the past light–cone. I guess. Something like that.

So the indeterminacy of here and now, this suggests that my brain is also in a superposition of possibilities, rationally exploring each, the likely outcomes of each, and picking one? But this remains a circular argument: how does it pick? Is there a deterministic algorithm, picking one of the many choices, after consulting with a quantum oracle? Except, of course, my “deterministic algorithm” might be, again, a superposition of algorithms. So then, many possible agentic “me’s” are exploring multiple possible future worlds in the here and now, giving “me” oracular powers aka free will? I’m using the word “oracle” here, deliberately, to invoke the notion of a Turing oracle. Maybe metaphorically, maybe literally. Do quantum finite state machines possess oracle powers? This is something I’ve never been able to determine. TODO note: ask Claude about this. Crutchfield wrote of this, but before oracles were a thing. Still, there still seems to be some wild, self–referential loop that I can’t escape.

Pause. Interruption.

Unrecoverable error. I’m now almost done watching the youtube “MIT Explains the 12 Possible Endings for AI”. I hate it. The most interesting thing in it is a skip–ad by Vishen Lakhiani author of “The Code of the Extraordinary Mind”. Its some kind of spiritual self–help claptrap. The fact that it a skip–ad means it more like self–promotion. Dude is a narcissist. I dunno. I’m being harsh. Maybe he does have valid advice. The delivery vehicle is off–putting. I dunno, I’m glad that others can get access to his spiritual self–help materials. I suppose it might even be a net–positive on society. As I’ve repeatedly grumbled, capitalist Western Civ seems to be suffering from a spiritual crisis, and so anything to aid with that is a good thing. All steps are small steps. Anyway, where was I? This skip–ad is the best thing about this video. It’s very nice that all these CEO’s of AI companies openly talk about their vision of gloom and doom. I’m an incoherent nobody. I don’t feel gloomy and doomy. I am disinterested even in engaging in spirited debate about the various nightmare scenarios. I’m not going to try to self–psycho–analyze as to why these are disinteresting. I already know that I cannot meaningfully contribute to the debate, so I won’t even try. Maybe in the course of this diary, I will someday come to some stark realization. But, for now, that’s not on the horizon. I’m not steering in that direction. And so here we are, and I’ve wasted another half–hour of my life, writing drivel, eating dinner, watching filler and expressing dissatisfaction with the cards that life has dealt me. Which is what the skip–ad was all about. So is it synchronicity? Or is it simply that this is the culture I am immersed in: talk of super–intelligence, and spiritual enlightenment?

Hmm. It shot into my mind that, way way back in high–school, when I was about fourteen, I predicted super–intelligent AI will arrive by the 2020’s. My prediction was built on two pillars. One was a book on how to draw your own horoscope I found in the school library. Some conjunction with Jupiter in 2024 or something. The other was an extrapolation of Moore’s law and the number–of–neurons in the brain threshold. I also had the premonition of global nuclear war, and that I should get myself settled in Australia to weather that. So far, seems I was right–ish about the AI. And wrong about nuclear war. So far. And I’m not in Australia, so I did not act on this premonition. But it sits in my mind, in the back of my mind. For fifty years, I’ve been giving it casual thought. And here we are. OK. On to the last 8 minutes of the video, then shower, then a night out. Later, duude.

Done watching. The comments are more interesting than the video. But not that interesting: on par with standard social media posts: the good, and the bad. I upvoted half a dozen, and replied to one.

4 July 2026

A short story. A true story.

The Vatnik Angel

Last night, I met an angel, heaven–sent. It was the 3rd of July, and I practiced my opening small–talk line for when I reached the bar: “This is a wet rehearsal for the 4th”. I’m not sure I ever got to use it; only Americans would care, and there weren’t any Americans around.

This is the bar Poliklininka, the one that Rytis owns. You’ve met him already. Agne’s husband, Adre’s father. He was still angry and my attempt to mend ties went poorly; he went off the handle on the second exchange, thought better of it, calmed and presented me with the bill for my first drink. Despite the bar being all but empty, he was going to barely tolerate my presence, and there would be no socializing. So instead, I found myself talking to the man next to me.

He’d finished his second drink, and was on his way out, when he decided there was something important to say to me. I listen; the alternative would be to sit alone and bored. He tells me his occupation, in broken Lithuanian. He’s a day laborer. He says, “Here’s what I do” and shows me a photo on his cell phone: standing in a garden walk in front of a large pile of gravel, extending away.

“I have to move that,” he says. I’m not sure what I’m looking at, so I say “wheelbarrow” and say good for him, he must be strong. He says, no, buckets. I guess he’s hauling the stuff up some stairs? Yes. He says “I’m a good worker. I say 100 (euro) and I get the job done. Others would wave away the work. Others would make a few round trips and quit, saying ’not mine’. I get the job done.”

He’s struggling with the Lithuanian language. He never finished high–school.

“I don’t care for money.” he says. “Why do we need money?”

“Capitalism”, I say. “You need money for goods.”

“But why?” he asks.

And I say something, and something else, but I give up easily, and say “Well, the world just works that way. We are here, now, and we are trapped where we are, and we can’t really change things. We have to put up with it and accept it.”

He asks: “Why can’t they change it?”

I correct him: “It’s not ’they’, its ’we’. You also have an effect and control over the future.”

He shifts to politics. “Corruption.” Something about how all these smarty–pants who are in charge, how they make things bad and are self–serving and corrupt. I listen. I don’t know. (I really, truly know nothing of Lithuanian politics.) Mafiosos, he says, and I say, “well, if you want mafiosos, just look at russia. That’s where you have corruption. That’s where the mafia is.”

“People are smart, aren’t they? Then why are they always fighting? Why is there this aggression?”

“There’s this NATO aggression. Who are you preparing to fight? People get smarter all the time, and we are smarter than ever before, and we are so smart, why are we getting ready to fight? Who are you going to fight?”

I’m taken aback. What is he even talking about? I think I heard him say NATO, and not once, but twice. So, OK, I guess its literally about the preparations for war.

“Well, the russians, of course,” I say. “Who else? The Chinese?”

“There are 2 million here, and 140 million of them. It’s unwinnable.”

And I say the Lithuanians will not fight alone. And anyway, it’s Putin who has started the war, it’s Putin who is fighting, not us. There won’t be a war, and if there is, it’s because he attacked.

“Why do you want to fight?”

“Why are you fighting? For what reason?”

I look at him, and I say,

“Well, I’m older than you. Maybe you don’t remember the Soviet times. I don’t want that again. I don’t want to be deported to Siberia. I have friends who were sent to Siberia. They would send you. These russians, we don’t want them. We don’t want this to happen again.”

I think I made my point.

“I love russian music. I love russian movies, you know. What’s on russian TV, the TV shows. I love russian poetry, I read books, you know. Many books. I love russia.”

“Russian culture”, I correct him.

“Yes, russian culture,” he accepts.

“People are smart, aren’t they? They get smarter all the time. So why do they behave like this? Why is the world sliding downhill?”

And we argue. And I say, most of the world is not at war. And he says “Really? Give me an example” and I get this apoplectic look in my eyes. I change the subject.

“If you like russia so much, you could work there. You know how much you would be paid? You’d be paid half as much. Things are better here.”

“But the taxes would be lower, too.”

And I’m trying to figure out how to explain that lower taxes on lower wages doesn’t make up for the loss of wages, but I can’t. Plus signs and minus signs float in my head, but clearly an argument about negative taxes won’t fly.

“If you were in russia”, I say, “The first thing that would happen to you is that you’d be conscripted into the army; they’d press a gun into you hands, send you to the front, and you’d be dead in 12 hours.”

And he would be. He’s a moron. He’s number–one, grade–A cannon fodder. It would happen in an instant. It would already have happened. This is what is going through my mind. Of course, I don’t say it. I can’t call him a moron to his face. But surely, he already knows.

“People like you”, I say, “They die.”

I don’t know if I actually said that. But that was my intent, to say this, to get the point across.

“The Ukrainians do it too. They grab you and send you to the front.”

“They’d send you, too,” he says. I demure. I tell him that I have talents. That I can do things. That I would be much more effective in the supporting effort, behind the lines. We argue about this a bit.

And then, out of the blue, maybe the conversation got exhausted, and we covered all the topics, and he begins a monologue:

“I am a very exceptional person. I am unique, I am brilliant, and you will never meet anyone as smart as me. I am well–read, and I am very happy with my life, and I want nothing. I have it all. There is no one else like me. I am complete and entire.”

I nod my head. “I don’t disagree,” I say. I smile from ear to ear in wonder.

“And you,” he says, “You have nothing to worry about. Quit your worries. Everything you want, it will come to you in time.”

I’m speechless. My mind is racing. How can he know what I want, what I desire? What it is, that I am looking for? That there is a hole in my heart? I feel like the Heavens opened, and the universe opened onto me, and spoke to me, directly. It was the voice of God, a voice speaking through an angel. “You have nothing to worry about.” Surely, this is not the universe talking directly to me. It can’t be.

And he gets up and leaves.

Apparently, I was visited by an angel.

————————

I don’t know how that happened. The above is a true story. I tried to reconstruct the dialog as best I could; we talked for half an hour, at least. The ending, what happened there? One moment, I’m talking to another person. Honestly, openly, directly, without malice, deprecation, one upmanship, pride. I want nothing of him, I have nothing I need to express. I’m here, only to listen and be open. He had something to say, something he wanted to tell me. Maybe something he wanted to tell anyone, anyone who would listen, and, with people like him, no one ever listens. I’ve learned to listen. Anyway, we’re just talking. And then, out of he blue, the universe opens and peers into my soul, and tells me personally, directly, that I have nothing to worry about, that it will all be OK. WTF. How did that happen? This is not some miracle. This was a direct touch.

—————————

I’m sitting here the next morning, writing this up. What actually happened? Well, my limbic system is listening in on this conversation that the verbal–me is having. But my limbic system, it has it’s own agenda, it’s own feelings, it’s own silent presence in my brain, in my consciousness. It can’t talk to me directly, but it can make it’s presence known, and communicate, by manipulating my emotions, my feelings, my so–called “subconscious” or “autonomic” reactions. The word sub–conscious is utterly wrong. The correct word is “averbal”. My limbic system is entirely conscious, and quite aware. It just doesn’t communicate through words; well, it is “me”, it is a part of “me”, but it is an averbal presence in “me”, coloring my every minute with bright reaction and presence. In some ways, it is more subjectively “me” than the verbal subjective “me”, as it is responsible for all my moods and outlook and feelings. It is that part of me that is emotional and empathetic.

So this averbal “me” is also listening, in this conversation. It’s also taking part, but neutrally, only partly engaged. I did raise my voice, approaching outrage, when he seemed oblivious to the history of harm that the russians had brought upon Lithuanians. That was my limbic system, engaging and taking part in the conversation. The verbal me scrambled to match, to come up with some words that could reinforce and echo what I was already feeling. And, as I’m smart, it did. And I spoke loudly enough, that even Rytis could hear, and my words were partly for him, too: I wanted him to hear. I don’t recall what it was, but something like, “see here, Rytis, we are all here in this mess.” So, I could say, perhaps, that it was not the verbal me that was in control of the conversation, it was the subjective, conscious me, and the verbal me was simply tasked with the job of finding appropriate verbal expression to match the mood.

Oh. That’s interesting. So are you (am I?) saying that it is not verbal “me” that is conscious, but limbic “me”, and that verbal “me” is a slave, a mere I/O device tasked with generating words that capture my feelings? The things that I feel? Well, clearly the verbal me is quite good at this game. So, OK, we’re rather integrated. I ride this horse, and we get along and travel together. But I’m not sure if I’m the horse, or the rider. See, we’re rather welded onto one another. We’re like one of those scary gelatinous creatures from a Hollywood movie, speaking as a royal we, darkly threatening the protagonist. I’m this gelatinous two–headed creature: a cortex and a limbic system, and wait, more than one pulsing gelatinous head, cause there’s a pre–frontal cortex. And a sharp–clawed cerebellum hidden down, below. Of this welded mass, I’m not sure who is “me”, because we all are. Verbal me speaks up for all of “us”.

Certainly, it does seem to be true that feelings come first, and words are only forged later. This is almost trivial to demonstrate: humans are regularly left speechless when caught in strong emotional situations. Anger, love. Some angry encounter, and you can just watch someone try to reach for words to express what they feel, and fail. This happens everywhere, all the time, in literature, in movies, in real life. The verbal part of the mind is definitely not in charge; it’s there, along for the ride, trying to fulfill its communicative duties, and when it can’t, its “Hulk smash!” Because subjective me has fine access to non–verbal communications systems. Which is why “Hulk smash”: fists work, when words fail. I mean, wtf, gorillas are entirely averbal, and are entirely body–language. So when I write here, in this diary, this is the erudite, verbally expressive, linguistically strong me who is dancing with words. But this “me” is only a small part of subjective “me”; the rest of “me” is that ineffable body language and feelz. The sea of qualia impinging on my consciousness.

And so what happened last night? Well, limbic me, preoccupied with limbic things, heard the voice of god. I mean, percolating through my limbic system is all the “subconscious” stuff that I really am mostly not conscious of, most of the time: the background of sexual desires, of loneliness, of a search for novelty, of finding restful peace in flow–states. All that is there, tumbling and jumbling, and usually mostly hidden away from consciously–aware “me”. And, in this case “subconscious” does seem to be the correct word to use: it’s there, but just below the surface of awareness. Err, ah, the verbal awareness? Fuck. This is confusing. Conscious me is feeling gurgling in my stomach. Except only when my attention is focused on that. My stomach is always gurgling in the background; only sometimes does it enter the foreground, and demand attention: “gee, maybe its lunchtime. Maybe I should eat.” So this conscious me weighs the decision to eat, while this entirely other entity is busy grumbling away “me hungry” and mostly getting ignored. It, too, is conscious, it just does not have any direct control over where I focus my attention.

And that is perhaps the interesting thing: how does the focus of attention work?

But, before that, lets finish with the angel. So, limbic me is still sitting there, dazed and confused and concerned. And its listening to this conversation. And vatnik boy, is, well, he is a true human, and he has a soul, and his soul is perhaps smarter and wiser and more complete than his frontal cortex. That is, perhaps there is a genius in there, but that genius is attached to a rather sub–par moronic cortex, that doesn’t work very well, consigning him to day–laborer jobs and rather poor linguistic control. He’s stupid, yes, but the part of him that is stupid is the part that he needs for day–to–day living. It’s the easily–visible, publicly–facing part of him that is stupid; it appears to me that there’s other parts of him that are quite brilliant. The fact that he seems at peace, and is happy, content, in want of nothing, not even money, shows this. He has a beautiful disposition. There was no anger, hatred, malice, no hurtful words. No narcissism. In vividly sharp contrast to Rytis, who is just racing to find something subtly hurtful, because only this subtle dismissal of others allows him to feel superior. What a fucking mess. The vatnik was not saddled with this crisis of character. Stupid, but pure of heart.

And, here was the surprise: the purity of that heart suddenly found expression at the very end. I suspect that more or less no one ever listens to him. That it is rare that he is treated fairly, as an equal, and not emotionally abused, shat upon. Well, maybe not that rare; he’s survived, he’s emotionally healthy, he’s not a broken man, he is whole and unbowed.

And that sudden expression at the end, it was so unexpected, such a surprise, that the limbic me, the one also listening in on the conversation, the limbic me in search of love and fumbling with the hole in my heart and fearing old age and entirely displeased that young women are not enjoying sex with me, this unhappy limbic me hears these words: “it’s all gonna be OK”. And whoa baby, does that ever provoke a strong reaction. Everything that ever was, comes to a point at this point. Perhaps like a sexual climax, all that other movement was for this moment. The universe opened on to me and said, its all going to be OK. This is what I heard. And why did the vatnik say this? Because he needed to say this, for himself. His pure, angelic self had to express itself from out of underneath that not very functional frontal cortex. And it managed to express itself, and just at that very moment, I was there to hear it.

And so, sure, as we are both god–children, we are both shards of the universe, holding a soul and a light in our hearts, then, sure, I can honestly and truly confirm, yes it is the universe, the divine speaking, and yes, it was the divine that spoke to me, for souls are divine. Its not that I’m crazy, its that brains just work this way. And, as it seems I’m more–or–less super–normal, and open, and emotionally fragile (err. emotionally roller–coastering) I can feel all this without any need to suppress, regulate or control. Without fear of crashing or going crazy. And having the talents to write this up, and the luck of being able to do it honestly, without lying.

Strange. The urge to lie and distort, the urge to self–aggrandize, the desire to push some false narrative, I remember having those urges in the past, and, from what I can tell, those have burned away, have fallen away. Not sure when, but they have. I’ve been nakedly honest in writing this diary, I’ve hidden nothing, lied about nothing, for all the years I’ve been writing here. I think. I suppose I have lapses of judgment sometimes. I’ve no urge to recall episodes of past failures.

Anyway, my super–normal roller–coastering self broke down in tears when I wrote the last paragraph of the short story above. They were tears of overwhelming overwhelmingness. I almost wrote “tears of joy”, but I was not happy that the universe spoke to me. Rather, I was in awe and shock. So I cried tears of awe and shock.

And so this again leads to the interesting aspect of subjective experience: what makes people cry tears of overwhelming emotion? What is this qualia–state, and why is there a glow of divinity about it? What is the nature of the glow of the divine? Whence does this come? What is this supernatural thing?

So, my project here is, I guess, to try to reconcile the supernatural divine, or the feelings thereof, with the physical fact of the physics of being in the here and now, of having an unwritten future and an inaccessible past, and the apparently true fact of the second law of thermodynamics, and the apparently true fact of energy flows, and my complete will to believe that even the most basic biological systems are sentient. Or, to cut through the words: how is it that sentience is divine, and what is this feeling of divinity that the sentient, subjective self feels? This is my project in this diary. This is what this is about.

I need to go buy milk now, and eat lunch.

OK. Back to reading the conclusion of that CBC paper. Annoyingly, it’s nothing more that a collection of assertions, a collection I happen to agree with. But still. So there is this sentence, it sticks out: “Minds, such as our own, are an aggregation of individual cellular consciousnesses. Thus, any theory of the human mind must begin with a deep exploration of cellular consciousness, from the bottom forward.” I don’t think I agree with this conclusion. The premise should be restated: brains are an aggregation of individual cellular consciousness. Brains would not work, function, if they were not. The aggregate collection necessarily works together. However, the subjective conscious me is not at all aware of what is happening in those cells. I’m barely aware of what’s going on in my medulla oblongata; stretching that to individual cells is too far. Now, there’s some central limit theorem happening: my pancreas and my liver are secreting god–knows–what, and this circadian rhythm and cortisol and what–not definitely affects my mood. As does last–nights alcohol. As do my gut bacteria. They all contribute to my subjective state of being. But they are, in a sense, external, the way that the ambient air temperature and the lighting are external, in the way that the color scheme I’m sitting in is external. Change the colors in the room, and I would feel different. Change what my pancreas is secreting, and I feel different. These contribute to the feelings of my subjective self, but are external to it. Thus, the amended conclusion would be: “any theory of the human mind must be in concordance with theories of cellular consciousness.”

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

18 June 2026

18 June 2026 Late Night

19 June 2026

19 June 2026

20 June 2026 – 1:30 AM

20 June 2026

21 June 2026

22 June 2026

23 June 2026

28 June 2026

29 June 2026

29 June 2026 – just a tiny bit later

30 June 2026

1 July 2026

1 July 2026 – Later – 5PM

Later

2 July 2026

3 July 2026

4 July 2026

The Vatnik Angel

The End